KEY POINTS:
When did shopping become such an ethical minefield? I like a certain brand of instant coffee but I cannot buy it without much clucking of the disapproving kind from my teenage daughter who, aglow with righteous indignation, always replaces it with the fair trade stuff.
She is saving the world, one coffee jar at a time, but she fails to apply the same stringent ethics to her clothes buying, which is necessarily of the cheap, Chinese-made variety.
Ethical choices are all right for me, it seems, but beggars like herself with meagre clothing allowances ought to be given some dispensation.
Helen Clark, basking in the glory of that free trade deal with China, might mount a similar argument. Can the prime minister of a small nation dependent on trade really afford to throw out a trade deal several years in the making? Can you be ethical and have your free trade deal, too? That depends. Like many ethical questions, it falls into a grey and thorny area.
There are the ethics you have as a student activist protesting the Vietnam war or the Springbok tour, for example, and the ethics you have as a nation. And what is ethical to one lot may spell economic doom for another.
In Britain, for example, it's become unethical for the seriously green to buy New Zealand lamb and apples, not because of our human rights record but because the carbon-emitting food miles we chock up to get our produce to British supermarkets puts us in the environmentally sinful basket.
Clearly, some ethical choices are easier than others. Ask whether the New Zealand Superannuation Fund should invest some of its $13.5 billion in companies that make cluster bombs and the answer from most New Zealanders would be a resounding "no". New Zealand, after all, has been at the forefront of a push for an international treaty to ban cluster munitions, and even hosted an international disarmament conference in Wellington this year. But the fund's guardians have found it less clear-cut, even under their responsible investment guidelines.
Without an international law specifically restricting cluster bombs, they weren't able to unambiguously conclude that cluster bombs were a bad thing, despite the weapons' well-documented ability to maim and kill innocent civilians.
It's only now with an international treaty on cluster bombs on the horizon that the guardians have seen the light, though, strangely, the fund won't actually rid itself of its investments in munitions companies until the treaty is signed.
For Dr Robert Howell, chairman of the New Zealand Council for Socially Responsible Investment, the guardians' ethical ambivalence is the best argument for a "stronger legislative direction for the sort of moral investment that would be consistent with New Zealand values".
Right now, says Howell, the Crown's financial institutions - the Super Fund, ACC and the Earthquake Commission are restricted only by their obligation to avoid prejudicing New Zealand's reputation as a responsible member of the international community, and that's left them plenty of room to invest in all manner of socially irresponsible companies with "unacceptable or questionable human rights behaviour or environmental impacts". Until late last year, for example, the Super Fund had money in tobacco companies.
Howell says New Zealand needs to take a more principled approach, and follow the example of the powerful Norwegian Pension Fund, which operates under a Council of Ethics imposed on it by the Norwegian Government. Its first move was to ban investment in makers of landmines and cluster bombs. In 2005, the ban was extended to companies involved in the production of nuclear weapons.
The same ethical guidelines also obliged the fund to "actively exercise its ownership rights" which has seen it voting against excessive pay bonuses for company executives. Though socially responsible investing, like business ethics, might seem oxymoronic, there seems to be an international trend towards more ethical dealings.
Research conducted by New Zealander Dr Peggy Chiu suggests that "shareholders who are solely driven by the motivational value of a prosperous life (described as affluent, wealthy) constitute such a small minority (1.3 per cent) that it throws considerable doubt on the simplistic assumption that shareholders are only concerned with maximising their wealth".
Most shareholders are motivated by personal values when choosing which firms to invest in. "Fairness plays the most influential role in guiding shareholders away from investing in companies that they believe are exploiting people who might be gullible or disadvantaged," writes Chiu.
Other businesses they wouldn't invest in, even if offered good financial returns, included gambling, tobacco, bio-research and pharmaceutical companies, and fast-food companies. When it comes to governments, ethical considerations become less well-defined. Governments have to reflect the values of a wider community, and there's no clear agreement about that, as Howell says.
"Like Norway, New Zealand is a pluralistic society and there is no consensus on one particular uniform ethical perspective. Yet there are some companies which behave in ways that are morally unacceptable by any international or national consideration."
Like the ones, for example, which make cluster bombs.
