The Ethical Consumer

Rob Harrison, Terry Newholm, Deirdre Shaw, Rob Harrison, Terry Newholm, Deirdre Shaw

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781412903530, 9781412903523
• eBook ISBN: 9781446229439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

`This book is not simply the best book on the remarkable phenomenon of today?s ethical consumer. It is a gift of advice and insight, from the people that know best, to the cause of tomorrow. Many of the writers deserve the plaudits of being pioneers of a new consumer movement. These are the issues of our time? - Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the UK?s National Consumer Council (NCC)

Who are ethical consumers and why are they on the rise? Leading the way towards answering this question, The Ethical Consumer is an indispensable introduction to the subject. Exploring areas like boycotts and fair trade projects, it gathers together the diverse experiences of scholars, campaigners and business practitioners from the international community.

The chapters in this book explore:

- ethical consumer behaviours, motivation and narratives

- the social, political and theoretical contexts in which ethical consumers operate

- the responsibilities of businesses and the effectiveness of ethical consumer actions

Contributions are informed by a broad range of research methods, from case studies, focus groups to surveys and interviews.

The text is of interest to business related graduates, undergraduates and their tutors on courses relating to consumption. It will also be relevant to academics in other disciplines, as well as to politicians, producers, practitioners, campaigners and not least consumers.

Part One

Theorising Ethical Consumption

Philosophy and Ethical Consumption

1

Clive Barnett Philip Cafaro Terry Newholm

INTRODUCTION

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This chapter introduces some basic philosophical approaches that are useful in understanding and evaluating ethical consumption issues and ethical consumer behaviour. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section introduces the two main approaches to ethics in moral philosophy, ‘consequentialism’ and ‘deontology’, and considers how appropriate they are when applied to questions of consumption. The example of consumer responses to products made using child labour is then explored to show how these two different approaches to ethics can lead to different outcomes.

The second section considers the relevance of another approach, virtue ethics, which it is argued has the advantage of concentrating on the broad contexts in which ethical issues arise. Virtue philosophy focuses on flourishing and living a good life. Empirical evidence suggests that a sense of integrity is more fundamental to the well-being of ethical consumers than either a concern for consequences or rules (though both of these are evident).

In the third section we discuss the distinction between ethical consumption and the ethics of consumption. The former tends to see consumption as a means to express one’s moral commitments and the latter tends to be critical of the whole panoply of modern consumerism. We also look at work which has focused on the extent to which all consumers unconsciously consider moral issues in purchasing decisions.

In the conclusion we argue that the future lies in facilitating more widespread public participation in debates about the meaning and purpose of ethical consumption itself.

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RULES, CONSEQUENCES AND THE ETHICS OF CONSUMPTION

Moral philosophy often divides ethical theories into two sorts: theories that privilege the right, and theories that privilege the good. Definitions of the good refer to the properties or outcomes that our actions should endeavour to bring about; definitions of the right refer to what people and organisations ought to do in responding to ethical imperatives. Theories of the good therefore focus upon which outcomes to promote, whereas theories of the right focus upon which principles to honour, or on questions of duty (Pettit, 1991: 237). Discussions of moral philosophy inevitably distinguish between these two broad positions, if only for heuristic purposes.

Calculating consequences

Theories which privilege questions of the good are often referred to as consequentialist – they are concerned with defining ethical conduct by reference to the consequences or outcomes of actions. These approaches are also sometimes called teleological, because they start by specifying an end (or ‘telos’) independent of moral obligations. They then define the right thing to do as acting to maximise the good. For example, utilitarianism advocates practices that maximise the overall sum of happiness.

Peter Singer is an important contemporary philosopher who has employed consequentialist arguments. He is well known for his advocacy of animal welfare and is opposed to the other main approach to moral philosophy – deontology – because he thinks it narrowly defines ethics in terms of a system of rules. He argues that consequentialist approaches are more practical and realistic, insofar as starting with goals means that judgements of actions will always depend on contextual factors. Singer’s animal welfare advocacy leads him to condemn most consumer uses of animals, including meat-eating and wearing fur or leather. He advocates an environmental ethics which holds that we should, as far as possible, act to avoid unnecessary harm to the environment and sentient creatures (Singer, 1997: 284–8). In a recent book, he argues that wealthy westerners should forego frivolous consumption that adds little to our lives, and devote the resources saved to helping the world’s poor (2002: 180–95). For Singer, all this implies that we should adopt an ethic of frugality and simplicity. High levels of consumption are a major problem in modern societies, an unjustified ‘using up the world’ (Singer, 1997: 45–64), and a foolish misallocation of resources. Consumption, from this perspective, is associated with the conspicuous and extravagant display of social position (Singer, 1997: 238–9).

Singer’s arguments are more complex than this brief summary suggests, but they provide one influential template for understanding the relationship between ethics and consumption. In particular, his argument that there is no good reason to restrict the scope of concern to our nearest and dearest, or indeed only to other people, seems highly appropriate to the field of ethical consumption, in which the fact of being one link in a much wider chain of relationships with strangers in distant locations is often made the basis of appeals to alter one’s consumer behaviour in order to bring about more ethical outcomes.

Ethical consumption campaigns and policies often rely on consequentialist assumptions and appeals. They tend to assume that ethical decision making works through the rational calculation of ethical obligations, for which the provision of knowledge, advice and information is an essential prerequisite. Existing research on consumption therefore often depends on relatively narrow conceptualisations of ethical decision making by consumers, companies and public organisations. In particular, ethical consumption is understood in both theory and practice to depend on access to information. This leaves aside the questions of how the goals considered worthy of pursuit through consumption are decided upon, and by whom. It also seems to imply that there is a single measure of what ‘the good’ is, and of what ‘acting ethically’ should entail, and that the main challenge is to get consumers to adopt the appropriate forms of conduct and behaviour.

Obeying universal rules

In contrast to consequentialist approaches, deontological or duty-based approaches define right action as independent of its contribution to human happiness or other favoured goals. Deontological moral theories have gone through a revival since the publication of John Rawls’s (1972) A Theory of Justice. Rawls explicitly set about developing an alternative approach to utilitarian theories of ethics and justice. He argued that teleological theories implied that it is justifiable to exploit some people, or limit their rights, in pursuit of a more general utilitarian benefit. Utilitarian theories did not ‘take seriously the distinction between persons’, tending to assume that collective choices by whole societies were analogous to individual choices. They therefore ignored what Rawls takes to be an inevitable plurality of views regarding what constitutes the good. The plurality of values led him to defend the priority of the right over the good, as a means of ensuring that definitions of the collective good do not come at the cost of basic individual liberties. Rawls’s work is important because it highlights the tension between the plurality of personal values and ethical positions on the one hand, and the degree of unity required to pursue collective outcomes and decisions on the other.

Ethical consumption discourses also contain elements of deontological understandings of moral obligation. They often invoke highly universalised arguments about people’s responsibilities to care for others – whether this is other people, other creatures, the environment, or future generations, as in the Precautionary Principle. Ethicists who have written about the ethics of global warming, for example, tend to argue along the following lines: 1) current energy consumption patterns are warming the earth, with unknown but potentially disastrous consequences for human life support systems; 2) current humans have a duty to future generations to pass on fully functioning life support systems therefore; 3) current humans have a duty to significantly scale back our energy consumption (Brown, 2002).

The limitations of universal prescriptions

Both consequentialist and deontological approaches are open to two related criticisms that are relevant to ethical consumption. First, both present models of ethical conduct that appear to be far too stringent in the demands they make on the capacities of ordinary people – consequentialist arguments seem to imagine it is possible to collect, collate and calculate all sorts of information and chains of causality prior to, or even after, action. While utilitarian considerations might be relevant in relation to evaluating collective public decisions, they seem rather unrealistic as complete models of personal choice. Similarly, deontological approaches seem to present an implausible picture of actors rationally judging the degree to which each of their actions conforms to a very abstract principle of universalisation. This criticism – of over stringent or unworkable models of ethical conduct – is related to a second problem with both consequentialist and deontological approaches. They end up presenting models of ethical conduct that are rather inflexible, leaving little room for the complexities and ambivalences of ethical decision making. They therefore present a highly abstracted model of the ways in which people are implicated and involved in their actions.

To illustrate the relevance of these concerns to how we approach ethical consumption, consider a couple of examples. First, there is the case of sustainable consumption initiatives which have become increasingly important in the wake of international programmes such as Local Agenda 21. As Hobson (2002, 2003) observes, the assumption of many of these initiatives is that the exposure of the public to scientific knowledge will trigger changes in consumer behaviour. However, this assumption takes no account of the myriad ways in which consumer goods play important symbolic roles in the ordinary lives of people. As Jackson (2001) observes, material products do more than simply provide basic needs – they also serve to facilitate interpersonal interactions, senses of personal identity and worth, or as means of creativity. To use the vocabulary developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, the value of material consumer goods needs to be understood in terms of the ‘functionings’ and ‘capabilities’ they enable people to develop. Jackson’s argument is that this tendency for sustainable consumption policies to ignore social aspects of consumption accounts for the difficulty of altering consumer behaviour. Simplistic appeals to reduce or forego consumption are ‘tantamount to demanding that we give up certain key capabilities and freedoms as social beings’ (Jackson, 2001: 9). The implication of this argument is that ethical consumption cannot depend solely on either consequentialist or deontological approaches, because these fail to register the motivations behind a great deal of consumer behaviour. What may be required, then, is an approach that is more sensitive to the experiential horizons of ordinary consumers, and in particular to the ways in which certain sorts of ethical conduct are already embedded in everyday consumption practice.

A second example of the limitations of abstract models of moral responsibility is the recent emergence of concerted anti-sweatshop campaigns in the USA, especially on university campuses. It is common to think of boycott campaigns in terms of bringing into view the connections between the consumption of particular products, such as Nike sportswear for example, and the perceived oppressive or exploitative working conditions in which these are made. It would be easy to think of these sorts of campaigns in consequentialist terms. They aim at changing individual or collective conduct by providing knowledge of spatially distant contexts and empowering individuals to accept their responsibilities. Consequentialist responsibility is understood to depend on a clear calculation of the relations between our voluntary actions and their consequences. However, the idea that ethical consumption can work simply by bringing to view the chain of consequences and connections between consumers and producers is highly simplistic. As Iris Young (2003) has argued, this notion of responsibility tends to elide important distinctions between being causally responsible for events, being a beneficiary, and being in a position to actually change outcomes. This model of responsibility ends up being overwhelming as well as highly unfair in its ascription of obligations to change things.

Young argues that anti-sweatshop campaigns are, in fact, important because they have developed a non-individualised political sense of responsibility that departs from a wholly individualistic understanding of causality, agency and blame. The success of anti-sweatshop movements depends, she suggests, on campaigners and activists being able to provide frames in which consumers can acknowledge responsibility for distant contexts without being overwhelmed.

Young also argues that people are likely to be moved to change their consumption behaviour by all sorts of different considerations. This is also the implication of empirical research on consumption boycotts which suggests that these are not forms of collective action, but that boycotters are motivated by personal factors such as the emotional expression of individuality, so that boycotting serves as a vehicle for moral self-realisation (Kozinets and Handleman, 1998). This is important because it suggests that ethical consumption is not simply a matter of wholly selfless beneficence, but that successful campaigns will combine appeals to both other-regarding and self-regarding virtues.

One problem, then, with a narrowly consequentialist understanding of moral reasoning is that by implying that we should act in a manner wholly oriented to collective outcomes, it ignores what acting morally actually means to people. As Derek Parfit points out (1984: 27), if we all acted as pure do-gooders, it might actually make things worse rather than better. This is because being a pure do-gooder would involve so much self-sacrifice that it would decrease the overall sum of happiness. Parfit’s point is that being wholly selfless would involve acting against many of the motives that we act upon when we love, care, show concern, and so on. The implication of this argument is that changing people’s consumption practices is probably not best pursued by simply appealing to people’s sense of self-sacrifice or altruism, or by supposing that it requires a wholesale abandonment of self-interested concerns.

We saw above that one advantage of consequentialism is that it is contextually sensitive, so that it does not hold that the value of a particular course of action is determined in advance by a set of rules. However, if this is one charge made against deontological approaches, the counter-argument is that consequentialism can, in principle, lead to indifference to the righteousness of actions – to a privileging of ends over means (Parfit, 1984). We might ask whether it matters if ethical consumption campaigns realise their aims and objectives by actively altering people’s sense of what is the best thing to do, or simply by more anonymous changes to consumption patterns. Is ethical consumption simply about aggregate outcomes – reduced pollution, less exploitative work conditions, etc. – or is it also about actually changing the sense of self held by ordinary people? Many advocates of ethical consumption see the adoption of a more conscious approach to consumption as an important objective of their overall strategy.

If neither pure consequentialist nor pure deontological approaches capture the complexity of moral action, perhaps it might be better not to abandon these approaches, but to recast them in less all-or-nothing ways. Amartya Sen distinguishes between consequentialism and consequentialist reasoning. He suggests that consequentialism demands ‘that the rightness of actions be judged entirely by the goodness of consequences, and this is a demand not merely of taking consequences into account, but of ignoring everything else’ (Sen, 1987: 75). However, he suggests that it is possible to develop what he calls ‘consequence-sensitive deontological’ arguments (1987: 76). This requires acknowledging that rights – the primary concern of deontologists – have both an instrumental and an intrinsic value. This means that deontology is itself not immune to consequentialist considerations: rights are not only valuable intrinsically, but also because of the goals they enable people to pursue. What all of this suggests is that it is more appropriate to think of any ethical theory as combining an understanding of the good with an understanding of the right in a distinctive way (Pettit, 1991: 230).

Products made using child labour

To illustrate some of the arguments made above about the complexity of ethical action, let us consider how consequentialism and deontology might be applied to the example of products made by child labour. First, the deontologist might refuse to buy products made using child labour on principle, arguing that this violates a fundamental moral rule against the exploitation of children. After all, she would not wish her own children to labour, less still in exploitative conditions, and must universalise this rule. However, the dilemma arises when one is faced with the argument that the fate of children is worsened by her action – an important source of family income might be reduced (see Meiklejohn, 1998). In contrast, and on these grounds, the utilitarian might buy products made using child labour, since not to do so would cause more harm than good. She might also have a reasonable, but not certain, expectation that in the long term trade conditions would improve. However, this consumer is still faced with the question of when should she withdraw support for iniquitous producer practices?

Forms of consequentialist reasoning can therefore help us to consider our external environment and our effect on the happiness of others. However, we cannot ignore our own moral beliefs in considering these sorts of issues (Norman, 1998). It is not a case of choosing between the happiness of the many and our own egoistic morals. Our own unhappiness as ethical consumers is not simply to be weighed in the generality of happiness. That we are concerned at all is because we are moral agents. Any capacity for moral agency is indivisible from the sense of personal integrity upon which it is partly based in the first place. We cannot entirely derive our notion of what is the ethical thing to do from an external consideration of effe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Theorising Ethical Consumption
• Part Two Campaigners and Consumers
• Part Three Understanding Ethical Consumers
• Part Four Responding to Ethical Consumers
• References
• Index