Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEPTICs.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Gilef.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, today our topic is essentially the law of unintended consequences and how it thwarts even the most meticulous and devoted

efforts to make ethical choices about, say, what to do or what to buy in terms of being

responsible environmentally and socially. And, you know, how our very best efforts in those

regards can end up backfiring or just not helping as much

as we thought they were. Yeah, so this is particularly relevant to me because of sort of recent

personal experience. I've always tried to some degree at some level to make reasonable choices

in my eating habits, in my buying habits and all

that. But more recently, I become sort of more aware of the consequence, more sensitive,

I guess, to ethical consequences of what I do in general. And therefore, I developed sort of

this heightened sense of, okay, well, should I really buy this or buy it or eat that and so on and so forth.

Now, it seemed to me that all I needed to do was to document myself about, you know, the basic of productions of certain goods and productions of foods.

But I'm not talking just about food

and dietary choices. I'm also talking about, you know, do you buy made in the U.S. or do you avoid

made in China? What is it, you know, what sort of consequences and priorities do you have when

it comes to your consumer habits.

And so I thought initially, as it turns out, very naively, that, well, you know, I'm going to

spend some time reading about sort of the lay on the land, the ethical landscape of the,

...