if it’s immoral to spend extra money on things you want, what do you do with the extra money? spend it on things other people want? gift it to the government for redistribution? huh?
it’s nice to help others, but it’s not immoral not to take altruism to the extreme.
The other side of this is that I think having ridiculous amounts of money can completely put you out of touch with reality. My husband’s grandparents were horrified that he chose to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology because ‘‘how will you support a family?’’ They only understand extreme poverty and extreme wealth, but do not grasp the concept of the middle class.
On the other hand, his billionaire uncle often regales us with stories about how miserable he is and how he’s really happy for us that we don’t need money to be happy.
I wouldn’t call that immoral, but it’s certainly, from my perspective, an argument against excessive wealth. And not to get all spiritual and shit, but I believe suffering is caused by craving, and buying more stuff often just feeds the addiction. Plus to really support that kind of income you basically have to sacrifice your life to your career. (I don’t claim myself exempt from consumerism, god no, but I do at least try to be aware of it.) Some things really can vastly improve the quality of your life, but most of it is stupid shit that fails to fill the void.
Then again, as my professor recently remarked, ‘‘Money doesn’t buy happiness, but have you ever tried to frown on a wave runner?’’
No, buying luxury goods does not make you a Bad Person. I used to think it did, but then I woke up and smelled the [del]coffee[/del] Peet’s. 
This isn’t the exact model we have here at the house but it’s close.
Define immoral?
Define luxury?
Also, consider your arguement from a purely logical perspective.
Not Moral = Own Luxury Items
If you switch the polarity does it make any sense?
Moral = Not Own Luxury Items
I don’t think anyone would argue that not owning luxury items is inherently moral.
What you do with any legally obtained disposal income is nobody else’s business and nobody has the right to make moral judgments on your legal spending habbits.
I think there are degrees. I live in a so-called third world country and would not feel comfortable owning anything too ostentatious, even if I could afford it. Having said that, I’m aware that even my relatively modest family car would be considered a luxury by over half of the local population.
Of course it’s immoral, no doubt about it.
If it were morality, there wouldn’t be all this dilly-dallying and sophistry going on. There wouldn’t be all the ‘‘but in this situation, I guess it’s OK’’, or ‘‘you gotta look at the context’’, or ‘‘it encourages responsibility’’, or ‘‘but they’ll lose their jobs’’, or ‘‘it’s OK as long as the buyer is also a slave’’.
We just don’t live in a moral world, but saying we live in one allows for more power and control. That’s why there’s so much dilly dallying.
Break the case into its parts:
Morality is morality (in the tinge you meant to give it, you made it look like ethics, other people, less influenced by religion, refer to morality as habit).
Consuming someone else’s life for a luxury object, means what it means.
Completely antithetical.
One of the main reasons why the world is so screwed up is because there are so many interests in repressively marrying completely antithetical concepts like these.
I do think there is a point at which having luxury items is immoral. A bag that costs tens of thousands of dollars, a car that costs multiples of a nice house, are int he range of what I mean.
And I don’t say that because I think it’s wrong to want or own beautiful things, but because (as said above) everyone has the obligation IMO to help relieve suffering from lack of basic necessities, and if you can afford to spend $50,000 on a purse you can clearly afford to give quite a lot of that away, and make do with a $5000 bag.
But it’s a difficult line to draw. I own some good things (mostly stuff passed down to me int he family plus a couple of pictures) and another person might say that my much lesser level of luxury is immoral.
Does it make a difference whether you had to toil and sweat to earn the money to buy the luxury item, or if it just fell into your hand because you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth?
Because few people are going to bother toiling and sweating to amass savings just to give them away to benefit someone else (perhaps, but not necessarily, someone who is himself quite capable of toiling and sweating, but just can’t be bothered).
If earned wealth is confiscated to support the needy, it will also be necessary to enforce a minimum standard of labour - and at the same time, it won’t be very surprising to discover that few people try very hard to exceed the minimum labour requirement - why should they?
Short of attaining a post-scarcity Star Trek style society, there is no perfect solution. There are some solutions worse than others though.
I’d say that, if you can afford it, buying a luxury item might be more moral than buying a cheap one. If you go to WalMart to buy a suit, you are encouraging a system that cuts out every penny, including those which are spent on fire protection for workers. If however you buy a bespoke suit, you are supporting skilled tailors.
There are expensive things made under conditions as bad as cheap things, of course, I’m talking about true luxury goods with skilled labor content.
Also, if it’s immoral to have a gold plated toilet seat, then it’s immoral for gold plated toilet seats to exist at all - because selling mine* to benefit the poor means someone else will acquire it, and that’s immoral. And if they thus are not allowed to exist, nobody is better off for it.
*I don’t have a gold plated toilet seat - (it’s solid gold)
Basically everything, down to a change of clothes and a pot to cook in, is a luxury. It’s amazing how little humans are capable of surviving with. So even if it somehow was immoral, how would you ever draw the line? It’s an absurd idea.
That said, I do look askance as purposefully destroying things of value. For example, a trend among well-off brides is to take “trash the dress” pictures, where the dress is destroyed by jumping in water, rolling in mud, etc. Often these dresses are many thousands of dollars, and no doubt represent countless hours of labor. That, to me, seems a little morally iffy.
In reality, any modern “charity” does in fact address long term needs for employment. Next to nobody (besides a few small homegrown faith based orgs) is in the business of handing out money, unless it’s an immediate disaster response situation. Some “charities” directly address unemployment by providing job training, funding for startups, etc. Other address it more indirectly by focusing on education, health, and the other things a community needs to have a functional workforce. Even things like roads are very much related to economics. These things are measured and the effectiveness of different types of programs is well known. People can walk away from these programs saying “For every $2.50 we spent, 5 people were trained and 4 of them went on to get better jobs than the untrained control group.”
Your sweatshop goods, however, leave very little in the hands of their community and most of the money in the hands of multinationals based abroad.
Fair trade usually tries to help communities transition from being raw material producers to being manufacturers. Selling raw materials is never going to make you much money, but if you can add to the value chain, you can start having an actual economy. Those “one resource” Africans would be growing coffee either way, be it for their fair trade brand or for Juan Valdez. The difference is that fair trade coffee tries to bring them into the other stages of production, cuts out some middle men, and gives people direct access to the international marketplace. If you don’t like fancy coffee, that’s fine. It’s a niche product. But it’s not a bad thing.
That’s just because people suck at critical thinking. A moral world isn’t one where there are no luxury items, it’s a world where everyone has the freedom to get them.
I’d say that in reality they’re getting extra use and enjoyment out of those dresses. Most wedding dresses see the light of day one time and then live out the rest of their existence in a trunk or closet. Having fun, outrageous photographs taken which spotlight the incongruity between a beautiful white dress and, say, a junkyard, gives a whole new opportunity for fun, memories and photographs for a bride and her friends to enjoy.
Plus sometimes the photos can be really beautiful. My niece is a wedding photographer and one of her “trash the dress” shoots involved several young brides lying, posing and frolicking in their wedding dresses in pure white snow. Yeah, the girls froze their asses off between takes and spent most of their off-camera time huddled in their idling cars with the heaters going at full blast, but you’d never know it to see them lying bare armed, bare shouldered and beautiful, smiling beauteously at the camera while lying on a blanket of snow, frolicking with their friends in the snow, hugging a barren snow covered tree, etc. And now they have their incongruous (and in this case, beautiful) photos to laugh over and enjoy for the rest of their lives. There is value to be found in enjoyment, and the enjoyment these brides and their friends get out of their “trash the dress” photos in my opinion serves only to increase the value they get out of their dresses’ expense.
Besides, often the dress can be reconstituted. Not always, but often.
Also, what’s the moral difference between an expensive wedding dress that is:
[ul]
[li]Used once, then ‘trashed’[/li][/ul]
or
[ul]
[li]Used once, then put into storage for 40 years[/li][/ul]
??
In both cases, a lot of money is spent on something that’s used once only.
I dunno. I just went to a very nice destination wedding in a fairly poor developing country. The bride and groom are absolute sweethearts, but watching someone tear up a $6,000 dress for some funny pictures, smack in the middle of other people’s poverty (and our own bad economy) felt wrong.
Beautiful, quality things should be celebrated and used. If you don’t want you good stuff, I promise you that there is someone who can use it.