Business of Boycotting

Synonyms

Blackball; Exclude; Ostracize; Sanction; Shun

Introduction

Although a frequently employed practice, little has been written on the ethics of boycotting. One article, The Business of Boycotting: Having Your Chicken and Eating It Too, by Alan Tomhave and Mark Vopat, explicitly addresses the issue (Tomhave and Vopat 2018). In their article, Tomhave and Vopat argue for the moral impermissibility of some, but by no means all, boycotts. In large part, Tomhave and Vopat are responding to the view of boycotts expressed by those like Murray Rothbard that boycotts are always per se morally acceptable, because they do not involve coercive force (Rothbard 1998). Unlike Rothbard, Tomhave and Vopat hold that the question of whether boycotts are coercive is not a settled issue. They claim that there are two initial questions that need to be answered, “First, are boycotts coercive? … Second, are there instances of boycotting that would fall into an unjust use of coercion” (Tomhave and Vopat 2018...