Should You Quit Your Evil Job?

What to do when your actions don't matter

Recently, I was doing some grocery shopping for my fiancée. She asked me to get some baking cocoa and I, knowing almost nothing about baking, was asking her what to get. In the midst of this, we ran into a little moral dilemma: how could we avoid buying unethically sourced cocoa? Plenty of companies rely on child labor and other exploitative practices to get their products in stores. How much responsibility do we bear to avoid these companies?

It’s hard to shop perfectly ethically: there are risks that things from sugar to coffee to cocoa might have come from similarly unethical farms. There are ways to avoid it, though they often cost more money and, of course, are more inconvenient.

Even barring these challenges, it’s easy to fall back on the same question every time you consider one of these boycotts: does this actually matter? Will my decision to buy a $5 box of cocoa really help or hurt anybody?

This is a common sentiment today: when you’re such a small part of a big machine, it’s hard to feel any responsibility for that machine. I’m a small-time consumer without a lot of spending power or much influence over others. My decision to buy or not buy is so incredibly minor in the grand scheme of things—why, then, should I care?

Of course, this isn’t limited to shopping. It’s very easy to apply this idea to work as well. It’s rare that any one person’s impact is enough to make a major change. If you quit your job for ethical concerns, what would happen? Most likely, your company could find someone else to do the same work you do quickly enough. Whatever impact you could make might seem minimal at best. How often do we say to ourselves, “If I don’t do this, then someone else will?”

It’s a difficult problem at a practical and ethical level. Giving up a job is never an easy decision: the impacts on your life and your family might seem like too much to even consider it. But when you feel that your work is unethical, what choice are you supposed to make?

There’s a similar problem that’s been discussed in the history of philosophy many times: the tragedy of the commons. The classical example goes like this: there’s a pasture where many shepherds bring their herds to graze. This pasture, however, can’t support all these herds: eventually, if too many sheep come along, the pasture will die off and nobody can graze.

A field suffering from overgrazing, as in the example of the tragedy of the commons.

To stop this, the shepherds need to limit their herd sizes and pledge to focus on the general well-being of the pasture. But why would any one shepherd choose to do this? If I decide to limit my herd size, all that means is that everyone else can grow their herds that much more. Even if almost all the shepherds agreed to limit their herds, the few who ignore this rule could simply expand their own herds massively and take advantage of the newly available space. It’s hard to trust everyone to give up their own selfishness for the group’s sake.

In this case, it seems inevitable that the problem will continue. It’s easy to say to yourself, “Well, if I don’t take advantage of this, then someone else will. Why should I bother to change my ways if I can’t trust others to change too?”

It’s easy to apply this to the examples from before. Why bother boycotting unethical companies if your actions won’t have any impact? Why should you care about the ethics of your work if someone else will just come along and do the same job anyways?

How can we respond to this? The simplest argument is that if we want to improve things at all, then the only way forward is for someone to make a sacrifice that might not feel that meaningful. Perhaps your actions don’t mean that much—but if you don’t do it, who will?

Still, this idea seems to tie your decision to an unrealistic expectation. Your decision to quit might play a part in a big change, but it’s just as likely (if not more likely) that it won’t matter all that much. If we just think about the consequences, there’s not much of an incentive to make a difficult choice like this. This might be a convincing argument to some, but it can also easily seem like pointless idealism. Uprooting your life for the sake of an impossible goal seems overly idealistic at best and outright naive at worst.

In philosophy, there’s a similar argument that doesn’t really so much on consequences: Immanuel Kant’s ethics. Kant argued that to live ethically, you have to live by rules that apply to everyone without exception. You begin to do the wrong thing when you decide to make an exception of yourself: all injustice comes when you decide to break the rules for your own gain.

Taking this perspective, it’s easy to see what to do: if you think that it’s wrong to take a job or buy from a certain company, you should follow your conscience and decide not to. Doing otherwise would mean expecting others to follow a rule that you yourself ignore: you might hope that everyone would quit unethical work and boycott bad companies, but you don’t apply this same rule to yourself.

Yet this can also seem inflexible and overgeneralized. There might be a few rules that apply to everyone, but do we really think that there’s one set of moral rules that guide everyone’s life the same way? Is there no difference between the life you’re meant to live and the life another person is meant to live?

These examples seem focused on the rules that apply to others: the consequences-focused approach asks if we can trust other people to do their part, while Kant’s approach asks what rules we expect to apply to other people. But how could we find an approach asking what to do with your own power and responsibility?

In a difficult moment like this, the first thing you should ask yourself is this: what is in my control? What can I change, and what’s beyond me?

Ultimately, these things that you can do are the basis of your ethical duties. Kant once said that you can’t possibly be given an impossible ethical duty: if you can’t do something, then there’s no way that you’re meant to do that. Many philosophers have argued for this same idea: start with what you’re capable of when thinking about your responsibilities.

Thinking about the huge systems that you can’t influence is the wrong starting point for asking these questions. Your work doesn’t have to save the world to be worthwhile. Whether your actions “matter” in the grand scheme of things is the wrong place to start. Instead, you have to ask yourself what you’re capable of. Don’t start by thinking about the forces too big for you to meaningfully impact. Start by thinking about what it means for you to live ethically in your own life. Think about what you need to do to live up to your own ethic and your own calling.

In the grand scheme of things, will your decision to boycott a company or change your job change the world? Most likely not. But real freedom starts with finding the rule that you’ll live your life by. These decisions might be insignificant to the world, but in your own life, there’s nothing more important. Treat them with the gravity they deserve.