I've been slowly getting rid of plastic food containers. I like to imagine having a conversation with another person while rationalizing my decisions. In this case, the hypothetical person asked why, and I replied with:
- microplastics are known endocrine discruptors, and
- it's better for the environment; plastic recycling is a sham, and was probably created by corporations so that we're okay with creating mountains of trash.
How important are each of these factors? Due to potential health consequences, I would still remove plastic containers even if it was 100% recyclable, but would I do it even if it was provably safe? In other words, is (2) a sufficient reason for me to phase out plastic containers? Given that I knew (2) before (1) and still used plastic containers, the answer seems to be no; so why did I state (2)? Note that I wasn't in an empty vacuum reflecting on my intentions; I was imagining myself explaining my decision in a social context; I was disingenuously virtue signalling.
To live an honest life, I need to find and state only the minimal set of reasons for an action. This is a concept I'm borrowing from discrete math; with respect to a mathematical property, a set is minimal if it satisfies the property, and no proper subset of the set satisfies the property. In my case, the property is "sufficient reasons to abandon plastic containers", and the set {(1), (2)} is not minimal since {(1)} also meets the property, and is a subset of {(1), (2)}. Less formally, the test I was performing above (of discarding certain reasons and seeing if it was sufficient) is an intuitive way to check minimality.