Links To Amazon

A reader and fellow blogger writes:

Given your expertise in responding to the nitty-gritty ethics questions on your blog, I was hoping you’d address the following for me, as I could use some assistance in thinking about this matter — some readers have raised the issue of late of my use of Amazon.com’s affiliate program, given the fact that 1) anti-Catholic material may be found on their website and 2) pornographic material may also be freely purchased on their website as well (DVD’s, videos, etc.).

Noticing that I am not the only blogger to make use of this, or that Catholic companies like Ignatius Press, Our Sunday Visitor and Tan Books employ the use of Amazon.com as a seller of their books and publications, I wonder if you’ve addressed this question in the past, or can do so now? — from an ethics standpoint, how does one navigate this issue?

Q: Can business involvement in Amazon.com, or Barnes and Noble, or another virtual or real book distributor be considered condonement of their use of other ethically questionable materials? Should I best severe ties from them altogether? I wanted to know your thoughts before making a practical decision.

The answer to the question as phrased is: It depends. It depends on what kind of business involvement you’re having with such a bookseller. If you’re putting links to pornographic items on your blog for folks to buy, then no, that’s obviously no licit business involvement.

I’m sure that’s not the kind of involvement you mean, though. I assume that it’s providing links to purely innocent (even positive) items that they have for sale and possibly getting a tiny, tiny revenue share if the person buys it.

That kind of involvement is going to be morally licit.

To see why, let’s first step back and note a few points:

1. These booksellers sell a whole lot more than the problematic items you mention. They carry many items that are not anti-Catholic and not pornographic. In fact, they carry many items that are pro-Catholic (e.g., Benedict XVI’s previous books) and pro-chastity (e.g., John Paul II’s Love & Responsibility).
2. These booksellers are really just online versions of the major book chains. Barnes & Noble is a major book chain, and Amazon carries the same books, CDs, & DVDs that you’d find in a typical Borders bookstore (which is, in fact, affiliated with Amazon.Com).
3. The kind of business involvement you are talking about is going to be in the same category as the kind of involvement that an author has with these booksellers. When an author writes a book, he gives it to a publisher who tries to get it in all the bookstores it can, and (if it’s a large publisher) it gets it in the major chain bookstores, on Amazon and B&N, and people buy it and a royalty goes back to the author. If you’re providing a link to the book and the company gives you a revenue share (much smaller than an author’s royalty, as small as those usually are) then it’s essentially like a royalty going back to you. If it’s wrong for you to do this, it’s going to be wrong for an author to do it as well.
4. Since the sending back of those royalties to you and the author depends on a person buying the product, that gets the purchaser into the moral equation. If it’s going to be wrong for you and the author to receive money though your business relationship with the bookseller then it’s going to be wrong for the puracher to give money to the bookseller, who is really just a middleman between the author and the audience. If the middleman is so morally tainted that the author (and you) can’t do business with him, then the audience won’t be able to do business with him either. They will be morally obliged to boycott him.

Now, suppose that it were morally wrong to sell or purchase books through major booksellers like Amazon. What would the consequences of that be? Well . . .

• Per point 4, everybody is morally required to not do business with them. A boycott by all morally informed purchasers is mandated.
• Per point 3, authors and publishers are not going to be able to place their books through these booksellers. They’ll only be able to use untained, morally pure online vendors for their books. Per point 2, the same applies to bookstores. Purchasers and authors can only work with morally pure bookstores that do not carry tainted material.
• Point 1 is therefore neutralized. It doesn’t matter how much good the pro-Catholic and pro-chastity books, CDs, and videos might do. They can no longer be offered through in online or offline booksellers. The producers of these materials have to boycott these venues, and so the vendors become more tilted toward evil due to not having good materials and the public finds it harder to obtain good material, meaning that society as a whole tilts further toward evil since the diet of material it can buy at its local bookstore, etc., is now tilted toward evil.
• Purchasers therefore have to expend extra effort to get morally good material, meaning that they will obtain it less often and thus be less edified. Secular and non-committed Christians won’t undertake those efforts. Even many committed Catholics will simply not make the effort, at least on occasion, and thus not purchase the products. Sales of good products therefore go down.
• Authors thus will find it harder to make a living since there are fewer venues for their products and fewer people buying then. More authors experience economic hardship, and many publishers go out of business, centralizing more market share in the major publishers who are already publishing problematic material and therefore can’t be touched either.

Now, a person might object: "But wait! If we got all the Catholics and Evangelicals in America to boycott with us, they’d change their policies!"

Maybe.

If you really got all the C & Es together and had an iron-clad economic blockade of these institutions, that just might be enough to get a policy change.

But let’s be realistic: We’re not going to get all of the C & Es in America to conduct such a boycott. There is no mechanism in place capable of generating a boycott that big. If someone engineers such a mechanism then we can talk about the prudence of initiating a boycott, but we can’t act as if such a boycott is in the offing until it actually is in the offing. We have to base our actions on what is achievable now and not in a possible future that may never materialize.

Well, what if we had a smaller boycott?

It’d fail.

The thing is: Anti-Catholic stuff and porn has a market. For a start, it’s the Evangelicals who are eating up a lot of the most direct and explicit anti-Catholic stuff. (Secularists won’t read James White’s latest opus.)

And as for porn, it’s apparently an economic juggernaut at the moment. I’m given to understand that it accounts for a frighteningly high amount of the traffic and economics of the Internet. I certainly have to delete an awful lot of porn spam from the comments boxes and trackbacks (though having switched my e-mail to Gmail, I no longer have to delete all the porn ads that were being dumped into my e-mail box every day; Gmail’s filtering system seems quite good).

As long as there’s a market for this stuff and–this is a point often overlooked–as long as there is an indifferentist ideology among booksellers where they say, "We don’t take sides in these debates; we let anybody put their products on our site, and that’s important to who we are" then anything but a massive, iron-clad boycott of millions of people isn’t going to achieve the desired effect.

(NOTE ‘CAUSE I KNOW FOLK’LL ASK: The indifferent ideology of eBay is part of the recent problem with them. I’ll post soon on the issue of boycotting eBay. For now, I’d ask folks not to discuss the eBay situation in the combox of this post as I want to keep the issues separate.)

So: Whadda we do until we have a bookseller boycott in the offing that could be truly effective?

Well, Catholic moral theology will not support the proposition that we are morally obliged to boycott when doing so will be ineffective. (It may not even support the existence of a moral obligation when an effective boycott is in the offing, but it certainly won’t support the existence of a moral obligation when an effective boycott ain’t in the offing.) The kind of formal cooperation or immediate material cooperation required to make a boycott morally obligatory just ain’t there.

We could, of course, impose our own personal boycotts that we know will have no chance of achieving the effect we want. In that case, the bad effects mentioned in the bullet points above will happen to the extent that people are participating in the ineffective boycott.

If I write a pro-Catholic book and say "Sorry Amazon! Y’all don’t get it!" then that makes it (a) makes it harder for folks to find it, meaning fewer will and thus fewer folks will be benefitted and (b) hurt me by making it harder for me to make a living since I’ll have spent all this time writing the book and getting less remuneration for my time investment.

Acting in my capacity as a customer, if I refuse to do business with only vendors that have morally untainted product lines then I’m going to be able to buy only the items available in Catholic bookstores. I’ll never read a non-Catholic book again because the non-Catholic booksellers all have something problematic in them. I therefore will not only (slightly) impoverish the authors who wrote the good but non-Catholic books I would have otherwise bought, I’ll (much more!) impoverish myself by living in a defensive, retreatist manner that fails to engage contemporary culture in the way that the Church has always called us to.

While I greatly sympathize with the impulse of individuals to try to boycott booksellers that sell bad material, and while organizing effective boycotts against them is praiseworthy and worth pursuing, Catholic moral theology will simply not support the proposition that as things stand now people are to have no dealings with them.

The idea that as individuals we must, in the here and now, cease having anything to do with secular booksellers (online and off) and only buy things from Catholic vendors with totally pure inventories (no problematic theology or apparition stuff in them) is Jansenistic and fostering of scrupulosity.

I suggest that we take as our model in these matters our current, wonderful holy father, Pope Benedict XVI.

Benedict XVI has a string of book contracts with Ignatius Press and other publishers and these publishers get his books carried by non-religious booksellers. Revenue flows back to them from these booksellers, and every now and then they cut a royalty check and send it to Benedict XVI (or whoever he may have designated as the recipient of his royalties–maybe a religious order or charity or relative), and he’s totally jake with that.

He may or may not know that his books are on Amazon, but he certainly knows that his books are being sold through non-religious booksellers who also carry problematic materials. He knows how the publishing industry works, and while he no doubt deplores the bad material the vendors carry, he wants the vendors to sell his stuff so it can get out there and do good.

If he can allow his books to be sold through such venues then it seems to me that it’s okay for us to buy them from such sellers or to provide links to them.

LIKE THIS ONE. GO GETCHA SOME GREAT BENEDICT XVI BOOKS! YEE-HAW!