Ethical consumerism


Ethical consumerism, also known as ethical consumption, ethical purchasing, moral purchasing, ethical sourcing, or ethical shopping, and also associated with sustainable and green consumerism) is a type of consumer activism based on the concept of dollar voting. People engage in ethical consumerism by purchasing ethically made products that support small-scale manufacturers or local artisans and protect animals and the environment. Conversely, they boycott products that exploit children as workers, are tested on animals, or damage the environment.
The term "ethical consumer", now used generically, was first popularised by the UK magazine Ethical Consumer, first published in 1989. Ethical Consumer magazine's key innovation was to produce "ratings tables", inspired by the criteria-based approach of the then-emerging ethical investment movement. Ethical Consumers ratings tables awarded companies negative marks across a range of ethical and environmental categories such as "animal rights", "human rights", and "pollution and toxics", empowering consumers to make ethically informed consumption choices and providing campaigners with reliable information on corporate behaviour. Such criteria-based ethical and environmental ratings have subsequently become commonplace both in providing consumer information and in business-to-business corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings such as those provided by Innovest, Calvert Foundation, Domini, IRRC, TIAA–CREF, and KLD Analytics. Today, Bloomberg and Reuters provide "environmental, social, and governance" ratings directly to the financial data screens of hundreds of thousands of stock market traders. The nonprofit Ethical Consumer Research Association continues to publish Ethical Consumer and its associated website, which provides free access to ethical rating tables.
Although single-source ethical consumerism guides such as Ethical Consumer, Shop Ethical, and the Good Shopping Guide are popular, they suffer from incomplete coverage. User-generated ethical reviews are more likely, long-term, to provide democratic, in-depth coverage of a wider range of products and businesses. The Green Stars Project promotes the idea of including ethical ratings alongside conventional ratings on retail sites such as Amazon or review sites such as Yelp.
The term "political consumerism", first used in a study titled "The Gender Gap Reversed: Political Consumerism as a Women-Friendly Form of Civic and Political Engagement" from authors Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti, is identical to the idea of ethical consumerism. However, in this study, the authors found that political consumerism as a form of social participation often went overlooked at the time of writing and needed to be accounted for in future studies of social participation. However, in "From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consumption", author Nick Clarke argues that political consumerism allows for marginalized groups, such as women, to participate in political advocacy in non-bureaucratic ways that draw attention to governmental weaknesses. Political consumerism has also been criticised on the basis that "it cannot work", or that it displays class bias. The widespread development of political consumerism is hampered by substantial mundane consumption, which does not afford reflective choice, along with complexities of everyday life, which demand negotiations between conflicting moral and ethical considerations.

The consumer groups

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people in industrialized countries began formal consumer movements to ensure that they would get value for their money in terms of the things they purchased. These movements focused on the unfair labor practices of the companies, and on labelling requirements of food, cosmetics, drugs, etc. Examples of the consumer movements were the Consumer League which was established in New York, US in 1891, National Consumers League created in US in 1898, and Consumers Council which was established during World War I in Great Britain. During this time workers were neither well-paid nor did they have secure employment with benefit of social protection; similarly, working conditions were decent and the Irish Trade Union movement focused the International Labour Organization policy of campaigning for decent work wherever there was an opportunity for job improvement or job creation.

Basis

Global morality

In Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market As An Ethical System, John McMurtry argues that all purchasing decisions imply some moral choice, and that there is no purchasing that is not ultimately moral in nature. This mirrors older arguments, especially by the Anabaptists, that one must accept all personal moral and spiritual liability for all harms done at any distance in space or time to anyone by one's own choices. Some interpretations of the book of Genesis from the Judeo-Christian scriptures appears to direct followers towards practising good stewardship of the Earth, under an obligation to a God who is believed to have created the planet for people to share with other creatures. A similar argument presented from a secular humanist point of view is that it is simply better for human beings to acknowledge that the planet supports life only because of a delicate balance of many different factors.

Spending as morality

Some 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 affect the moral rather than the functional 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 shift away from commodity markets towards a service economy where all activities, from growing to harvesting to processing to delivery, are considered part of the value chain for which consumers are "responsible".
Andrew Wilson, Director of the UK's Ashridge Centre for Business and Society, argues 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: if we say we care about something but continue to buy in a way that has a high probability of risk of harm or destruction to that thing, we don't really care about it; we are practising a form of simple hypocrisy. Ethical consumerism is widely explained by psychologists using the theory of planned behavior, which attributes a consumer's choices to their perceived sense of control, social norms, and evaluation of the consequences. However, recent research suggests that a consumer's ethical obligation, self-identity, and virtues may also influence their buying decisions.
In an effort by churches to advocate moral and ethical consumerism, many have become involved in the Fair Trade movement:
A number of standards, labels and marks have been introduced for ethical consumers, such as:
Along with disclosure of ingredients, some mandatory labelling of the origins of clothing or food is required in all developed nations. This practice has been extended in some developing nations so that, for example, every item carries the name, phone number and fax number of the factory where it was made so a buyer can inspect its conditions. This can also be used to show that the item was not made by child labour or "prison labor", the 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.
Some companies in the United States, though currently not required to reduce their carbon footprint, are doing so voluntarily by changing their energy use practices, as well as by directly funding, businesses that are already sustainable—or that are developing or improving green technologies for the future.
In 2009, Atlanta's Virginia-Highland neighborhood became the first Carbon-Neutral Zone in the United States. Seventeen merchants in Virginia-Highland allowed their carbon footprint to be audited. Now, they are partnered with the Valley Wood Carbon Sequestration Project—thousands of acres of forest in rural Georgia—through the Chicago Climate Exchange. The businesses involved in the partnership display the Verus Carbon Neutral seal in each store front and posted a sign prominently declaring the area's Carbon Neutral status.
Some theorists suggest the amount of social capital or trust invested in nation-states will continue to decrease, and that placed in corporations 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. However, the economic school of Public Choice Theory pioneered by James M. Buchanan has offered counter-arguments based on an economic demonstration of this theory of "amoral markets", which lack ethics or morals, versus "moral governments", which are tied to ideas of justice.