Abstract
Hussain claims that ethical consumers are subject to democratic requirements of morality, whereas ordinary price/quality consumers are exempt from these requirements. In this paper, we demonstrate that Hussain’s position is incoherent, does not follow from the arguments he offers for it, and entails a number of counterintuitive consequences.
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Notes
All page numbers refer to Hussain (2012).
‘Certain laws, policies, and patterns of behavior may be attractive in themselves, but the processes through which these develop in society may be morally objectionable because they are inconsistent with procedural values. For example, if a wealthy person bribes political officials to get them to increase healthcare spending for low-income people, the new policy may be a substantive improvement, but the process of social change would be objectionable because it is not adequately inclusive, transparent, or public’ (p. 115).
It is important to note here that Hussain restricts his argument to ethical consumerism that can be characterised as SCEC. Indeed, SCEC is the key category of Hussain’s argument; he makes it explicit that his reasons aim at this form of ethical consumerism alone. Other forms of ethical consumerism, e.g. clean hands ethical consumerism, expressive ethical consumerism, and unmediated ethical consumerism, are not within the scope of Hussain’s argument (p. 113).
By saying that practice ‘x is subject to democratic requirements’, we of course mean to say that the agent who engages in practice x is subject to democratic requirements. We choose the shorter formulation in order to avoid using a cumbersome formulation.
This is not to say, of course, that motives are generally under our direct voluntary control. But we do not believe that this matters for our objection here. Whatever prompts a change in motive, it cannot count as pivotal for whether or not democratic requirements apply to a consumer.
This, of course, would raise another worry. If we are to focus on the actual effects of one’s consumption, then one does seem to be in the position to know whether the democratic requirements apply at the moment of consumption. Whether an act of consumption will yield social change often will not be clear until a later point in time. So, Hussain would need to adjust his view and make the application of democratic requirements conditional on what is foreseeable or reasonable to expect ex ante. We thank the editors of this journal for considering this point.
We thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this interpretation.
This line of reasoning appears to be consistent with Hussain’s position that ‘[c]ertain laws, policies, and patterns of behavior may be attractive in themselves, but the processes through which these develop in society may be morally objectionable because they are inconsistent with procedural values’. In this sense, Hussain’s democratic requirements can be understood as Nozickian ‘side constraints’, i.e. moral restrictions that stem from rights and legitimate concerns that ought not to be overstepped in the pursuit of the greater social good (Nozick 1988).
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Fink, J., Schubert, D. The Morality of Price/Quality and Ethical Consumerism. Res Publica 25, 425–438 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-018-9402-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-018-9402-9