Seán Moncrieff: Eco-guilt is real. A lot of marketing claims product X will make you feel slightly less terrible

Herself wasn’t too happy with the amount of sparkling water we were buying. Like everything, it comes with an environmental cost. Not as bad as driving or burning a rainforest, but the kind of indulgence that perhaps we could enjoy in a more virtuous way.

The answer was to get a carbonator – one of those yokes that put fizz into water. But this presented another, more political problem. The brand leader is Sodastream and, although it’s now owned by PepsiCo, Sodastream is an Israeli company that has regularly snacked on controversy pie. For some years, it had a manufacturing plant in the occupied West Bank.

Instead, Herself found a European company that produces carbonators made from recycled cardboard mixed with daisies. Or something like that. The product arrived. Works perfectly.

You might think this was a lot of thought and effort into something that makes only an infinitesimal difference to the world. Our sparkling water consumption still isn’t entirely carbon neutral. There’s still the carbon dioxide and the transport. And Israel hasn’t withdrawn from the West Bank.

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Part of the motivation was reduction of our own eco-guilt. We’re far from the only people who experience this. For the first time in history, a lot of marketing doesn’t claim that product X will make you feel or look great; instead, it will make you feel slightly less terrible. That’s why so many products or services make a claim for how green or natural or environmentally responsible they are. Occasionally, those claims may even be true.

What it demonstrates is how commerce taps into something central about human self-belief: that we are good people. If you walk around your local supermarket and keep an eye out for it, you’ll be struck by just how many products use the morally-loaded word “ethical” on their packaging. Buy me and you’ll be ethical too.

There is a famous thought experiment called the Trolley Problem, which comes in two parts. This is an Irish adaptation.

Scenario One: there’s been a massive technical malfunction on the Green Line of the Luas. A tram is hurtling out of control and heading for Ranelagh where a gender-neutral farmer’s market has been set up around the tracks. If the tram reaches there, five people will die. But you have the option of switching the tram on to another track, where a single Luas worker is having her lunch. If you switch the tracks, she will die. What do you do?

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Scenario Two: the Luas is speeding towards Ranelagh; except this time, you’re standing at College Green. Just you and one extremely large German tourist. If you shove the German in front of the Luas, killing him, it will stop the tram. What do you do?

The experiment has been carried out many times and the results have been strikingly consistent. In Scenario One, a majority of people say they would press the button to switch the tracks. But in Scenario Two, a majority of people would refuse to push the tourist in front of the Luas.

There’s a mountain of academic speculation as to why this is but it must have something to do with humans not always being comfortable with witnessing the consequences of our actions. In a situation where there is no “good” choice, we’d rather not see one person die, even if that means a greater number will lose their lives elsewhere – because to cause and watch a death would conflict with the belief that we are good.

Yet – in far less dramatic fashion – we are morally compromised all the time; often unwittingly, sometimes not: in what we buy, how we deal with other people, how we vote. After we got the carbonator, we realised that we couldn’t get the CO2 canisters from the same company – they can’t be posted – so now we get them from the shop. The Sodastream ones. All we can do is fail better.