That's kind of a tenuous link at best. You could make the case that buying more increases the opportunities for those at the bottom.
I'm not even necessarily making a factual statement here, but personally I don't feel that there's anything to reconcile.
I don’t know enough about these things to know whether buying more or less of these devices directly helps enslaved people, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to observe that rampant consumerism does fuel the postcolonial economic machine that perpetrates that kind of exploitation. And I think that those of us who stand to benefit the most from this system would do well to be extremely cautious about how we are incentivized toward motivated reasoning.
Factually you could argue either way. I suppose broadly you could say that industrialisation is bad for those at the bottom in the short term. But after the hump things get better. Is that pain reasonable? Is it avoidable? Are we morally obligated to avoid it? Are all somewhat open questions.
The GP used the word 'reconcile' which to me is a more emotional metric. Personally I don't make the link (rightly or wrongly) between me buying X and person Y suffering. So personally I don't have anything to reconcile. That is a correct answer. It isn't the answer, but as an answer to the GP, it is legitimate.
I can also see it being a reasonable answer to say that in buying Congolese cobalt you are helping the country industrialise, which in the long term is a good thing. Again you may disagree with the reasoning or morality but it seems to me a legitimate way of reconciliation.
A sufficiently technologically advanced human species might be the only thing capable of stopping the next extinction event. Something that will almost certainly occur naturally without any intervention.
So our choices appear to be wait for the bad thing to happen or continue to drive each other to improve and learn, which consumerism does in fact provide great motive and drive for humans to improve (although not the only mechanism, I'm sure, just a large one we understand today). Hopefully we strike the right balance and solve these problems.
Can you confirm this for Apple products? I couldn't find anything recent.
