What If There Is No Ethical Choice?

Most of us want to live in a way that matches what we believe.

Buy from the store down the street instead of the giant one, at a price that means somebody was paid fairly at the other end. Reduce our carbon footprint with better ways of getting around. Support human talent rather than the machine trained on it without permission.

These are not extreme positions. They are ordinary care for people and for place, and most of us hold some version of them.

And then we try to live by them. But the local store doesn’t carry what we need. Or it does, but it costs twice what is in our budget this month, and our budget is not a moral failing.

The electric car is well outside the budget. And a parent is in another country and getting older, so every visit is a flight, and there is no train across an ocean.

We need AI to get through the edits by Friday. We’ve read about the energy and the water consumed by data centers. We also care about writers and artists, and we know how those models were trained. But everyone is already using it and what difference does one more person make?

So what does it mean when we can’t fully live by our values?

Do we live in low-grade guilt about it? Give up the thing and feel a bit righteous? Stop thinking about it, since there’s no answer and thinking only makes it worse?

I know this one firsthand. Not only as a mindful consumer, but as a mindfulness teacher selling mindfulness reminders on tee shirts.

My book and my teachings are based on eight mindfulness skills carried carefully for two and a half thousand years. I was looking for a way — for myself and for my class participants — to have physical reminders of those skills in the middle of everyday life. The inspiration was to print them on clothing, with a QR code that opens a micro-practice.

I was excited about the idea as it combined my love for mindfulness, creativity, and my experience as a designer. But it also created a dilemma. I couldn’t tell whether that was making the sacred accessible or making it profane.

I am aware of how secular mindfulness has been decontextualized from its roots in Buddhist wisdom and ethics, and I did not want these t-shirts adding to the McMindfulness movement.

On the one hand, making the practice a wearable could be a reminder to return to mindfulness in the middle of life, with easy access to micro-practices when we need them. Like when we’re waiting in line, in challenging moments, and in the beautiful ones.

On the other hand, I would be taking wisdom that was given freely, for the ending of suffering, and putting a price on it. Passed hand to hand for centuries, offered without charge, now available in three colours and five sizes.

I could argue both sides well, which is usually a sign that arguing is not the way through.

When I feel stuck in ethical dilemmas, and can’t find a way out, I like to ask myself: What would the Buddha do?

The timing was perfect to contemplate on the question. I was attending a silent retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, with two Buddhist nuns teaching the bojjhangas — the liberation factors the Buddha named as the conditions for waking up, and the basis of my own teachings.

Which is to say: I sat down for six days to study the exact teachings I was proposing to print on a shirt. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to hold the question with an open mind and heart.

I didn’t ask the nuns. I put it to the Buddha and listened.

What came back in response was a question.

What are your intentions?

If your main purpose in selling these tees is making money or marketing your business, then yes, it is making the sacred profane. But if your core purpose is to make mindfulness widely accessible, to meet people where they are in their day as a reminder to return to their own inner knowing, then it is following your dharma.

This clarifying question immediately dissolved my dilemma. I knew I was doing this for the right reasons — to make mindfulness accessible to all, especially when they need it.

And only later I realized this wasn’t something I could settle once and be done with.

Most of us believe our intentions are good. That’s the problem: intention always looks clean from the inside. If a question like that could be answered once and filed away, it would just be a permission slip. And a permission slip is exactly what the mind wants when it is uncomfortable.

Two things keep the intention question honest.

Intention is the inner compass we keep returning to. This was not a one-time insight. It is something I return to daily, checking whether I am coming from striving — create more, sell more — because striving creeps in silently, even with a strong commitment to my dharma of causing no harm. It rarely announces itself. It arrives on a Tuesday afternoon when a launch isn’t going well, wearing the costume of diligence or hard work.

In those moments the practice is to return to my intention: to create with joy something that invites the wearer to return to their own inner knowing.

Consequences are the half we can check. Intention is invisible and anyone can claim it. Consequences cost something, and other people can see them. What is the cost of our choices to the environment, to suppliers, to employees, to our local ecosystem? A skillful choice minimizes harm to the ecosystem we live within.

So I searched for ethical manufacturers of t-shirts and selected Contrado which uses recycled fabric, OEKO-TEX certified inks, it’s sewn by hand in a small London studio, and worn shirts can be sent back for future discounts instead of going to landfill.

Then I ran into the problem underneath my own reasoning. If the whole point is that mindfulness should be accessible to all, a shirt only some people can afford quietly contradicts the point. So I looked again and added organic cotton tees through Printful, at a price more people can actually pay.

I could have had shirts made far more cheaply, but that would have compromised my commitment to caring for the environment and to fair wages. I chose these and I make less on them. But earning less is a choice I can make more easily when I return to my initial intentions of making mindfulness accessible to all with least harm to all.

It is still not clean. Made-to-order means nothing is manufactured and burned unsold, which is real, and everything is made in one facility and shipped in recyclable materials, which keeps transport and emissions down. All of that is real. And it is still a new object, shipped in a box, to someone who already owns shirts. I keep looking for better options. I have not finished looking.

We live inside systems we didn’t create and can’t always step outside of. The cotton. The electricity. The container ship. The road under the truck. The factory. The bank. The data center.

Even a careful choice can carry consequences we didn’t intend and couldn’t see.

That doesn’t make the choices meaningless. It makes them choices rather than absolution.

We can reduce harm without eliminating it. And that distinction matters.

Because if I believe I can find the perfectly ethical choice, I'll keep researching until I find an answer that lets me feel I've done right by people and the earth. And if I eventually decide there is no perfect choice, I may go to the other extreme: then it doesn't matter what I do.

Neither is particularly useful. And both are stories rather than truths — one about being good, one about being powerless. We don’t check either one. We arrive at it, feel the relief of having arrived, and then act as though it were a fact about the world.

Look at the second one closely, because it sounds like we’re facing facts but it’s us settling for answers easily available to us. Everyone is already using it. What difference does one more person make? That may be a fair description of the outcome we are choosing to see. But it doesn’t answer the question what I am responsible for. The harm in my choice doesn’t shrink because other people are making the same one.

So the question in these situations is this:

Given that I can’t avoid all the harm, what am I willing to be responsible for?

Being responsible for something means naming its cost out loud instead of leaving it off the page. It means keeping that cost visible rather than settling it into a story about how it’s fine. And it means staying available to change when a better option turns up, which requires still looking.

That question won't make the harm go away, and it won't get us off the hook. It gives us agency to do what we can actually do.

Next time you’re deciding — the local co-op or the box store, the fair trade coffee or the familiar brand, AI or no AI — try this before the arithmetic.

Return. Feel your feet. Three breaths, longer on the way out. Notice what deciding feels like in the body — the tightness, the low hum of guilt, the wish for someone to just tell you. Let it be there.
Calm is not the goal here. It’s the place you start from. Because so many of our consumption choices impact the environment, I like to practice mindfulness in nature. Mindful walking or running with the ethical question and the intention of arriving at a response that promotes wellbeing for all is a clarifying practice. See for yourself the next time you are feeling stuck!

Listen. This is the step we often miss in a hurried world. We all have access to wisdom that guides us in alignment with our values. We just have to learn to listen and trust. I’ll take the first example of choosing between the local co-op or the box store to illustrate how I listen within for answers to these questions. You may arrive at completely different answers and that is OK. The point is to make space to listen between your observation and action. I use these three questions but feel free to follow your own way to listen within.

What is important to me here?
Local resilience that comes from taking care of our environment and the people in it. Worth saying in actual words rather than leaving it as a feeling. Then two questions that test whether it’s really the value talking. If nobody would ever know what I chose, what would I choose? That separates the value from the performance. And what would I choose if budget were not a concern? That separates the value from the constraint because sometimes the answer shows I do hold the value and simply can’t act on it this month, which is a different situation from not holding it, and it asks something different of me.

What are the consequences of this choice, and to whom?
At the co-op, more of what I spend stays in town and reaches the people who grew and sold it. At the box store, I keep money I need this month, and the cost sits somewhere I can’t see a mother working two shifts to make ends meet, a supplier squeezed, harm to farms and animals I have no way to track. The question isn’t how the choice makes me feel. It’s who carries it, and where.

What else is possible?
This is where curiosity does the work, because usually we have already decided. We believe the co-op is more expensive. Maybe we checked once, saw one price, and closed the question. After that the belief runs on its own and never gets tested again.

I had that story. Then we started actually shopping at our local co-op, and I was surprised. The bulk section is cheaper than what we had been buying. The produce is fresher. My husband checked the meat counter and found grass-fed at a lower price than we were paying before.

That doesn’t mean the co-op always wins. It means I didn’t know, and I was sure that I did.

Sometimes there’s a third option neither the shelf nor the search results offered and sometimes there isn’t, and knowing that is worth something too. How do you find new options? Usually not by searching harder. By asking a person who knows — the one at the co-op counter, the neighbor who's already solved it. By changing the question. Maybe, instead of asking which one do I buy asking do I need to buy one or borrow, repair, share, wait. I now move between an ethical online store, our local co-op and a CSA, where before I did all of my shopping at Whole Foods.

Begin. This is where the rubber meets the road and it turns out to be bigger than where I shop.

Choose. Then name what the choice costs, out loud or on paper. Not to punish yourself, but so it stays visible and you keep looking instead of settling into a story about how it’s fine.

Then keep going, because the choice doesn’t end at the register. It continues in how we use a thing and how we discard, let it go.

The fair trade coffee costs more, so I drink it more slowly and waste less of it. The price changed the relationship, not just the receipt.

Food is about a quarter of what Americans send to landfill, and because it rots fast, it produces well over half the methane that escapes from them. Once I knew that, we started roadside composting. If the service isn’t affordable where you live, that itself becomes a choice. Advocate for your town to adopt universal composting, so it’s affordable for everyone.

And then the question that keeps all of it open: what else can we do to more fully enjoy the abundance this earth provides, and to take care of it and all beings, ourselves included?

That is the difference between a choice and a justification. A justification closes. A choice stays open, and we check it again next time.

We don’t get to stand outside the system. We do get to stay awake inside it. And staying awake is a skill, which means it can be practiced.

I would love to hear how you make decisions when you’re at the crossroads and there is no perfect choice readily available.

Return. Listen. Begin. Stay Sama. 🪷