Pick Your Battles

Last week, one of my online friends asked if it was ethical to buy a used car from someone who was an overt racist.  I told him certainly, if it was a good car at a fair price.  I then pointed out that every one of us does business with dozens of racists & people with even worse character traits every day; we just don’t know it.  One of the costs of living in a complex modern society is that you know zero about 99% of the people you need to interact with.  How does a merchant know anything about the character of most of the people who buy things from his store?  He doesn’t, and that’s OK.  Here’s a personal example:  There’s a very good chance that any given woman I interact with in public supports the sending of armed thugs to rape, rob and cage me and most of the people I love.  If I had to stop interacting with such people I would simply have to stay home and never buy anything (NB: I say “woman” because studies show far more women than men are in favor of the government dispatching armed thug rape squads to destroy the lives of other women).  If a person’s or company’s behavior offends you and you can get the same service or product from another who doesn’t, by all means go to the other.  But in most cases you either don’t know or else there’s no real alternative, and you’ll harm yourself more by obsessing over this than your one-person boycott could possibly ever do to induce the offender to change their ways.