George Clooney is under attack:
In his new film, George Clooney plays a man who is at the end of his ropes so goes along with the schemes of a huge multinational corporation that harms people in their quest for making money.
In real life, George Clooney is a man who makes lots of money, but takes money to promote the products of a huge multinational corporation who promotes products that harms children.
The movie is the new Michael Clayton and the product is Nestle, in case you didn't know. Clooney responded: "I'm not going to apologize to you for trying to make a living every once in a while.''
The critique is that some mothers mix dirty water with the dairy formula and give their kids diarrhea, from which some of these kids die. (Yes I do know that breast milk has other health benefits for kids.) But isn’t dehydration the major mechanism of death? Forgive me for sounding flip, but shouldn’t Nestle be advertising its dairy products to mothers with kids with diarrhea, so then they wouldn’t die? (Even dirty water is better to drink than doing nothing and usually it will save most lives, or so I have been told.) Isn’t one way of looking at the problem that Nestle doesn’t have good enough ads?
Flipness aside, Clooney supposedly is not being paid for his role in the movie, so
his behavior raises a question for utilitarianism. Should not a saint
work for evil causes, earn more money, and subsidize good causes with
the surplus? I believe this depends on whether good or evil causes rely more on cash flow, whether good or evil causes invest resources more productively toward their good or evil ends, and the costs of mixing good and evil causes in terms of symbolic values.
Under what conditions will evil causes end up manned exclusively by good people?
I have a related question: Shouldn’t Hilary return the money to Mr Hsu’s victims?
(Clinton is donating $23,000 to charity this month, because its original giver, Norman Hsu, who is also a large donor to other candidates, was convicted many years ago of running a Ponzi scheme, and has recently turned himself in after years on the lam.)
It seems like every time a good person receives evil money, their first inclination is to donate the money to charity. Is that the best strategy?
“Under what conditions will evil causes end up manned exclusively by good people?”
About these people who are manning evil causes: what makes them “good people?”
If good people are working for evil causes what will the evil people be doing?
Kyle: The evil people will be manning good causes, I suppose, and trying to ruin them.
Why should we presume that Clooney endorses the “message” (if there is a single, coherent message to be found) of movies that he appears in, even in the case that he takes no salary for appearing in them? Might not his appearance signal, rather, that he finds the message interesting, challenging, or original and not totally unworthy, as opposed to his proclaiming it categorically correct? Perhaps he believes that a film with such a message will be worthwhile in its totality, with whatever artistic, entertainment, or hortatory virtues as well as whatever flaws it may have, even if he does not fully subscribe to any particular reading of its message.
If so, there need not be any contradiction between Clooney’s appearing in a film that seems, in whole or in large part, to communicate one moral message while conducting his life in a manner that’s at least partly inconsistent with that message. So I don’t see that the accusation of hypocrisy is adequately grounded in the facts presented.
I don’t understand how selling a product to people who choose to purchase it is “evil.”
I can understand saying that if the company was really really good, they would try to help the mothers more by offering them better choices, educating and doing all kinds of other good and helpful things.
But I don’t see how NOT doing those things is evil. And I don’t see how selling a product is evil. Nor advertising for said product. There is a difference between being not-especially-great and being *evil*.
As for George Clooney – he is just a good looking man who wants to make a buck. Leave him alone.
James,
I don’t think being good means being without fault, but I do think being good means recognizing your faults and trying to fix them (isn’t that what we would like evil people to do?).
Someone without vanity wouldn’t have a problem doing their good deeds anonymously. They also wouldn’t have a problem letting everyone know they were doing good. But this is someone without vanity (which I doubt exists). Everyone else has some and should guard against it (if they are good and trying to fix their faults) and therefore should do their good anonymously.
Anonymous acts of good aren’t going to be hindered by public opinion in the manner you mentioned.
And remember, Tyler didn’t just mention “good people† he mentioned “saints.† When will these people work for evil? You saw my answer. (I’m sure his question was sarcastic, so we probably shouldn’t take this too seriously.)
The problem sounds like a water quality issue. Why is this Nestle’s fault?e
“Even dirty water is better to drink than doing nothing and usually it will save most lives, or so I have been told.”
Good job, Sir, that you are an economist not a public health field worker in a developing country! ‘So I am told’ is a research reference, is it? Or are you simply being a modern day male version of Marie Antoinette, by suggesting kids with diarrhoea take Nestle formula milk?
How do you think a lot of kids in these countries get diarrhoea? Wait, I’ll tell you. Visit a poor country with hardly any public water supply and then DO NOT drink bottled water, as tourists do. You will find out first-hand (and will likely never forget it either!).
And if all those years of promoting ORS as a remedy did not get through, do you believe Nestle advertising will?
Here is a story from my sister-in-law, a physician working in a deprived area:
A parent brings child in with diarrhoea. The child has classic dehydration signs.
Doctor: “Why, you have not been giving him water, tea etc!”
Parent: “Doctor Saab, every time he goes only water comes out; see his stomach is distended. It is full of water so we do not want to give him more. Won’t it aggravate the situation?”
END OF STORY
Needless to say nearly 80% of her time is spent giving people basic hygiene and public health advice rather than ‘curing’ them.
I think you could have chosen a better example or done some more research…
Please note, “I have been told…” by a specialist working in the field of diarrhea research.
The real problem with Nestle is that they ‘give’ away the formula to the women in Africa, you know, ‘gratis’ but just enough until their breast milk dried up. La Leche League knows all about this. Bad show.
Yes it is capitalism and yes buyer beware… but also the gears of the free market depend upon good and true information so products may be selected with best value at the least price rising to the top. Deliberate clouding of information, even to the unsuspecting and uneducated is the true evil.
All that being said, I don’t fault George Clooney for making a buck by using his image. If he were to look for a corporation to front for that had no evil attached to it, he’d look for a long long time. I personally look to John Patterson and the old NCR as a template for corporate responsibility… but that was a long time ago when community (as versus individuality) wasn’t a dirty word – and the great paean of individuality wasn’t a license for subverting common decency in our behaviors. I think George is great and on balance, his efforts for justice and a truly moral community are highly commendable.
“Nestle breaks the marketing requirements for baby foods adopted by the World Health Assembly more than any other company, so contributing to the unnecessary death and suffering of infants around the world”
If we’re going to get into unnecessary death and suffering, how does the death toll from Nestle’s activities compare to, say, our environmental movement’s efforts to stop the use of chlorine – which would pretty much stop the diarreah problem in it’s tracks – or their anti-DDT effort that kills a million people every year?
The baby milk charge is that Nestle or other milk powder pusher hard sells discounted milk powder to new mothers who then for the next year or so have no choice but to use it as the main source of nutrition for their babies. Using the powder often means using dirty water and that puts babies at greater risk of getting diarrhea in the first place because of poor quality water and difficulty in achieving the more challenging hygiene standards.
Once a child has diarrhea it might be worth continuing to supply even dirty water but it is obviously best not to catch it in the first place.
The parents will also find difficulty in purchasing the milk at the full price once the teaser rate expires potentially causing or exacerbating other health issues. That is to say once hooked parents have to spend more to deliver a dangerously inferior service to their child.
I’m not sure whether it is any longer a fair accusation but I fail to see how more advertising would make anything better and even Nestle have, I believe, admitted to problems of this type in some places in the past.
J, even supposing that chlorination of rivers and wells was an option and had anything at all to do with say being in favour of, say, low chlorine paper manufacture and that DDT was a cure-all and that someone was in fact campaigning against using it to combat malaria, how would that make a death-toll from Nestle’s activities acceptable? That’s a scary attitude.
liberty: Many of the women presumably can’t breast-feed because, having been started on formula, they no longer have a milk supply.
You’re a Ms., you say — have you ever breast-fed a child? Two of the things that were really striking to me when I had mine earlier this year:
1) Breast-feeding is not intuitive. It may be natural, but it’s learned. Many women who are not actively supported will find themselves “unable” to breast-feed — the scare quotes because they are, or at least were originally, not unable because of some physical problem, but because of a hole in their knowledge.
2) A generation of widespread formula use, as happened a few decades ago in the US, quickly wipes out the cultural knowledge base about breastfeeding. I only figured it out because I had a lactation consultant — specialized, probably expensive help that many people don’t have access to. If you’re in an environment where everyone breastfeeds and always has, you very seldom need that sort of specialized help, because you can just ask your mom or aunt or sister or friend…but once you’ve wiped out the knowledge for a generation, you need experts to rebuild.
So pushing formula aggressively really does go beyond marketing and choice and so forth into creating a long-lasting, cultural dependency (not to mention the dependency of individual infants who will literally die without access to formula once their mothers’ milk is gone).
I’m intensely happy that formula exists. I like being able to be apart from my baby for a while and not worry that she will starve. I like being able to go on an airplane and not worry about flashing people. But I’m also intensely happy not to be dependent on it, and I know how easy it would have been for that dependency to arise. (Heck, I was formula fed as an infant because my mother — my highly educated, reasonably affluent, first-world mother — didn’t have access to the breastfeeding knowledge and technology that I do, hence was unable to solve my problems.)
“Modest proposal for Nestle: Develop a cheap anti-bacterial water filter and include it with packages of baby formula.”
I believe a simple innovation in Denmark can ensure people drink clean water. So in theory, formula milk can be made with unclean water so long as the child drinks it through the straw (Which makes me ask at what age can kids drink with a straw? Are they the same kids having formula milk?). At $3 per straw, this is not a bad price to pay for something that lasts a year.
Excerpt for those who do not want to follow additional links:
“The aptly-named LifeStraw might someday be dubbed the greatest life-savers in history. This $3, 10 inch long filtered straw, kills the waterborne diseases that are killing nearly two million people a year. More than a billion people do not have access to clean water and contaminated water transmits diseases such as typhoid, and cholera.
Each LifeStraw contains three compartments, several filters, and produces water that is cleaner than most public water supplies killing 99.9999% of all bacteria. With the straw you can suck almost five cups in eight minutes, the same straw can be used for approximately a year without needing to clean or change the filters, and it can be warn around your neck on a string. Until now, there was not much we could reduce the cost of cleaning water. Billions have been plagued with sickness, dehydration, and death because there was no straw to save their life.”
URL: http://www.internationalreports.net/europe/denmark/2006/innovation.html
There’s another deeper problem here that noone has noticed so far: Large numbers of incredibly poor women who lack access to clean water are making babies.
The world population grows by about 75 million per year or about one United States every 4 years. This controversy over Nestle marketing practices is a symptom of the real problem: too many babies, especially among the really poor.
The efforts of the environmental groups seem misplaced to me. I still remember the good old days of the 1970s when environmental groups worried about overpopulation. Changing Nestle’s marketing practices won’t undo the 95% shrinking of Lake Chad in Africa since 1963.
The larger point isn’t whether or not Nestle is truly right or wrong, but about Clooney’s true convictions.
He’s an outspoken left wing ideologue, this movie fits perfectly with his known public views, so of course he is trying to identify with the message of the movie.
But as is the case with most leftists, he views the public perception of his deeds much more seriously than he does his daily personal actions.
And moving on to the philosophical aspect of Tyler’s question, it would seem to make more sense that he get paid as much as possible for the movie so then he could then pass that money on to some needy cause.
Of course for him that would be MoveOn.org or the Clinton campaign, but to do the movie for free definitely deprives somebody of some donation by simply leaving the dough in the pockets of the movie’s producers.
I was wondering how ms. liberty could write twaddle such as this:
“The actual problems – what separates the lives of those women and babies from yours – were not caused by Nestle but by their government.”
Her resume claims she works for the Heritage Foundation. Don’t need to say anything more, I guess.
So the defenders of Nestle are saying that it is ok to advertise a product, often via free samples, that leads to mothers feed their children unclean water and stop breastfeeding, is ok. This is to people in poor countries who don’t have access to better information.
The fact that “the problem is the water” would never hold up in the U.S. Yes, that is a bigger problem, but it does not negate the issue with formula. What if a company advertised a cheaper type of condom (only $0.05 each) that broke half the time, but they didn’t really advertise that fact. You might say, “the problem is AIDS”. Or maybe the government health system is not doing their job. Well, hmm, maybe, but in the meantime, people are being tricked into risking their lives, and a company is making a profit. I don’t think you’d go for that in the U.S. – even Ms. Liberty.
And as for, “Even dirty water is better to drink than doing nothing and usually it will save most lives, or so I have been told.” Either you or your expert is wrong on this one, because the alternative is really between breastfeeding and using formula, and breastfeeding (except for certain cases, such as HIV+ moms, or moms with no milk – and in these cases its really a health professional, not Nestle, that should help the mother decide what to do)
Actually, Jude, I don’t think a company that sold a cheaper type of condom that broke half the time would be evil either.
They would, again, be selling a product. They would not be forcing people to use it. Again, it might be morally superior to provide more information about the actual effectiveness in their advertisements, but if they were not perpetrating actual fraud (lying about what it is able to do), then they really aren’t doing anything wrong.
This applies whether it is sold in the United States or elsewhere.
Now, there is a difference with companies in the free market and in areas which are not developed free market systems. As far as advertising is concerned, in a free market little is required of a company because reputation and free information take care of a lot of it. They need to label the fact the product is less effective, and not perpetrate fraud; and then reputation takes care of the rest: people know what brands of e.g. electronics are well made and which are not. Some of this is price signaling, some reputation, a lot of it both. In a country without so much choice, this isn’t as true.
Still, I don’t see it as ‘evil’ and I think the core problem is to do with why they are this underdeveloped non-market economy in the first place; not the fact that a company is selling them a product which in itself isn’t a bad product.
Liberty,
First of all, I am not comfortable with the word EVIL, and never used it. But I am saying that in the context of the developing world, well, formula is a bad product, consumers just don’t know it, and don’t have access to the accurate info.
I don’t think I made it clear, but in my condom example, the equivalent would be that they advertise the condom but do not make clear that it breaks half of the time. Or perhaps they say it on the label, but in Chinese, or Braille. Thus, consumers have to rely on word of mouth to find out that the condom sucks. Similarly, in rich countries, many people cannot read the instructions, live far from health facilities etc. Except there is very limited internet, newspaper, public health information, etc. So: a condom manufacturer making %50 successful condoms (which might be good products somewhere where there are no STDs and people want to cut the number of pregnancies in half) without allowing consumers to decide.
You said, “They need to label the fact the product is less effective, and not perpetrate fraud; and then reputation takes care of the rest” – How does labeling work when many are illiterate (or where many local languages are spoken)? Well, the answer is, it doesn’t. Hence the problem…
Ray G, you’re assigning motives to him that I’m not sure are fair. Are you certain that he was aware of this formula issue? I can’t find a single citation online that indicates he was.
Don’t have fuel, don’t have time, don’t know it’s bad, no nice clean kitchen to store it in, might not be necessary for adults but still dangerous for small babies and wasn’t necessary when breastfeeding, many sources of disease so that it is not obvious that water is the vector. Don’t forget that malaria is called that because until the end of the 19th century it was thought to be caused by bad air.
We are talking about laces where many bugs are antibiotic resistant because people can only afford to buy a single antibiotic pill and not a whole course.
What do Liberty at al. think of Harry Lime? Just selling a product?
For the record I believe that some people here are defending actions that even Nestle wouldn’t. They instead deny that some of the more abusive practices continue. I also think that Tyler slightly fumbled the issue and has hold of the wrong end of the stick on the practicalities of baby milk. Formula made with dirty water is not a great tool for prevention of dehydration, it may just be better than holding out for clean stuff if a child is already suffering from diarrhea.
Tyler’s major error was to mix the idea of utilitarianism with the fantasy ideas of good and evil. That opens the barn door to all sorts of blithering from free-marketeers about how capitalist practices are not evil. A simple evasion for them, since harrumphing indignantly “not evil” sounds a lot better than owning up to egregious harms.
Ms. liberty writes:
“Right, right, sorry Mike. Nestle has caused all the world’s ills. Nestle and Dick Cheney, who probably owns Nestle. And Halliburton. Its not like there are other reasons why third world countries are poor.”
Maybe one day Ms. liberty will learn that snark is not a valid support for her claims. But it’s typical of the weak support for Heritage Foundation ideology.
Go ahead, liberty, defend your claim. Oh, and you might also note that this is a problem among literally dozens of thrid world nations with many policies, not due to a single government as you propose. But Nestle is a common factor.
Mike Huben,
Sorry, it didn’t really seem worthy of a response- I should have just ignored it.
It is obvious that Nestle isn’t the cause of third world poverty. Have they destroyed the US? They sell formula here too!
Furthermore, those third world countries were impoverished long before Nestle was founded.
In the future, please don’t blame my employer for my comments. Nothing I say here should be taken as indicative of the views of the Heritage Foundation.
Mike,
I sure am glad it’s only people from the Heritage Foundation who employ snark instead of arguments. Otherwise, imagine what this thread would look like….
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