Is the Ethical Oil campaign helping or hurting Canada's international reputation?

The Ethical Oil campaign makes Canadians look ethically challenged.  The Mark got it exactly right when it ran the headline: “The Truthiness of Ethical Oil.” Truthiness, as defined by comedian Stephen Colbert, means “things that a person claims to know intuitively or ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.”  We need a mature public debate about climate change in this country.  The rhetoric of ethical oil is designed to thwart any such debate.

In a beautiful paper entitled “Moral Complexity: The Fatal Attraction of Truthiness and the Importance of Mature Moral Functioning”, social psychologist Darcia Narvaez argues that “Mature moral functioning is evident in action that balances intuition and deliberation with individual capacities for habituated empathic concern, moral imagination and moral metacognition and with collective capacities for moral dialogue and moral institutions, offering tools for moral innovation.” We need these skills more than ever in an era of climate change, resource depletion, loss of species diversity and habitat, and unsustainable growth.

The “ethical oil” debate is manifestly designed to dumbfound the moral intuitions of the naïve, deflect meaningful deliberation, silence those who actually have something to say, and polarize debate on climate change.  The advocates of ethical oil could not be happier with the angry reaction of Saudi Arabia to their Karl Rove-style commercials.  The use of women’s rights as a wedge in the debate on energy and the environment would be laughable were the lessons of recent history not so clear: we are unwise to think that such blatant manipulation of the public can be ignored.  Truthiness is on the rise.  

See: Narvaez, D. (2010). Moral complexity: The fatal attraction of truthiness and the importance of mature moral functioning. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(2), 163-181.

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Painting petroleum derived from Alberta’s oil sands as more “ethical” than petroleum produced in countries such as Saudi Arabia may generate a little creative cognitive dissonance among Canadians who don’t give much thought to the kind of regimes sustained by the global oil trade.  And the response of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the campaign – loosing a battery of high-priced lawyers across the land threatening chill – will do nothing but confirm the “ethical oil” message.  However, while the EthicalOil.org campaign may slightly shift the terms of debate within Canada, it is unlikely to convince critics, either in this country or elsewhere, to abandon their criticism of the oil sands.  The campaign is right to remind us about where the oil we consume comes from, but it is unlikely to do for oil what was so successfully done for diamonds.

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Hurting, for sure. The campaign is offensive. And it’s stupid. The oil sands industry will do better by advertising its determination to mitigate carbon impacts. But it’s not the only contribution to our growing reputation for being responsibility-deniers. Beyond climate change, there is the disgusting government support for exports to poor countries of asbestos products outlawed in Canada. We righteously denounce corruption abroad but Transparency International points out Canadian authorities hardly enforce the OECD anti-bribery convention on Canadian companies. As Olympic hosts we brayed about “owning the podium.” Internationally, the only gold medal we’re winning is the one at the WTO for most whining about perceived unfairness to us. Global citizenship has its responsibilities and its pay-offs. Selfishness has its costs. 

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Can’t say from extensive firsthand experience, but anecdotally it appears to be hurting, partly because few take us at our word on climate change given our failure to keep our commitments, and partly because it sounds like too much like a PR campaign.  Also, after the Exxon Valdez and the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico,  few take seriously the words “oil” and “ethical” in the same phrase.

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