What Does an Ethical Gym Look Like?
Instead of wasting energy, what if gyms produced it?
Let’s imagine an argument that concluded gyms are unethical.
I do just want to say up front: I am not actually making that argument. Even if I actually believed going to the gym was unethical, I would not publicly state it on the internet. Could you imagine the response? Athletes all over the world would turn on me. You’re a communist! You’re a fascist! What, is everything we do now unethical? Make America great again!
Oprah would invite me on her show (we’re still imagining, people) and be like, “So… wtf?”
But the idea just came to me in a dream last night and now I’m exploring it in a post on Medium. You can all put down your pitchforks and chill for a second (including you, Oprah). Let’s just see where this goes.
Also, let’s keep in mind that I actually know very little about ethics and I do not have a degree in philosophy. I know only enough about it to know that I know very little about it. The philosophers in the crowd will likely find this little adventure of mine riddled with issues.
But I think even amateurs should be able to give things a shot (except maybe when it comes to children singing; please see my forthcoming petition to YouTube). And I’m encouraged by Churchill, who said,
“Ethics, understood as the capacity to think critically about moral values and direct our actions in terms of such values, is a generic human capacity. Except for sociopaths, it is common to all of us…”
So I’m just going to exercise a bit of that capacity common to all of us (let’s hope I’m not a sociopath). Please go easy on me and hear me out.
An Ethical Argument Against the Gym
An ethical argument against the gym might go something like this.
We could begin by asserting that our world has limited resources and that one of those limited resources is food. (For ease, let’s talk about food resources in terms of calories, which is a unit of measurement for the energy that foods provide.) We would further assert that in our world, there are enough calories for everyone, but that they are distributed in such a way that some people do not have enough calories and other people have many more than they need.
So far, there is good evidence for all of these claims.
Now comes the ethical argument.
Let’s start with the proposition that a “good” or “ethical” situation is one in which calories are shared in such a way that everyone has enough. In other words, the “good” thing to do is to try to make sure everyone has enough to eat.
So then, the closer that behavior brings us to a situation where everyone gets enough calories, the “better” or more “ethical” that behavior is. On the other hand, the further that behavior brings us from a situation where everyone has enough calories, the “worse” or less “ethical” those behaviors are.
(That was a social argument, and I’ll consider it for the rest of the article. But, if we preferred, we could consider an argument about the environment—we would just have to change the details. We would start by acknowledging that we’re facing a climate crisis that requires we reduce our carbon emissions to net 0 by 2050. We need to be able to produce the energy we need in a way that doesn’t contribute to global warming. Collectively, gyms use a ton of energy… etc.)
What is the gym?
Now let’s consider what going to the gym is. For many people, the reason they go to the gym is to lose weight. More specifically, many gym-goers are interested not in losing weight per se, but in losing body fat. Body fat, roughly, is the body’s way of storing excess calories. We can conceive of excess fat as the physical manifestation of the calories we have consumed that we did not need. It is fuel. Stored energy.
We can think of going to the gym as behavior that we engage in to get rid of the excess calories that we’ve consumed. For many people (though certainly not everyone), the gym’s purpose is to use up excess energy we’ve accumulated. This is energy that could have gone to people that do not have enough.
Going to the gym, then, becomes a behavior that brings us further from a situation where everyone has enough calories because it helps some of us consume many more calories than is our fair share.
According to our definition of “ethical” from before, since going to the gym is a behavior that takes us further from a situation where everyone has enough calories, we would consider it “worse” or less “ethical”.
These calories could have been distributed differently such that those who are starving or malnourished could have benefitted from them. If they had been, maybe we wouldn’t have as many gyms.
Some Counter Arguments
Okay, you’re saying to yourself, but surely there are a number of arguments you could make for the ethical-ness of going to the gym.
We know that being active contributes to health. Surely staying active and reducing one’s risk of chronic diseases, like heart disease and diabetes, is good for the global community and is ‘ethical’? I make friends at the gym — surely, the community-building benefits of gyms also contribute to their ‘goodness’? And surely, the world would be much worse off without the images of chiseled six-packs on Instagram?
Surely, for these reasons, and for many others, the gym provides numerous “goods” to the community? Surely?
Surely.
There are, of course, lots of benefits to the community of going to the gym, in addition to the very clear benefits to the individual who goes.
Let’s return now to the fact that I am completely unqualified and unable to evaluate whether or not going to the gym is ethical or not. And, actually, I’m not even really that interested in making such an evaluation.
What I am interested in is this idea: that some of us (especially North Americans and Europeans, but also many others) use way more resources than is our “share”. One example of that is that we eat way more than we need to.
But not only do we consume more than we should, but we also use all that extra energy to do what? To ride a bike that doesn’t go anywhere?
We have so much of that extra energy that we’ve created a multi-billion dollar industry to help us get rid of it. And we get rid of it by moving our bodies in ways that are completely pointless.
Think about it: where does the treadmill get us? Nowhere—at least in the literal sense.
What Would an Ethical Gym Look Like?
That brings us to the dream I had last night. In my dream, I was exercising at the gym. But the gym was a farm.
I was busy shoveling things and raking things (arms, chest, back), climbing up ladders to get hay, going downstairs (quads, hams, glutes) into the cellar to get beer and apples. (Why was I getting beer and apples from the cellar? It was a dream, Oprah, it doesn’t make sense).
In my dream, I was using all that extra energy to get farm work done; to do something useful.
I’m obviously not suggesting we replace all the gyms with farms.
But I am suggesting that we consider the following: in a world where there is limited energy, where we’re facing a climate change crisis, and where many people are hungry, what is the best use of our extra collective energy? What is the best way we can use all those extra calories?
A Brainstorm
I don’t have the answer, but I have some ideas.
What if the treadmills, the elliptical machines, and the stationary bikes we use to eat up all our extra calories produced energy? Rather than us plugging them into the wall, what if they ran off our own work? This is not even new technology; there are already cafes where you can pedal a bike that charges your phone. What if all the cardio machines at the gym did that? Think of the energy we could save.
Let’s take that further. What if any excess energy we produced went back into the grid? In a suburb of Halifax, Canada, they’ve installed a hydroelectric generator in the municipal water system—in water pipes and taps. The water passes through a turbine on its way to your water glass, and this creates electricity. The electricity goes into the grid. One small test turbine in the water pipes of one neighborhood of the city currently earns about $30,000 a year in energy sold back to the grid.
What if the gym did that? What if it tracked my cardio and put the energy I created back into the grid? What if I could get a discount on my gym membership based on how much energy I contributed?
Better yet, what if I could actually make money by exercising? What if the electricity that I produce on a stationary bike is tracked and at the end of the month I am compensated for the amount of electricity I generated with all my extra calories? I could stay fit, save for a house (or, more realistically, a sandwich), and contribute to greener energy production at the same time.
Or, what if I just ate less?
Re-thinking Our Energy Use
This article started by considering whether spending calories doing useless work when lots of people don’t have enough food was ethical. The point of that wasn’t to make people feel guilty for going to the gym (and it certainly wasn’t to help you justify being sedentary). It was simply meant to be a mental exercise to get us to think about how we distribute and use energy.
In a world where we’re going to have to be much more careful to avoid waste, the over 200,000 gyms around the world seem like an energy sink. But maybe they don’t have to be.
My goal in this article was really to prompt some thought about how all that energy could be better used. What could we do with it?
The conventional treadmill may not be getting us very far (haha).
How could we change it so it does?
