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Everyone can reconcile almost anything, practically humanity's superpower. It's rare the person that fails to - on any issue. I think we all do it all the time for most issues.
-Benjamin Franklin
Also being shamed for everything you do as bad for the environment or bad for human right does not work.
I'm not going to buy a new phone today and it sounds like you probably won't either, I'll check back in tomorrow and see how the environment is doing!
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.
Can you confirm this for Apple products? I couldn't find anything recent.
