1.5.5.5 Natural versus Artificial

Version 1.0 November 2022          (Previous Version)

This subsection covers a practical issue rather than an ethical or moral one.

Many people, especially naive environmentalists, are inclined to suspect that manufactured items are intrinsically bad, because they are made by big business and contain ‘chemicals’. 

There are certainly things made by modern industry that the world would be better off without.  The poison DDT spread to all animals around the world.  CFCs, most from refrigerators, were destroying the ozone layer.  Nuclear waste from bomb testing and electricity generators will be a problem for tens of thousands of years.  Microplastics are killing wildlife.  It is better not to eat too much highly processed food.

There are many tens of thousands of chemicals being created in our modern world that are inadequately researched, undocumented, and we don’t know what their long term effects will be.

Still, modern agriculture, and food processing, preservation, packaging and distribution, can enable more people to have a healthy diet, because of the use of fertilizers, preservatives and so on.  On the other hand many modern manufactured foodstuffs are very unhealthy, and it is generally better to eat less processed foods.

But many complex manufactured items are good.  These include most medicines, many prosthetics, some (but not all) packaging, and many machines and digital devices that enable us to live productive and more prosperous lives.  As a general principle it is better to consume products – food, entertainments, transport, and everything else we use – that are simpler and have a smaller adverse impact on the environment, but each situation must be examined case by case.

But none of the above really relates to a moral judgement.

We can and should make ethical decisions on whether or not to purchase or consume particular products.  We may choose not to buy something with excessive packaging because it will result in microplastics polluting the oceans.  This decision is justifiable because of the harm it does, not because plastics are artificial.  A decision to buy ethically produced coffee may be justifiable, provided it does lead to better outcomes for the local coffee farmers and causes less harm, even though the tracking system that is required to ensure the ethical production is highly artificial, as well as a nuisance for the farmers.  A decision to buy scented soap to wash your feet, to prevent them getting smelly (and they otherwise would get smelly) is justifiable even though there is an artificially added scent in the soap (and virtually all commercial soaps have added scents anyway).

We do not judge things according to whether they are natural or artificial but according to whether they are harmful or beneficial overall, to humans, animals and the environment in general.

In summary: