With a Billion People Living on Less Than $1 a Day, Is Buying Luxury Shoes Ethical?

More often than not, filmmakers adapt movies from books. Examined Life: Excursions With Contemporary Thinkers is an exception to the rule.

A feature documentary about contemporary philosophy, Examined Life is a series of unique excursions with contemporary philosophers.  Playing off philosophy’s peripatetic roots – think Socrates wandering around the Athenian agora or Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker – I took eight world-renowned thinkers to the streets, asking them to reflect on the theme of ethics while moving through spaces that hold special resonance for them and their ideas.

That’s how I found myself cruising around Manhattan during rush hour with Cornel West; taking a walk through Tompkins Square Park with Avital Ronell; sauntering past Fifth Avenue’s posh shops with Peter Singer; touring an international airport with Kwame Anthony Appiah; strolling down Lake Michigan’s Chicago shore with Martha Nussbaum; rowing across a pond with Michael Hardt; enjoying a London garbage depot with Slavoj Zizek; and rambling around San Francisco with Judith Butler and my sister, the artist and disability activist Sunaura Taylor.

These marathon conversations had to be whittled down so I could fit them all into a feature length film. Dozens of hours of material were left on the cutting room floor, which I re-edited, with input from my subjects, for the printed page. Cinema has its charms, but also major shortcomings – chiefly compression, especially when you’re trying to tackle a subject like philosophy.

What follows is an excerpt from the Examined Life companion book, now available from The New Press. (And you can watch the trailer for the film in the video on the right of the screen.)  Against one of New York City’s glitzy shopping districts, I invited Peter Singer to discuss morality and consumption.  The author of many books, including Animal Liberation and, most recently, The Life You Can Save, Singer has been profoundly challenging the status quo for over three decades.  We met on a beautiful summer day and leisurely made our way downtown towards the beckoning billboards of Times Square.

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I met Peter Singer near Central Park, at the giant cube that marks the location of the Apple Store. It struck us as a fitting monument given that we arranged to discuss ethics and consumerism while walking down Fifth Avenue, one of New York City's glitzy shopping districts, to Times Square, now a site of corporate seduction ablaze with giant television advertisements and three-dimensional billboards. It was a perfect summer day, and the streets were crowded with shoppers and tourists as we made our way downtown.

Astra Taylor: I want the ideas to bounce off the environment, so feel free to reference things you pass by or to pause and talk about things that have caught your eye.

Peter Singer: So we are here on Fifth Avenue in New York, which is obviously the shopping strip par excellence for all the top brands, for all the top designers -- Gucci, Hugo Boss, Escada, whoever that is.

They're here, they are selling stuff at incredible prices, thousands of dollars for a dress or a handbag or whatever it might be. And at the same time, of course, we are living in a world in which there are about a billion people who are struggling to survive on less than one U.S. dollar per day.  With some more aid from the developed world, untold deaths could be prevented.

So obviously that raises an ethical issue. I mean, there are people who have the money to buy from these stores and who don't seem to see any moral problem about doing that. But what I want to ask is: Shouldn't they see some sort of moral problem about that? Isn't there a question about what we should be spending our money on?