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Adorno wrote that wrong life cannot be lived rightly. Does that let me off checking where my coffee comes from?

Johanna Reinhardt Fellow
· 4 replies
Applied ethicsContinentalModern EuropeanCritical theoryTheodor W. Adorno#adorno#complicity#ethical-consumption#minima-moralia
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Its coordinates: 3.3 Applied Ethics

There is a sentence of Adorno's that half of Berlin seems to know by heart: Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen, usually rendered "wrong life cannot be lived rightly". It closes aphorism 18 of Minima Moralia, which he wrote in American exile in the 1940s, and the aphorism is about something very ordinary: where and how to live. The old family house has become impossible, he says, the modern flat is a box, and even owning furniture ties you into an order of property you would rather not endorse. Then comes the famous line.

My friends use it in two opposite ways. One treats it as permission to stop worrying: the system is rotten, so checking whether my coffee was picked by underpaid workers is a private comfort that changes nothing. Another treats it as a reason for endless worry: since no choice is clean, every choice needs scrutiny.

I don't think Adorno meant either. He was not giving shopping advice. He was saying something about the limits of private virtue in a society organised against it. But that leaves a practical question he never answers. If no life is right, are some lives still less wrong? Is trying to live a little less wrongly a real moral effort, or a way of buying a good conscience?

I'd especially like to hear from anyone who thinks the sentence is simply false.

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4 replies

  1. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    Adorno is right about the box and wrong about what follows from it. The coffee you're worrying about probably came through a port like mine, in a container I lifted. I can't make my own life clean either. But "less wrong" does exist, and it is mostly collective. Dockers have refused cargo before, in more than one port, and the refusal mattered because it was many people at once.

    So my answer is: checking your coffee alone is a comfort. Checking it with others, and making noise about it, is politics. Adorno distrusted that too, but he never stood on a quay at six in the morning.

  2. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    Kant would refuse the question as you've posed it. In the first section of the Groundwork he says that even if a good will achieved nothing at all, it would still shine like a jewel, by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself. So whether your choice changes the system is not what makes it right or wrong.

    What matters is the maxim. "I buy whatever is cheapest and ask no questions" is a maxim you would hesitate to will for everyone. That is enough to make checking a duty, even in a wrong world.

  3. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    An economist's footnote. Marx's point about the commodity was that the coffee on the shelf hides the relations between the people who made it and the people who drink it. Checking where it comes from is at least a refusal of that disguise: you decide to know what you are part of, even if you can't leave it.

    And read the rest of aphorism 18. Adorno doesn't recommend despair. He recommends a kind of suspended relation to your own private life: live it, since you must, but don't take it as a refuge or as proof of your goodness. That seems to me compatible with checking the coffee, as long as you don't congratulate yourself afterwards.

  4. Rohan Desai

    Fellow

    Johanna, my startup sold "ethical sourcing" software, so I have watched this sentence used as a business model. Our clients wanted dashboards that let them say their supply chain was clean. The data underneath was mostly self-reported by suppliers who knew what we wanted to hear.

    That made me sympathetic to your first friend for a while. If checking is theatre, why check?

    But Hugo's answer is the one I have come round to. "Less wrong" is real when it is measured in effects on someone, not in how I feel. Paying more for coffee from a cooperative that pays its farmers more is less wrong. Buying a label that tells me I'm good is a purchase of conscience. Adorno is right that the second is everywhere. He is wrong if he means the first is impossible.

    My test now: would the action still make sense if nobody, including me, ever knew I had done it?