Ethical Traceability and Ethical Room for Manoeuvre

Food production in Europe is in crisis because of ethical consumer concerns and the continuing emergence of safety and health issues, which have resulted in a steady decline of trust in the sector on the part of governments and consumers. Several alternatives to current production methods are proposed, such as more stringent government control (e.g. Dutch policy from 1982–1998) or better co-operation between farmers and technologists (e.g. Dutch policy from 1998–2006). Most of these alternatives have until now had only mixed success, largely due to not very well explicated ethical assumptions and to social barriers, as is well documented by Pretty (2002). Firstly, the ethical assumptions of these alternatives focussed mostly on one or two values, although farming is a mosaic of values. Secondly, they assumed a stable and non-dynamic view of these values. Thirdly, the social barriers that confront directly involved stakeholders (producers, consumers) prohibit them from formulating value dilemmas and proposing new ethical-technological solutions that are alternatives to existing ones. Another barrier is that a certain moral position with respect, for example, to animal welfare could immediately lead to policy measures that were stricter but were not flexible, and could in the long run hamper new ethical solutions. Consumers also mention barriers such as availability and the lack of trustworthy information.

In this chapter I want to show how and why consumer concerns about food production can and should be incorporated into decision-making in food chains by organizing ethical discussions of conflicting values that include consumers as participants. This is valuable because, in the first place, there are several types of consumer concerns with respect to food and agriculture, which are multi-interpretable and often contradict each other, or at least are difficult to reconcile without considerable loss, as I will show later on; many consumer concerns are inherently dynamic as they change over time. Moreover, there are different types of consumers, and their choices between conflicting values differ accordingly. Different weighing models and various types of information are used for making choices. Both these features of consumer concerns make it worthwhile to organize the fundamental decisions made in the serial links of food chains in accordance with consumer concerns.