roachboy

this is a digression.

i have a friend who started and runs a biotech firm. among the drugs that firm produces are anti-malarial drugs which are designed in a way to get around acquired immunities to older anti-malarial drugs. the bulk of the market for them can't afford them. the firms doesn't stop producing them because, contrary to your one-dimensional view, there's more than one ethical decision involved and there's more than one way to approach them. and these questions aren't always easy.

so you know, i have another friend who's head clinician for a different biotech firm. i have other who work trying to get anti retro-viral drugs into parts of east africa without them all disappearing between the port of entry and the clinics where they're destined. folk at several points in this sort of chain of production and distribution that is the result of **political choices** particular to the united states about the way in which medicines are produced and by extension funded.

and one thing is sure--none of these people are as blind as you are about the particularities of the american system. none of them imagine this is the only way of doing things.

there are multiple ways to balance economic and ethical questions. there are multiple conflicts that emerge as well. everyone who is involved with this production thinks about them from time to time. the folk in the production side tell me that most of their days are spent on purely technical matters. the ceo types consider them frame matters---so they wrestle with them but in ways that are shaped by having to work within a system that they see as both given and distorted. the folk who are really confronted with all the complexity of this overall system of drug production and distribution are my friends who are working on the ground in sub-saharan africa.

but that confrontation involves complexity and nuance.

i wonder if it is possible to be an ethical subject at all if you cannot deal with ugly realities. because ugly realities are often consequences of actions. there is a problem for anything like ethical action if you cannot deal with consequences of actions. so i wonder, ace, if your aversion to complexity makes you entirely incapable of ethical action. i mean in principle. i don't know how you roll in meat-space. i assume like everyone you're way more complicated there than you come across on this board.

for example it is possible to defend oil production without having to vaporize the reality of the niger river delta. it is possible to make arguments about the relation of captialist forms of production to something approximating ethics that are not routed through milton friedman.

it is possible to think about how to align capitalist forms of production with even stakeholder interests not to mention ethical questions that extend beyond the circulation of capital--because like it or not capitalist production operates in a wider social context. for example the deepwater horizon disaster happened in the gulf of mexico, remember? the gulf is other than than the circulation of capital.

if all that matters is the circulation of capital, why should a firm like bp give a shit about what happens in the gulf of mexico?

but what happens if all that matters is the circulation of capital? well, one thing that happens is the sort of thing that's happening in the niger river delta.

so you might think that the niger river delta points to a the centrality of political arrangements in shaping what economic actors are and are not responsible for. so there is no ethical content to corporate actions. there is adaptation to particular frameworks and that's it.

i have a husky to walk.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite