Overall, I agree with the statement "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism". But I also feel like a lot of people just throw it around as the catch-all defence for their overconsumption and thoughtless spending. This pisses me off. Because while there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, there are ethics attached to how you choose to consume.
Take, for example, cellphones and laptops. In this day and age, cellphones and laptops are almost necessities. But It's also a well-known secret that the mining of the cobalt necessary for these devices directly contributes to gender-based violence, political destabilisation, slave and child labour, environmental degradation and much more in the Congo. Needing a new laptop or cellphone is the very definition of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
And people bring this up as some sort of gotcha — as some sort of an excuse to just continue spending money without any thought or care for how it affects other people. What these "defenders" conveniently fail to consider is that there is a big ethical difference between a consumer who chooses to buy a secondhand cellphone or only buys a new laptop once their old one is broken beyond use, and a consumer who buys every new edition of the iPhone on release day.
Not to sound like your run-of-the-mill socialist, but we live in a capitalist hellscape. No matter what you do, damage will be done somewhere in the production chain, either to a person, the environment or a community. The question any decent consumer should be asking is "Which of my possible options is going to do the least amount of damage and hurt the least amount of people?"
Don't piss me off with your "highbrow" slogans that you're simply parroting without truly considering.
