Ethical consumerism
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Ethical consumerism is buying things that are made ethically. Generally, this means without harm to or exploitation of humans, animals or the natural environment. This can take on the following forms:
- Positive buying — favoring ethical products, and businesses that operate on principles based primarily on benefit for the greater good rather than self-interest, allowing for business self-interest only for the perpetuation of doing general good outside of self.
- Moral boycott — negative purchasing and company-based purchasing
- Combination of above [1]
Contents |
[edit] Assumptions
Alternative terms are ethical purchasing, moral purchasing, ethical sourcing or ethical shopping. Users of all these terms make three common assumptions:
- The comprehensive outcome of a purchase, that is, its effect on every living thing from its point of extraction to its eventual point of disposal (see product stewardship), is of interest to the consumer, not just the culminative outcome. (terminology from Paul Hawken)
- The individual or institutional buying criteria for purchases can be well enough defined that a combination of standard labels, product- and service-specific information, and self-advertised ethical choices, makes it easy to match buyers and sellers. That is, a term like fair trade can actually have an objective meaning at least if people and their institutions have defined fairness well enough in some area.
- The collective choice will not simply deprive consumers of particular choices or make them cost less for less ethical people, but will actually alter the market composition so that the choices offered become generally better (from this ethical view) over time.
All three assumptions have been subject to challenge. For instance, advocates of full cost accounting similarly assume that comprehensive outcomes can be calculated and measured well enough to actually charge for harms and damage done by the entire process of creation, delivery and disposal of the product or service, but this is problematic in practice, and subject to many diverse political assumptions about responsibility for the process or governance of it. Even when objective information is available and there are well-defined standards from global efforts like "ecolabels", these are often criticized for applying environmental standards from developed nations to poor nations that are doing exactly what developed nations in their process of development. And finally, the evidence that corporations will seek to regain the consumers lost is mixed. Some corporations seem simply to abandon the market of more critical consumers and let their practices become even more abhorrent as they pursue investors, consumers and employees who simply don't care about the criteria the lost consumers cared about.
[edit] Basis
[edit] Global morality?
In "The Global Markets As An Ethical System", John McMurtry argues that there is no purchasing decision that does not itself imply some moral choice, and that there is in fact no purchasing that is not ultimately moral in nature. This mirrors older arguments, especially by the Anabaptists, e.g. Mennonites, Amish, that one must accept all personal moral and spiritual liability of all harms done at any distance in space or time to anyone by one's own choices. Judeo/Christian scriptures further direct good stewardship of the Earth God has created and given man charge over. Accordingly, sustainability is required and purchasing for vanity or status is abhorred and shunned. This theory is echoed in some modern eco-villages who adopt very similar stances, effectively blocking all goods that do not satisfy their moral criteria at the village gate, and relying on internally produced food and tools as much as possible.
[edit] Spending as morality
Certain trust criteria, e.g. creditworthiness or implied warranty, are considered to be part of any purchasing or sourcing decision. However, these terms refer to broader systems of guidance that would, ideally, cause any purchasing decision to disqualify offered products or services based on non-price criteria that do not affect the functional, but rather moral, liabilities of the entire production process. Paul Hawken, a proponent of Natural Capitalism, refers to "comprehensive outcomes" of production services as opposed to the "culminative outcomes" of using the product of such services. Often, moral criteria are part of a much broader shift away from commodity markets towards a deeper service economy where all activities, from growing to harvesting to processing to delivery, are considered part of the value chain and for which consumers are "responsible".
Some argue that "Shopping is more important than voting", and that the disposition of money is the most basic role we play in any system of economics. Some theorists believe that it is the clearest way that we express our actual moral choices, i.e., if we say we care about something but continue to buy from parties that have a high probability of risk of harm or destruction of that thing, we don't really care about it, we are practicing a form of simple hypocrisy.
[edit] Criticism
Critics often argue that the ability to effect structural change is limited in ethical consumerism. They cite the preponderance of niche markets as the actual effects of ethical consumerism. Critics also argue that ethical consumerism is fundamentally anti-democratic. In their view, the act of buying is considered as a vote, and the number of votes does not equal one per individual. Instead the more money an individual (corporation, government, university etc.) has the more votes they have in the market place. The distribution of wealth therefore leads to an unfair distribution of votes. Critics also argue that the continued reliance on inherently anti-democratic methods leads to societies that no longer understand or desire engaged citizenry. This viewpoint suggests, though, that for a democratic system to be fair, that vote distribution must equal for all viewpoints, or that a small group having few votes is irrelevant, means nothing and/or can have no influence.
[edit] Positive buying
Positive buying means favoring ethical products, be they fair trade, cruelty free, organic, recycled, re-used, or produced locally. This option is arguably the most important since it directly supports progressive companies.
[edit] Standards and labels
A number of standards and labels have been introduced to induce positive buying, such as:
- Fairtrade
- Social Accountability 8000 - a universal standard for ethical sourcing, sometimes unofficially called "sweatshop-free"
- Sweatshop Free Clothing
- organic food
- Organic Trade Association
- Co-op America
- shade-grown coffee
- kosher (religious standard)
- halaal (religious standard)
- vegan
- free-range poultry
- grass fed beef
- union-made
- dolphin safe fish
- recycled
- FSC-certified ("environmentally friendly") wood
- Product Red
Along with disclosure of ingredients, some mandatory labelling of origins of clothing or food is required in all developed nations. This practice has been extended in some developing nations, e.g., in China where every item of clothing carries the name, phone number and fax number of the factory where it was made so a buyer can inspect its conditions. And, more importantly, to prove that the item was not made by "prison labor", use of which to produce export goods is banned in most developed nations. Such labels have also been used for boycotts, as when the merchandise mark Made in Germany was introduced in 1887.
These labels serve as tokens of some reliable validation process, some instructional capital, much as does a brand name or a nation's flag. They also signal some social capital, or trust, in some community of auditors that must follow those instructions to validate those labels. Theoretically, any such label could be false, and any such auditor or inspector could be bribed or misled. One inhibitor to wider use of more standard labels is low trust and inability to validate truly global standards for what such labels might mean.
Over time, some theorists suggest, the amount of social capital or trust invested in nation-states (or "flags") will continue to decrease, and that placed in corporations (or "brands") will increase. This can only be offset by retrenched national sovereignty to reinforce shared national standards in tax, trade, and tariff laws, and by placing the trust in civil society in such "moral labels". These arguments have been a major focus of the anti-globalization movement, which includes many broader arguments against the amoral nature of markets as such. However, the economic school of Public Choice Theory pioneered by James M. Buchanan has offered counter-arguments based on economic demonstration to this theory of 'amoral markets' versus 'moral governments'.
[edit] Boycott
Moral boycott is the practice of avoiding or boycotting products which a consumer believes to be associated with unethical behavior.
An individual can choose to boycott a product. Alternatively, the decision may be the application of criteria reflective of a morality (or, in the terminology of ethics, a theory of value) to an individual, family, union, or other group's (corporation, university, government) purchasing decisions.
[edit] Products
Reasons for products boycotts include
[edit] Corporations
Examples include corporations that
- are perceived to espouse unethical behavior by one of its subsidiaries
- investing a portion of their profits in for example the arms industry
Such boycotts can cause great damage to reputations, not to mention loss of profits, and has, in part, led to the development of the concept of corporate social responsibility.
[edit] Countries
Examples:
- Made in Germany
- Consumer boycotts of South Africa over apartheid. These boycotts were mirrored in state policy over time, and contributed to the fall of the white regime.
[edit] Collective moral choices in government
Many people would disagree with the view that purchasing should be motivated on personal moral criteria rather than utilitarian grounds. The view argues that a citizen's proper expression of moral choice is via voting for parties and candidates in government. Accordingly, in democratic countries, most people consider themselves to some degree responsible for the decisions governments make about what to buy on the people's behalf, e.g., pacifist nations such as Costa Rica refuse to buy military weapons or equip armies suitable even for self-defense, and some, e.g., New Zealand, refuse to allow nuclear ships or weapons into their ports.
Furthermore, governments handle various kinds of drugs in very different ways, e.g. buying out a coca or poppy supply for use in medically approved channels, forbidding trade in marijuana and interdicting its movements, all of which involve some degree of purchasing of arms or violent force. By seeking to restrict citizens' spending on drugs, they seek both to prevent the use of these drugs and to keep money from the hands of those whose morals they dislike, e.g., armed "terrorist" groups selling drugs to raise funds to buy arms.[citation needed]
An argument is that governments buy things that the public claims they do not want, but actually do, and so act as collective systems of hypocrisy. Critics of this view argue that the political process, or parties within it, add the hypocrisy for their own benefit, and ignore public will and morality. For example, a comparison of Marijuana and Cocaine: since Marijuana can be grown virtually anywhere many marijuana smokers grow their own supply, eliminating the entire supply chain. By contrast the bulk of the world's supply of cocaine is produced and transported by a relatively small number of cartels, many of which are involved in civil wars and use the profits from cocaine to fund those wars. Despite this fact many governments treat both drugs equally within the law.
[edit] Budgeting
Governments' budget decisions impact domestic economies in other ways, e.g., by spending more on education, or less on weapons. A particularly key issue is how much government spends on policing and armies.
Usually, this is restricted to governments "purchasing" the services of its own citizens, who share some moral code with fellow citizens, and who believe ideologically in what they are doing. It becomes unclear how the politicians' or government's criteria, the people's criteria, and the actual law enforcement or military officer's criteria, interact. These issues are one focus of political economy which establishes what is deemed to be a valid trade good, how its movements are encouraged, discouraged, standardized or otherwise dealt with. The application of United Nations sanctions against nation-states is an increasingly common way for nations to standardize the way they encourage or discourage each other's trade, e.g., preventing nations from purchasing weapons of mass destruction, as in the case of Iraq. See also UN Global Compact.
[edit] Research
GfK NOP, the market research group, has made a five-country study of consumer beliefs about the ethics of large companies. The report is described in a Financial Times article published on the 20th February 2007. [2] [3] The countries surveyed were Germany, The USA, Britain, France and Spain. More than half of respondents in Germany and the US believed there is a serious deterioration in standards of corporate practice. Almost half of those surveyed in Britain, France and Spain held similar beliefs.
About a third of respondents told researchers they would pay higher prices for ethical brands though perception of various companies ethical or unethical status varied considerably from country to country.
The most ethically perceived brands were: The Co-op (in the UK), Coca Cola (in the US), Danone (in France), Adidas (in Germany) and Nestlé (in Spain). Coca Cola, Danone, Adidas and Nestlé did not appear anywhere in the UK's list of 15 most ethical companies. Nike appeared in the lists of the other four countries but not in the UK's list.
[edit] Related concepts
[edit] Conscious Consuming
Conscious Consuming is a social movement that based around increased awareness of the impact of purchasing decisions on the environment and the consumers health and life in general. It is also concerned with the effects of media and advertising on consumers. Many aspects of Conscious Consuming have been practiced throughout the world but not in a cohesive form.
As a result of organizations such as Adbusters and the Center for a New American Dream, the Conscious Consuming movement began in Boston in the summer of 2003 when a group of people gathered together and planned an alternative gift fair, "Gift It Up!" In the fall of 2004, another group of Bostonians formed a group named "Conscious Consuming"and began meeting to discuss a broad range of topics, from the environmental impact of consumption to the effect of media and advertising. The memberships quickly overlapped and in 2005, the groups merged into Conscious Consuming.
Conscious consuming has its roots in voluntary simplicity, in which people re-evaluate their work/life balance in order to spend more of their time and money on the things that matter to them. As people work less, there is more time for connecting with family and friends, volunteerism, hobbies, and community service. A natural off-shoot of working less is spending less. Instead of spending time and money shopping, people engaging in voluntary simplicity buy less. They get goods using web sites like craigslist, trade with friends, make do with what they have, or hit yard sales. When they do purchase something new, the decision to buy is made consciously. A would-be shopper asks, "Is this item made in line with my values? Am I supporting the local economy? Are the people who produce this item treated and compensated fairly? Is this item built to last?" As a result of these questions, conscious consumers find themselves supporting organic agriculture, fair-trade and sweat-shop free products, and local and independent businesses. A great resource for such goods is Co-op America.
[edit] Consumarchy
The boader regulation system within which corporate behaviour is in part subordinated to consumer demand functions obeying both logics of individualism and solidarity is referred to as Consumarchy. It lends itself to economic, political and philosophical analyses. The political branch of consumarchy is also known as political consumerism.
[edit] Alternative Gifts
In response to an increasing demand for ethical consumerism surrounding gift giving occasions, British charities have developed an alternative gift market, which has become very popular since 2004. These gifts are bought for friends and family, and are represented in the form of a card explaining the selected gift, the most common gift is a goat which is then sent to a family in a poor community to provide milk and manure and more goat kids. [4]
Oxfam’s gift catalogue (OxfamUnwrapped.com) is a successful example of fun and unusual gifts which provide a real alternative to commercialism. Having sold over 700,000 gifts from fishing nets, toilets, safe water, teacher training, condoms, goats and donkeys Oxfam have been able to raise millions of pounds to help end poverty and suffering around the world. Such purchases go directly to the people who need them the most, and are a tangible and accountable way of giving to charity. Other alternative gift catalogues include Christian Aid and World Vision.
The popularity of alternative gifts has led retailers to partner with charities to sell more ethical gifts such as 'adopt an animal'.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] Ethical Shopping in General
- The Consumers Union guide to environmental labels
- Ethiscore - ethical score for products
- Green Seal - certification for products and services
- Organic Trade Association - member organization promoting and certifying organic businesses
- "Conscious Consumer" - JC Report.com interview with Kathy Freston on conscious consumption
- Ethical Shopping - A blog covering recent news on ethical shopping
[edit] Company or brand information
[edit] Specific products
- conservatree.com - paper
- environmentaldefense.org - unwanted catalogs and direct mail
- Oxfam Unwrapped - Oxfam's Alternative Gift catalogue
- Shop with a Conscience, Support Workers' Rights - Sweatshop Free Clothing shopping guide endorsed by many nonprofits (civil society and faith based) and labor unions.
- wikiPPP:Product,People,Planet - A global wiki-labeling initiative.
[edit] Trade organizations and shops
- ConsciousShopper.com - Search engine for organic, natural, recycled content, fair-trade and eco-friendly products.
- Traidcraft
- Tearcraft
- EthicalSuperstore.com - online shop selling fair trade, organic and eco-friendly products
- Get Ethical - online shop selling what they call the "best ethical ... products"
- Sakaad - Fair trade craft from Kenya
- The Solar Centre - Eco friendly online shop
[edit] Activism
- Ask For Change: MeatMatters!
- What you can do
- interrupcion* - A community of organizations and individuals working together to promote socially responsible consumption and supply chains.
