Brian Berkey (University of Pennsylvania), "Ethical Consumerism, Democratic Values, and Justice"

Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2021

By Brian Berkey

Consumer boycotts are often collective efforts to bring about changes in corporate policies or practices via the exercise of some combination of market power and social pressure (often aided by media coverage). Many people likely think that there’s nothing particularly morally troubling about these efforts, since they involve some combination of choices that we typically think we’re entitled to make. Specifically, they involve choosing not to purchase certain products, and publicly expressing the moral and political views that motivate that choice. Since we generally think that both of these things are, independently, morally acceptable, it might seem that their combination must be acceptable too.

The ethics of consumer boycotts is, however, more complex than this initial characterization might suggest. Waheed Hussain, for example, argued that boycotts that aim at social change must meet a rather stringent set of conditions in order to be compatible with a proper commitment to democratic values and procedures. When they are not, they amount, he says, to an impermissible form of vigilantism.

In this paper, I argue that Hussain’s view about the range of permissible consumer boycotts is overly narrow, and defend an alternative set of conditions. One of the central claims that I make is that efforts to bring about social change can be consistent with proper respect for democratic values even if they do not aim to achieve the changes that they seek via formal democratic mechanisms, such as legislation. This has important implications not only for our thinking about when consumer boycotts are permissible, but also for our thinking about what a commitment to democracy is fundamentally about.

I discuss these and related issues here as well, as part of a panel on boycotts and free speech with legal scholars Amanda Shanor and Genevieve Lakier: