Consumer Ethics in a Global Economy

How Buying Here Causes Injustice There

Daniel K. Finn

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781626166967, 9781626166950
• eBook ISBN: 9781626166974
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

It is a serious mistake to think that all we need for a just world is properly-structured organizations. But it is equally wrong to believe that all we need are virtuous people. Social structures alter people's decisions through the influence of the restrictions and opportunities they present.

Does buying a shirt at the local department store create for you some responsibility for the workplace welfare of the women who sewed it half a planet away? Many people interested in justice have claimed so, but without identifying any causal link between consumer and producer, for the simple reason that no single consumer has any perceptible effect on any of those producers.

Finn uses a critical realist understanding of social structures to view both the positive and negative effects of the market as a social structure comprising a long chain of causal relations from consumer/clerk to factory manager/seamstress. This causal connection creates a consequent moral responsibility for consumers and society for the destructive effects that markets help to create. Clearly written and engaging, this book is a must-read for scholars involved with these moral issues.

PART I

Our Situation

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Our Individualistic Cultural Bias

The University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, has worked hard to strengthen its Catholic character. As a diocesan institution, it does not have the benefit of a sponsoring religious order and thus must articulate its specifically Catholic character, while many comparable institutions feel more at ease stressing the charisms of their founding religious congregations.

The University has two seminaries, one for college students and another for college graduates. It has a lively mission office and a center for Catholic studies, which encompasses a degree major for students, the Habiger Center for Catholic Leadership, and the John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic Social Thought. Its commitment is impressive.

The University also has a wonderful motto, used in nearly all its literature in print and online: “All for the Common Good.” Ironically, however, every time the motto appears it is followed by two letters: “TM.” This five-word endorsement of the common good as the pervasive purpose of the University is a legal trademark, registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office, whose website explains, “A trademark is a brand name.” A trademark is “used or intended to be used to identify and distinguish the goods/services of one seller or provider from those of others.”¹ No organization can use this phrase without the permission of the University of St. Thomas.

Having long taught at the primary football rival of St. Thomas, I want to be clear that I say this not to impugn the motives of its leaders but to make a point about the pervasive individualism of the culture and economy in which we all live. “Branding” has become a powerful goal for most Catholic colleges and universities today. In addition, without the trademark some other entity could copy the motto, seek a trademark, and, if successful, prevent St. Thomas from using it.

The irony that anyone would seek property rights over a phrase endorsing the common good takes place within broader structural and cultural realities. How is it that we find ourselves in a situation where the self-interest of institutions and individuals “has to” constrain even bona fide efforts to further the common good?

Introduction

Our goal in this volume is to answer a question: Are we as consumers causally (and therefore morally) responsible for the harms that markets cause to distant others who make the products we buy? Most of this volume—chapters 4 through 8—is dedicated to presenting a constructive argument that produces a view of how markets work. This first chapter, however, provides a brief overview of the individualism that makes answering the question so difficult. It will review early developments in the long history of individualism, starting some eight hundred years ago and ending with the individualistic biases of American culture today. It will explore two examples—English as a dominant language and gerrymandering—to illustrate how an individualistic perspective is empirically inaccurate.

The Long Road to Individualism

The evolution of individualism in Western culture occurred over many centuries, in tandem with several other developments, including the rise of science and the shrinking of religion in so many parts of life. One of the most insightful accounts of this long road to individualism is provided by the philosopher Charles Taylor in his monumental study A Secular Age.² In it, he disputes what he calls the standard “subtraction” story of science and secularization that most people take for granted.

According to this subtraction story, religion—from primitive tribes to the medieval Christian church—sees the natural world as “enchanted.” In Christian theology, the story goes, God is deeply involved in nature, which is vividly embodied in the festivals, carnivals, Ember days, blessing of crops, and other Christian appropriations of pagan culture. With the development of modern science, people started to be interested in the natural world “for their own sakes” and not just as some form of service to God.³ Over centuries, from the Middle Ages to the modern period, trust in science and the value of individual autonomy increased, and religion receded. Responsible intellectuals then confronted a “disenchanted” natural world with no religious concerns. From Taylor’s point of view, this story about the subtraction of religion to create modern individualistic, secular society is deeply mistaken—and the true story is much more interesting.

As have many before him, Taylor credits the Protestant Reformation with an important role in this process. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other reformers rejected Catholic sacramentals (crucifixes, oils, salt, holy water, palms, ashes, etc.) as distorting elements of “magic,” and they pressed for “the abolition of the enchanted cosmos.” Instead, “sanctification depends entirely now on our inner transformation, our throwing ourselves on God’s mercy in faith.”⁴ In contrast to the subtraction story, this move toward a disenchanted world and the increasing importance of the individual arose out of a conscious affirmation of Christian faith and not a rejection of it.

But Taylor cautions that this recognition of the Protestant Reformation is far from the complete history, because the Reformation was simply the most dramatic in a long line of efforts at reform within the church. Consider even official church policy. The Fourth Lateran Council, held in 1215, required that individual Christians annually participate in the sacrament of auricular confession, out of a concern to deepen the faith of the people, representing an endorsement of “a new individuality” in Catholic piety.⁵

Even more important, Taylor argues, was the rise of new movements of lay people in the thirteenth century—the Franciscans being the best example—that pressed for a lay spirituality in the world. These events in effect aimed to move the center of gravity of the apostolic life out of the monastery and into the world three centuries before Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. It put greater emphasis on the role of ordinary believers. And, in later intellectual developments by Franciscan thinkers such as Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam, “it ends up giving a new status to the particular as something more than a mere instantiation of the universal.”⁶ Such developments represented a conceptual foundation for a growing appreciation of the uniqueness of each individual person. Its importance should not be underestimated. As Taylor puts it, “Though it couldn’t be clear at the time, we with hindsight can recognize this as a major turning point in the history of Western civilization, an important step toward that primacy of the individual which defines our culture.”⁷

Simultaneously, within another strain in the Catholic intellectual tradition Thomas Aquinas imported the insights of Aristotle into Christian philosophy and theology and proposed that we understand the natural world as having its own rules, that is, natural law. God is certainly responsible for the creation of this system, but Taylor credits Aquinas with “the autonomization of nature,” another step on the road to the disenchantment of the natural world.⁸ As with the Franciscan tradition, this Dominican insight was deeply tied to faith and not a rejection of it.

The trajectory from the thirteenth century to our day is a long and complicated one, but Taylor points out that it eventuates in the existence of “the buffered self”: the human person is an “agent who no longer fears demons, spirits, magic forces.”⁹ Persons are identified more and more as subjects with rational control over their lives and less and less with ties to religious or cultural communities. As a result, “it is not surprising that the agent trained in this discipline falls easily prey to ideologies of atomism.”¹⁰

In sum, Taylor rejects the subtraction story of Western culture because it is wrong to think that a departure from religion drove these changes. Rather, “a more conscious and zealous dedication to God . . . largely fueled the process of disenchantment.”¹¹ The Old Testament conviction that religious faith is fundamentally a covenant between God and his people slowly erodes; religion becomes an individual commitment and an individual choice. Similarly, the stress on individual responsibility for one’s faith eventually leads to a reconceived view of society as simply constituted by individuals and not an organic community.

As this brief history of the development of individualism in the West reveals, the rise of economics as a separate discipline in the nineteenth century cannot be blamed for the individualistic bias of contemporary culture in advanced industrialized societies today. The individualistic economic mind-set is clearly an effect, and not the cause, of a longer historical process. Nonetheless, the discipline of economics has since become a powerful progenitor of individualism today, both for its undeniable influence on government policies in nearly every nation on earth and for its pedagogical influence on the millions of college students around the globe who each year take Econ 101 and, to one extent or another, come to adopt its view of the world. We will examine the individualizing characteristics of economics in chapter 2.

Habits of the American Heart

In her study “A Brief History of Individualism,” Nadia Urbinati observes that the American individualism of the mid-nineteenth century was experienced as a positive force precisely because it was structured by an equality of condition (generating a strong sense of self-respect) and a politics of rights (accompanied by “a strong sense of responsibility toward the community”).¹² Emerging from a European historical context, where family lineage was far too influential, Americans celebrated the opportunity to “start anew,” both nationally and personally. Eventually, however, the sense of responsibility to the common good withered, whether under the influence of the British conservatism of Edmund Burke or the later economic individualism of Friedrich Hayek.

A similar account, fleshed out in more detail, is provided by Robert Bellah and colleagues in Habits of the Heart. The authors conducted a large number of one-on-one interviews with Americans to better understand the relation of individualism and social commitment in the United States.¹³ The book opens with a description of Brian Palmer, a successful businessman living in San Jose, California. After years focusing on work and his own advancement within the corporation, Brian experienced a divorce, a reexamination of life values, and a new marriage, which led to a shift of his concern toward family. Yet when asked to describe the reasons behind this change, “his new goal—devotion to marriage and children— seems as arbitrary and unexamined as his earlier pursuit of material success. Both are justified as idiosyncratic preferences rather than as representing a larger sense of the purpose of life.”¹⁴

When asked about other moral convictions, such as his opposition to lying, Brian says, “Why is integrity important and lying bad? I don’t know. It just is. It’s just so basic. I don’t want to be bothered with challenging that. It’s part of me. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s very important.”¹⁵ As the authors put it, Brian “lacks a language to explain what seem to be the real commitments that define his life, and to that extent the commitments themselves are precarious.”¹⁶

As interviews of others affirm, Brian’s combination—having particular moral commitments along with an inability to explain a foundation for them beyond personal inclination—typifies much of American culture today. The authors attribute this situation to a shift in the chara...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Our Situation
• Part II: Critical Realism
• Part III: Implications
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author