Making choices: Rebecca Hardy navigates life’s moral complexities

‘Upon this principle, who would be innocent?’

Growing up as a teenager in the 1980s, there was a film that my Quaker mother particularly liked. The film was Witness, the 1985 feature directed by Peter Weir, about an Amish child who witnesses a murder when travelling with his mother to New York. 

Starring a swoonishly-rugged Harrison Ford, and featuring guns and violence a-plenty, it’s not what you might expect a Quaker elder to enjoy. But my mother loved it because she said it wrestled with a Quaker conundrum, albeit from an Amish perspective: how much can we truly stand apart from the world, and disentangle ourselves from its moral shades of grey? For her, this particularly resonated with the complexity of the Peace Testimony, which many Friends still have a complicated relationship with, especially against the backdrop of so much war and armed conflict.

In the film, the Amish elder Eli Lapp seems to sum this quandary up, when he finds his young grandson Samuel handling a gun. ‘Would you kill another man?’ he asks, to which Samuel replies: ‘I would only kill the bad man.’

‘And you know these bad men by sight? You are able to look into their hearts?’ says Eli, to which Samuel responds: ‘I can see what they do. I have seen it.’

‘Having seen, you become one of them,’ says Eli. ‘Don’t you understand? What you take into your hands, you take into your heart. “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.” Go and finish your chores now.’

Over the years, this film has often come to mind as I’ve tried to make ethical choices of my own, in a world drowning with inadequate response and seemingly-hypocritical compromise. 

I was reminded of this when I heard about Samuel John Galton Jnr, one of many eighteenth-century Quaker industrialists. These business-minded Friends are usually remembered for their industry in chocolate, shoemaking or banking. But Galton was different. Galton was a manufacturer of guns. 

Throughout the 1790s Quakers had grown increasingly troubled by the Galton’s family firm, Farmer and Galton in Birmingham, which made and supplied guns to the European traders of enslaved people. It was in fact the biggest and most important gunmaker in the country – many of the guns used by British troops during the Napoleonic wars were manufactured by the Galton family. Galton himself argued that to be involved in any manufacturing at the time made involvement with the violence of war unavoidable. He set out his defence in a letter responding to a 1775 minute from the ‘Monthly Meeting of Birmingham’. In it he argues that the manufacture of arms does not equate to encouraging war, and that it could be ‘equally applicable to the purposes of Defensive War, to the support of the Civil Power, to the Prevention of War, and to the Preservation of Peace’.

‘If arguments from Abuse are to be admitted against the Use and the Existence of things, Objections might be made against almost every institution,’ John Galton says. ‘Is the Farmer who sows Barley, – the Brewer who makes it into Beverage, – the Merchant who imports Rum, or the Distiller who makes Spirits, – are they responsible for the Intemperance, the Disease, the Vice and the Misery which may ensue from their Abuse? – Upon this principle, who would be innocent?’   

‘Sitting where he was in Birmingham, it would’ve been hard to be an industrialist and not be contributing in some way to war.’

It’s an interesting argument, but it was not enough to convince Friends, who disowned him in 1796 (though he was welcomed back when he retired). 

Fast forward nearly 250 years, and, in Empire of Guns: The violent making of the industrial revolution, the historian Priya Satia comes to the conclusion that the gun manufacturer was (sort of) right. Galton’s defence sparked for her ‘a whole new way of looking at the Industrial Revolution’, she says, in an interview for the Stanford University website. ‘I started to wonder, “What if we’ve all missed the big story about the Industrial Revolution? That so much of it was driven by war, to the extent that it would be hard to be a person of industry without being involved in war?” I persuaded myself that Galton was right. Sitting where he was in Birmingham, it would’ve been hard to be an industrialist and not be contributing in some way to war.’

‘The Galtons also had a bank that was founded on their gun wealth that was later folded into what is now HSBC,’ she adds. ‘The other big Quaker banks connected to Galton’s work were Lloyd’s and Barclays. This wealth from gun-making is still with us today.’

Historical legacy aside, the twenty-first century also has its problematic production issues. Indeed, the ethical complexities of industrialisation and manufacturing are written into every single moment of our daily life. Take the case of chocolate, which Quakers have long been historically involved in (with Quaker-founded companies including Cadbury, Fry’s and Rowntree’s). It’s hardly a secret that the provenance of chocolate is rooted in modern slavery. According to Oxfam last year, there are 30,000 cases of modern slavery, and 1.56 million cases of child labour, present in the chocolate industry in Ghana and Cote d’ Ivoire today. A US report last September revealed that child labour on cocoa farms is still supplying major packaged food companies such as Barry Callebaut, Nestlé, Mars, and Ferrero. Children were found to be performing hazardous work, preventing them from attending school, and earning less than the World Bank’s poverty threshold. Furthermore, twenty-seven per cent of 612 human rights incidents related to food-supply chains were of child labour on cocoa farms, according to Morningstar Sustainalytics (the incidents were recorded between January 2014 and January 2024). Some of this is obvious from a quick glance at the supermarket confectionary aisles. If a company brands one or two of its chocolate products as ‘ethical’, ‘sustainable’ or ‘fair trade’, it’s a decent working assumption that the rest are not – and that’s before you get to the many biscuits and cakes that have cocoa among their ingredients.

‘There has been progress,’ says Andrew Wallis, chief executive of Unseen, a partner NGO of Be Slavery Free, which coordinates an annual ‘chocolate scorecard’. ‘Child labour and modern slavery remain present in the cocoa industry. While companies are becoming increasingly aware of their responsibility to ensure that their supply chains are free from forced and child labour, the programmes created to address these issues need to be scaled up.’

As ever, he says, the root cause is poverty, which ‘must be addressed to eradicate child labour in all supply chains. Consumer demand for more ethical chocolate is making a positive impact, so we urge people to continue making ethical choices based on the findings of the Chocolate Scorecard. The choices you make can help end the suffering of children across this industry.’

This scorecard lists chocolate companies and products, and puts them on an ethical scale. This year’s list has Tony’s Chocolonely coming out best overall, classed as ‘leading in policy and practice’ over child labour, along with Ritter Sport, Cémoi, Mars Wrigley, Whittaker’s, Nestlé, Hershey’s, and ECOM. But the issues over lack of transparency remain. These make it almost impossible for any manufacturer to claim with total confidence that its products are slavery-free. (That said, James Cadbury, the great-great-great grandson of Quaker John Cadbury, told the Friend four years ago that the supplier for his chocolate brand Love Cocoa knows their own farms and ‘know they are not funding slavery’.)

Meanwhile, a recent Oxfam report showed more unsavoury truths about chocolate: that it is compounding the climate crisis, with west African growers selling land to gold miners, resulting in severe environmental degradation. Latin American farmers too are abandoning other crops and deforesting new areas in order to plant cocoa, due to its higher returns.

It’s not just chocolate, of course. There are similar concerns around the murky coffee supply trade, and child labour in the mining of minerals for electronic gadgets and electric cars, which the Quaker Congo Partnership has long been highlighting. In 2020, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme filmed children under thirteen years old working around forty-hour weeks in gruelling conditions on coffee farms that supply beans to Starbucks and Nespresso. Last November the House of Lords debated the need for better kite marks on electronic gadgets after ‘reports of children standing knee-deep with their bare skin in toxic pools mining for cobalt’ in eastern Congo. Siddharth Kara’s book Cobalt Red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives shows how more than seventy per cent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by poor labourers and children in subhuman conditions. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today – the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. 

Does your phone have an ethical guarantee? Overall, a staggering 159 goods from seventy-eight countries and areas are produced by child or forced labour (as of 28 September 2022, according to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs). 

‘How do we attempt to make a difference when – for all the fair-trade biscuits we crunch, and commitments to reparations we make – every daily choice we make is bound to be a bad one?’

It’s easy to see how, in the midst of all this, many people close their eyes and think it’s not worth making any kind of stand at all. How do we attempt to make a difference when – for all the fair-trade biscuits we crunch, and commitments to reparations we make – every daily choice we make is bound to be a bad one? How can we keep going against such an overwhelming backdrop? Is it worth making an ethical stance at all? The answer, of course, is yes, because it’s all we’ve got. But clinging to our small witnesses can sometimes feel like – and please excuse the unQuakerly language – pissing in the wind. Or holding back a trickle as a tsunami rushes in. 

Perhaps Samuel Galton was right and, just by living in this world, we are all part of the problem. All of us choose not to see, but in different ways. Our daily lives are an ethical minefield, from the polluting shower gel we use, to the Airbnb we book for a holiday, driving an inflated local housing market. From the smartphone we buy, to the provenance of our favourite salad, to the potentially-trafficked builders we use to do up our homes, you can bet that, somewhere along the great supply-and-demand chain, someone is being damaged or short-changed. 

But maybe our imperfect striving is witness in itself – that even amid the overwhelm of futility, we keep on keeping on because that’s all that we can do. While one person shines the light on coltan production in eastern Congo, another Friend carries a torch for the climate crisis. Small chinks of light, small acts of resistance. In the end, we keep on trying because that is all that we’ve got – and we can never fully remove ourselves from the world, nor ‘touch not the unclean thing’.

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