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BOYCOTT ETHICS

CALEB PICKARD

B.S., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2011

A thesis submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of the

University of Colorado in partial fulfillment

of the requirement for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy

2019

This thesis entitled:

Boycott Ethics

written by Caleb Pickard

has been approved for the Department of Philosophy.

______

Dr. David Boonin (chair), Professor of Philosophy

______

Dr. Alastair Norcross, Professor of Philosophy

______

Dr. Michael Huemer, Professor of Philosophy

______

Dr. Chris Heathwood, Associate Professor of Philosophy

______

Dr. Benjamin Hale, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies

Date: November 6, 2019.

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.

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Pickard, Caleb (Ph.D., Philosophy)

Boycott Ethics

Dissertation directed by Professor David Boonin

Abstract [344 words]

Recent decades have seen an explosion in consumer activism: boycotts, buycotts, divestments, ethical consumption campaigns, and certification/labelling schemes. Understandably, this period has also marked growing philosophical interest in the ethical contours of consumer activism and of boycotting broadly construed. This dissertation addresses some key moral questions about these activities.

In Chapter 1, I offer an argument in defense of consumer permissions to make morally- motivated consumption decisions (i.e. to boycott, with their own purchases), grounded in the presumptive admissibility of acting on our moral reasons. I defend this argument from one prominent and far-reaching objection which claims that ethical consumption is often impermissible for being incompatible with liberal democratic values.

In Chapter 2, I defend our permissions to make morally motivated purchases from a host of other objections, which claim, e.g., that boycotts wrongfully harm innocents or are objectionably unfair to targets, harming them excessively, inconsistently, capriciously, or hypocritically. I reject these objections for overgeneralizing. Each fails to articulate a morally relevant difference between ethically motivated consumption and normal (i.e. not ethically motivated) consumption and implausibly implies that many untroubling consumer behaviors are in fact morally condemnable.

In Chapter 3, I consider what permissions we have to support and promote boycotts by means other than our own purchases. I argue that our permissions to make our own ethical purchases entail further permissions to support the ethical purchases of others. Making an argument

iv from epistemic humility, I also defend the view that these permissions to support boycotting are relatively restrictive and don’t vary with the apparent moral urgency of our causes.

Chapter 4 addresses a common skeptical worry about the existence of consumer obligations and moral reasons. Given that individual consumers often seem helpless to make a difference (i.e. are ineffective, lacking in control, and causally impotent), “ethical” consumption does not actually seem to promote the good. I argue that all but two of the proposed solutions to this problem fail.

The promising solutions either ground consumer reasons in what we can accomplish together, as collectives, or in the expected value or utility of our purchases.

Acknowledgements

Let me express my deepest gratitude to my adviser David Boonin for his support and immensely helpful (and bafflingly prompt) feedback on this dissertation and to my persistently helpful, patient, and supportive dissertation committee members: Ben Hale, Chris Heathwood, Mike

Huemer, Alastair Norcross – and, again, David Boonin.

I’d like to thank the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder for their generous Dissertation Fellowship funding in the Fall of 2018, which facilitated the completion of Chapters 1 and 2 of this project.

I also owe many and ineffable debts to my students, colleagues, friends, teachers, and philosophical mentors. I wouldn’t be able to list you all if I tried, but you are hereby acknowledged.

Thank you.

Finally and of course, my utmost thanks to my parents and partner. If I were any more indebted to you, you could each file a lien on my diploma.

Contents

Chapter 1: Permission to Shop Freely?……………..…………………………………………. 1

Introduction………………………...……………………………………………………... 1

What do I mean by ‘boycotting’? …………….…………………………………… 4

Two kinds of boycotting activities……………….………………………………... 7

An outline of the project…………………………………………………………... 9

A plausible argument and the Public Sphere Objection…………………………………... 10

Markets, shields, and spheres…………………………………………………….. 14

Necessary modifications to the Public Sphere Objection………………………… 17

Case-based objections to the Modified Public Sphere Objection………………………… 21

A full reply to the Modified Public Sphere Objection………………………………...…... 25

Chapter 2: Ethical Consumption is Business-as-Usual………………………………….….. 35

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………... 35

Two constraints………………………………………………………………….. 36

Two kinds of objections…………………………………………………………. 40

On Substantive Objections and why we can ignore them……………………………….... 42

Procedural Objections…………………………………………………………………… 47

Does boycotting wrongfully harm innocents? …………………………………… 47

Is boycotting unfair? …………………………………………………………….. 53

Bias Objection #1: Individual inconsistency……………………………... 55

Bias Objection #2: Group capriciousness………………………………... 58

Bias Objection #3: Hypocrisy……………………………………………. 60

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Disproportionality Objection #1: Overharm…………………………….. 73

Disproportionality Objection #2: Relative Innocents……………………. 75

Does boycotting work? ………………………………………………………….. 77

Chapter 3: Jus in Boycott………………………………………………………………………. 81

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………... 81

An Argument, a Challenge, a Reply……………………………………………………… 82

Moderately Objectionable Means and the Proportional Permissions View……….. 90

The Restrictive Permissions View and a Better Analogy…………………………. 97

Other Objections……………………………………………………………………….. 102

Are Purchasing Decisions Irrelevant? …………………………………………... 103

Transfer Failures………………………………………………………………... 107

Transfer Failure #1: Backfires…………………………………………... 108

Transfer Failure #2: Capriciousness…………………………………….. 110

Transfer Failure #3: Non-authorization………………………………… 112

Transfer Failure #4: Politicization……………………………………… 115

Transfer Failure #5: Diluted Power…………………………………….. 116

Chapter 4: The Helplessness Problem………………………………………………………. 119

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. 119

On Consumer Obligations and Reasons……………………………………….... 120

The Challenge…………………………………………………………………………... 123

On the Control Principle……………………………………………………….. 124

In Support of the Control Principle…………………………………………….. 131

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The Consumer Helplessness Claim……………………………………………... 135

Responding to the Helplessness Problem………………………………………………. 141

Rejecting the Control Principle and Involvement Explosion……………………. 142

Control Principle Alternatives: Complicity Approaches………………… 147

Control Principle Alternatives: Virtue Approaches……………………... 155

Control Principle Alternatives: Collective Action Approaches………….. 166

Rejecting the Consumer Helplessness Claim……………………………………. 181

The Expected Value Solution………………………………………….... 185

The Objection from Ignorance…………………………………………. 192

The Objection from Vagueness………………………………………… 197

Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………….. 207

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………... 209

Chapter 1 – Permission to Shop Freely?

Boycotting, Democracy, and a Defense of Non-Deference

Introduction

Ethical consumerism is having a moment. It is now easier than it’s ever been for consumers

to link together, to share information, to organize, and to communicate directly with public figures

and corporations. Indeed, the social media era can sometimes feel like a never-ending call for

consumer action from all quarters. Consider this not-at-all exhaustive list of prominent U.S. boycotts

from 2018. In March, gun control activist David Hogg called for an advertising boycott of Laura

Ingraham’s FOX News program after a Twitter post in which she derided him for “whining” about

his college application rejections. In response more than a dozen companies pulled their ads from

the show.1 In July, the American Family Association (AFA) renewed its call for a boycott of Target

Corp. – a tiff that began in 2016 when Target announced a new restroom/changing room policy

that encourages individuals to use whichever facilities best suited their gender identity.2 A petition-

to-boycott on the AFA website has collected more than 1.5 million signatures since then.3 In

August, the chairman of the California Democratic Party called for a boycott of In-N-Out following

1 Perez, Maria. 2018. “Laura Ingraham Advertising Boycott: Here Are the Companies That Have Pulled Out of Fox News Host’s Show.” Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/laura-ingraham-david-hogg- advertisements-875876. 2 “Continuing to Stand for Inclusivity.” Target Corporate. Accessed September 7, 2018. http://corporate.target.com/article/2016/04/target-stands-inclusivity. 3 “Avoid Target: Do Your Back-to-school Shopping Elsewhere.” Accessed September 7, 2018. https://www.afa.net/activism/action-alerts/2018/avoid-target-do-your-back-to-school-shopping-elsewhere/

revelations that the regional burger chain had donated $25,000 to the Republican Party.4 A few days

later, Nike, Inc. sparked a flurry of protests (and counter-protests) when it announced a new ad

campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick – a controversial cultural figure who kicked off a multi-year

cultural dust-up when he decided to protest U.S. racial inequality and police brutality by kneeling

during the national anthem at an NFL game.5 6

Evidently, our political disagreements are increasingly devolving into economic disagreements.

(Boycotting – we might note, with a Clausewitzian turn – is the continuation of politics by other means.) I

suspect that few of us regard this as a promising development for our society. Yet I equally suspect

that many of us find ourselves in occasional sympathy with these efforts.7 It’s not obvious how we

should respond. None of us can arrest this trend, but ought we contribute to it? And if we do, how

do we decide where to lend a hand? Ought we find the worthiest causes? The most-likely-to-

succeed? Or is it more important to focus on permissible methods? Are there any rules about when

we’re not allowed to boycott?

The ur-treatments of this topic appear to be Dennis E. Garrett’s “Consumer Boycotts: Are

Targets Always the Bad Guys?” (1986) and Claudia Mills’ “Should We Boycott Boycotts?” (1996) –

both of which read as surprisingly au currant given their origins in the pre- and early-internet eras.8

4 Tsang, Amie. 2018. “In-N-Out’s Political Donation Attracts Boycott Calls, but Will It Matter? - The New York Times.” 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/business/in-n-out-burgers-boycott-california- republicans.html. 5 Victor, Daniel. 2018. “After Colin Kaepernick’s Nike Deal, Some Salute Swoosh, Others Boycott It - The New York Times.” 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/sports/nike-protests-kaepernick-nfl-.html. 6 This case is especially notable for the fact that Nike surely anticipated both the boycott campaigns and the buycott counter-campaigns in advance of their announcement. In the medium-term, the result seems to have been a net win for Nike. And that leaves us with some perplexing questions: Are consumer boycotts now so predictable that they can be reliably anticipated and included in corporate expected-value calculations? And, Does that leave consumers with one less tool for making a real difference in the marketplace? And, Is Nike’s omniscience compatible with consumer free will? 7 Even if the items on my shortlist struck you as a mixture of ridiculous and profoundly misguided, there’s probably something in the marketplace that raises your moral hackles. 8 Garrett, Dennis E. 1986. “Consumer Boycotts: Are Targets Always the Bad Guys.” Business and Society Review 58 (2): 17–21; Mills, Claudia. 1996. “Should We Boycott Boycotts?” Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (3): 136–148.

Garrett and Mills sift through a variety of consumer rationales for boycotting and conclude that the

practice is far more morally fraught than common sense would have it. Although boycotts offer

consumers a powerful opportunity to make a difference, act on their values, and express moral

disapproval, they may also promote unfairness, harm innocents, restrict consumer choice, suppress

rights, or, simply, backfire. Neither Garrett nor Mills come down firmly on either side of the issue,

but both advise caution and further consideration.

Later contributors to the boycotting literature have either adopted a similar stance – i.e. that

boycotting is morally troubling – or have focused on narrow issues arising for particular kinds of

boycotts. Friedman (2001), Rodin and Yudkin (2011), Radzik (2017), Beck (2019), and Weinstock

(2019) all raise additional moral concerns about boycotting and express varying degrees of moral

ambivalence about the practice.9 Dain and Calder (2007) are concerned about sporting boycotts.10

Mills and Saprai (2019) focus on cases where boycotting requires breaking a promise or contract.11

Nussbaum (2007), Abed (2007), and de Shalit (2016) debate the permissibility of academic

boycotts.12 Stoll (2008) offers ethical advice for businesses who find themselves the target of a

boycott.13 Peled (2019) offers a novel objection against the Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)

9 Beck, Valentin. 2019. “Consumer Boycotts as Instruments for Structural Change.” Journal of Applied Philosophy. 36 (4): 543–559; Friedman, Monroe. 2001. “Ethical Dilemmas Associated with Consumer Boycotts.” Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (2): 232–240; Radzik, Linda. 2017. “Boycotts and the Social Enforcement of Justice.” Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (1): 102–22; Rodin, David, and Michael Yudkin. 2011. “Academic Boycotts.” Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (4): 465–485; Weinstock, Daniel. 2019. “Dissidents and Innocents: Hard Cases for a Political Philosophy of Boycotts.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 560–74. 10 Dain, Edmund, and Gideon Calder. 2007. “Not Cricket? Ethics, Rhetoric and Sporting Boycotts.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (1): 95–109. 11 Mills, Chris, and Prince Saprai. 2019. “Commercial Boycotting and Conscientious Breach of Contract.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 575–91. 12 Abed, Mohammed. 2007. “In Defense of Academic Boycotts: A Response to Martha Nussbaum.” Dissent Magazine; Nussbaum, Martha. 2007. “Against Academic Boycotts.” Dissent Magazine. 2007; de Shalit, Avner. 2016. “The Ethics of Academic Boycott.” The Journal of Politics 78 (3): 642–52. 13 Stoll, Mary Lyn. 2009. “Boycott Basics: Moral Guidelines for Corporate Decision Making.” Journal of Business Ethics 84: 3–10.

movement.14 Fischer (forthcoming) considers whether consumers who take themselves to have

obligations to boycott may be justified in doing so, particularly if they feel moved to show solidarity

or to channel their reactive attitudes through benevolent activity.15

Waheed Hussain’s “Is Ethical Consumerism an Impermissible Form of Vigilantism?” (2012)

stands apart from this literature in its simultaneous non-ambivalence and broad focus.16 He argues,

in essence, that boycotting is often objectionable because it is often undemocratic. By seeking

unilateral, unsanctioned social change, boycotters threaten to undermine democratic values and our

liberal democratic social order. This, he concludes, is impermissible.

This chapter is primarily a defense of consumer permissions to boycott in the face of

Hussain’s objection. Before we get there, though, I want to offer a few general remarks about

‘boycotting’ (how I understand the term and how I intend to use it from this point forward), to

clarify the moral questions I mean to be asking and to lay important groundwork for this and future

chapters.

What Do I Mean by ‘Boycotting’?

At a level of schematic generality, let’s say that boycotting involves some market party refusing

to engage in some sort of market interaction with some other market party for moral reasons.17

14 Peled, Yael. 2019. “The Ethics of Boycotting as Collective Anti-Normalisation.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 527–42. 15 Fischer, Bob. forthcoming. “Boycotting and Public Mourning.” Res Publica, 1–14. 16 The other recent contributions to the boycott literature – namely, Beckstein (2014), Barry and MacDonald (2019), and Hassoun (2019) – are responses to Hussain. Barry, Christian, and Kate MacDonald. 2019. “Ethical Consumerism: A Defense of Market Vigilantism.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 46 (3): 293–322; Beckstein, Martin. 2014. “Political Consumer Activism and Democratic Legitimacy.” Studies in Social & Political Thought 24: 41-64; Hassoun, Nicole. 2019. “Consumption and Social Change.” Economics & Philosophy 35 (1): 29–47; Hussain, Waheed. 2012. “Is Ethical Consumerism an Impermissible Form of Vigilantism?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40 (2): 111–43. 17 This general definition already excludes a broad category of activities that sometimes gets called ‘boycotts’ – viz. refusals to engage in social or cultural interactions. The most common example in the philosophical literature (for obvious reasons) is the academic boycott, where some collective comes together to refuse various

There are a variety of ways to fill in each of the underlined roles. Market parties include governments,

state organizations, NGOs, individual consumers, consumer groups, individual businesses, and

business groups. Each of these parties can be either the boycotter or the boycotted. The boycotter can

refuse a variety of different market interactions. She can refuse to buy from or sell to the boycotted,

to buy from or sell to parties who themselves do business with the boycotted, to negotiate with the

boycotted, or to share a marketplace with the boycotted (e.g. locating in the same shopping center,

advertising in the same magazine, listing together on Amazon.com.)

To say that boycotts are performed “for moral reasons” is to distinguish boycotting activities

from other kinds of refusals-to-transact. Consider the many different reasons for which a consumer

might refuse a bar of chocolate. Maybe the consumer has aesthetic or taste-based reasons for refusing:

he hates the way this chocolate tastes or the look of the packaging. Or maybe he has prudential or

pragmatic reasons for refusing: he has an allergy to milk or doesn’t want the calories, or perhaps he

doesn’t live close to a vendor or doesn’t think he’ll get a chance to eat the chocolate before it melts.

Intuitively, consumers refusing solely for these sorts of reasons would not be boycotting the chocolate

company. Boycotting seems to require the presence of a moral reason.18 To count as boycotting, the

consumer would need to be refusing the chocolate at least in part because he doesn’t like what the

kinds of social interactions with particular institution(s) or academic(s). These boycotts raise a number of additional moral complications that don’t arise in the economic sphere. Accordingly, I am going to screen them out of the discussion and focus on the moral status of economic boycotting. 18 This isn’t quite right. If I promise my family members that I’m done drinking alcohol, my future alcohol refusals might then be for moral reasons but, intuitively, would not be boycotts. To count as boycotting, a consumer’s moral reasons must have something to do with some morally relevant aspects of the market itself – some good/bad products, practices, agents, or outcomes. And even that’s not quite right. Maybe I refuse to buy Brand X toilet paper out of loyalty to you, my good friend, who manufactures Brand Y toilet paper. In that case, I’m refusing to transact for moral reasons that are connected to the market (viz. I am refusing because the transactor isn’t you/the transaction won’t benefit you/the product isn’t yours), but I don’t think the everyday English user would be inclined to call me a ‘boycotter’ of Brand X toilet paper. I’ll have more to say about this in Chapter 4. For now, nothing much turns on these definitional quibbles. I’m trying to show that the introduction of moral reasons into consumers’ motivational sets does not limit their permissions to consume, and that argument doesn’t hinge on what we say about the toilet paper case or even on which exact moral reasons we’re talking about.

chocolate company stands for or thinks something about their business or product is bad and ought

to be opposed (perhaps he’s read that the company’s cocoa is harvested by child laborers in West

Africa.)19

In this and future chapters, my focus will be on boycotting by individual consumers and, in

particular, on the individual decision to refuse a purchasing interaction. There are two reasons for the

focus on individuals. First, the average consumer has very little control over the boycotting decisions

of larger market parties – consumer groups, businesses, states, international government coalitions –

but does have control over her own boycotting decisions. So an inquiry into the ethics of individual

boycotting decisions seems more pertinent to my own (and your own) decision making. Second,

other market parties are composed of individuals, and that suggests that individuals are a sensible

starting point for a discussion of boycott ethics. (What are you and I allowed to do individually?... Now how

is that different from what we’re allowed to do together?) The reason I want to focus on individual purchasing

decisions (rather than selling decisions) is simply that we buy things far more often than we sell

things. For many of us, the only thing we consistently sell is our own labor.20

Finally, I have been focusing the refusal to transact for moral reasons, but of course,

consumers can equally well agree to transact for moral reasons – a decision often referred to as

“buycotting.” There are two reasons why I focus on boycotts rather than buycotts. First, buycotts

19 See, e.g., Payson Center for International Development and Technology Transfer, Tulane University. 2011. “Final Report on the Status of Public and Private Efforts to Eliminate the Worst Forms of Child Labor (WFCL) in the Cocoa Sectors of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.” Archived 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20120412194832/http://www.childlabor- payson.org/Tulane%20Final%20Report.pdf. 20 One possible exception: product users are sometimes described as selling their own attention and information, especially on the web – a thought that’s sometimes expressed with the adage, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” The basic idea is that some products and services are free in the sense that no dollars are required for access but that, in another sense, the company is using access to its product as a currency for buying its users’ attention and personal information. This is an interesting class of cases, but they don’t raise any special problems for our present discussion. And anyway, instead of describing these as cases of selling our own attention/information, we could just as easily describe them as cases of purchasing access to a product in the currency of our own attention.

7 are relatively uncommon. (Why? Perhaps because buycotts don’t have the virtue of thrift to recommend them. “I want to support the Morally Upstanding Jacuzzi Co… how many units should I buy?”)

Second, boycotts and buycotts seem to share nearly all of their morally relevant features and so tend to be covered by the same arguments. Hence, the argumentative position I stake out about the one should easily extend to cover the other, and my persistent use of “boycott” may be read as a convenient way of referring to both kinds of decisions.

Two Kinds of Boycotting Activities

Given some desirable, transferable resources (money, usually) and a marketplace full of agents eager to exchange, each of us can be said to have bargaining power. This is more obvious in some contexts than others. When a car dealer tells you he “won’t let you leave unless it’s on a new set of wheels” or when an e-merchant sends you an email-cum-coupon seconds after you leave her site, products unpurchased, they are openly telegraphing a worry that you won’t transact with them.

Other vendors are more oblique. A vending machine doesn’t yell at you to buy a soda as you walk past. Nor does the grocer catch up to you in the parking lot to remind you about his heart-stopping produce deals. But that doesn’t mean these companies are uninterested in your patronage. (Look at those inviting Cokes through the big glass window! Download the Loyal Grocery Customer app for exclusive electronic coupons!) And the fact that businesses want to transact with you gives you bargaining power. You have other powers in the marketplace, too. Whenever you decide to buy (or not-buy) something, you seem to exert a small amount of power, a small amount of influence, on the course of the market. Such decisions largely determine what kinds of products are made, how they are made, in what quantities they are made, how they are marketed, and where they’re sold. For simplicity, let’s call this assortment of abilities “market powers.”

We can distinguish two kinds of boycott activities according to whose market powers they

employ. Some boycotting activities employ the consumer’s own market powers. (e.g. Tonya liked to

buy Brand X ice cream, but she’s read some bad stuff about palm oil production, so she doesn’t do

that anymore. Rasa heard that Fair Trade coffee is really good for coffee growers, so now he tries to

buy only Fair Trade beans.) These kinds of boycotting decisions are all about shifting one’s own

consumption toward good things and away from bad things. Borrowing some terminology from

Beckstein, let’s call these “introverted boycotting activities.”21

These are distinct from what we can call, by extension, “extroverted” activities. Extroverted

boycotting is all about getting other people to use their market powers.22 For example, I would be

engaged in extroverted boycotting if I said to someone, “You should avoid Product X because it’s

bad for the environment.” Or “You should stop watching Y’s movies because he’s a convicted sex

criminal.” The category of extroverted boycotting activities is broad and varied. It includes

persuading other market parties not to transact with some boycott target; organizing like-minded

parties to coordinate messaging about a target; harassing, blaming, or shaming other parties who

transact or share a marketplace with a target; creating a certification and labelling scheme to allow

companies to avoid being targeted; punishing or threatening other businesses who transact with a

21 Beckstein op. cit,. p.46. 22 Peled (2019) and Weinstock (2019) both appeal to linguistic intuition to argue that boycotting necessarily requires some sort of collective action – i.e. some group of individuals trying to act together. On this view, many of the actions I’ve called “introverted boycotting” would not count as genuine acts of boycotting. (e.g. Tonya’s solo decision to forego ice cream out of a concern about palm oil production.) Let me offer two quick replies. First, I very much doubt that this use does reliably track everyday English user intuitions. I could say for instance, “Do you have any tires that aren’t made by Firestone? I’m still quietly boycotting them over that SUV rollover fracas from the early 00’s.” And no eyebrows would be raised. More importantly, many of the arguments levelled against the permissibility of boycotting imply that morally-motivated consumption itself is objectionable and irrespective of whether the consumer is part of some larger collective. This is a sufficient reason not to reserve the term ‘boycotter’ for those engaged in collective activities. Peled, Yael. 2019. “The Ethics of Boycotting as Collective Anti-Normalisation.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 527–42 Weinstock, Daniel. 2019. “Dissidents and Innocents: Hard Cases for a Political Philosophy of Boycotts.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 560–74.

target; and spreading information to harm a target’s reputation or brand (thereby discouraging other

parties from transacting with it.) All of these strategies represent more or less roundabout ways of

getting other market parties to wield their own market power against a targeted party, and they are

largely separable from introverted boycott activities. I can, e.g., chide others online for buying palm oil

products while continuing to buy them myself. Or, less hypocritically, I could foment opposition to

a UK massage parlor on Twitter, even though I am a Colorado homebody with no interest in being

rubbed by strangers.23

Alternatively, we might describe the distinction between introverted and extroverted boycotting

as a difference between acts of boycotting and acts that support or promote boycotting. Introverted boycotts

involve literal boycotting (i.e. morally-motivated refusals to transact) while extroverted boycotts do

not. Extroverted boycotters are engaged in activities that are boycott-adjacent – threatening to

boycott, organizing a boycott, or persuading others to boycott. Accordingly, extroverted boycotting

seems to presuppose the efficacy and permissibility of introverted boycotting. (If we both thought

boycotting futile, would I bother threatening you with one? If we both thought boycotting immoral, would you urge me to

join yours?)24

An Outline of the Project

This dissertation is split into four chapters and is largely organized around the

introverted/extroverted distinction. The first three chapters all seek to answer the question, Are

consumers permitted to boycott?, as applied first to introverted boycotting and then to extroverted

23 This observation, that the two categories of action are separable, was first made in Radzik. Radzik op. cit., p.104. 24 From this point forward, I’m going to use ‘introverted boycott’, ‘ethical consumption’, and ‘morally- motivated purchasing decision’ synonymously. Since the everyday English user would likely understand those first two terms as overlapping but not synonymous – ethical consumerism encompassing more than just purchasing decisions – it’s worth explicitly noting this idiosyncratic usage.

10 boycotting. In Chapters 1 and 2, I argue that consumers have very broad permissions to introvertedly boycott (to make morally motivated purchasing decisions), and I defend this position from Hussain’s objection (Ch. 1) and from all of the other objections on offer in the boycotting literature (Ch. 2.) In Chapter 3, I tackle the same question as applied to extroverted boycotting – i.e.

Are consumers permitted to support and promote the transaction decisions of others? I defend a thesis in two parts. I argue, first, that we are permitted to extrovertedly boycott although these permissions are relatively restrictive and, second, that those permissions do not vary with the apparent moral urgency of our causes.

Finally, in Chapter 4, we pivot from questions about boycott permissions to (preliminary) questions about boycott obligations. That chapter is focused on one especially challenging skeptical concern about consumer obligations: that we mostly don’t have moral reasons (nor therefore obligations) to make particular consumption decisions because we mostly don’t have any power to influence the course of the market. I consider a host of possible responses to this skeptical challenge and argue that two of them show promise.

A Plausible Argument and the Public Sphere Objection

Let us consider then whether introverted boycotting in permissible. This question is both prior to all the others and, as it turns out, non-trivial to answer. We start with a plausible argument that our permissions to introvertedly boycott are very broad.

We generally accept that consumers have very broad permissions to refuse purchases for non-moral reasons. They may refuse to buy things because they’re too expensive or too cheap, because they’re ugly or because they’re not ugly enough, because they’re the wrong size, the wrong color, the wrong shape to fit through the front door. A consumer may refuse to buy from the

salesman with the gauche cravat or from the company with the annoying jingle. A consumer may

refuse to buy for reasons frivolous or urgent, or seemingly for no reasons at all. But then, surely, if

you’re allowed to do a thing for any non-moral reason you like, then you’re also allowed to do that

thing because you think it’s the right thing to do. Moral reasons, after all, are our best and most urgent

justifications for acting. Many of the things we’re forbidden from doing for non-moral reasons (e.g.

breaking promises) are admissible with sufficiently strong moral reasons. This suggests consumers

are, if anything, more justified in refusing to purchase for moral reasons than in refusing to purchase

for non-moral reasons. So, boycotting is generally permissible.25

There is one prominent objection to this argument, first propounded by Waheed Hussain.26

According to this objection, it is precisely when consumers start making morally-motivated

consumption decisions that the any-reason-goes presumption fails. Hussain is particularly interested

in what he calls “social change considerations,” which are moral reasons pertaining to the incentives

and behavior of other market parties. (e.g. If I buy Fair Trade Coffee, I can encourage the fair payment of

coffee farmers. Or, I should stop eating at In-N-Out to punish them for donating to the Republican Party and teach

them not to do that again.) Hussain wants to distinguish acts of consumption motivated by social

change considerations (“Social Change Ethical Consumption” (SCEC)) from other kinds of ethical

25 Dennis Garrett (1987), Chris Mills and Prince Saprai (2019), and Daniel Weinstock (2019) all gesture at a blood-relative of this argument that appeals to consumer rights. They argue: Consumers have a presumptive right to express displeasure with businesses (Garrett) or to refuse contracts (Mills and Saprai, Weinstock). Boycotting is one way to exercise these rights. So, consumers have a presumptive right to boycott. I prefer my own formulation for two reasons. First, arguments over rights and their correct attributions can be rather vexed. Second, the primary objection to introverted boycotting, Hussain’s Public Sphere Objection, is easier to understand when seen as a reply to a reasons-based justification rather than to a rights-based justification for consumer permission to boycott. (Mills and Saprai also support this reason-based justification – though they seem to regard it as interchangeable with the rights-based justification.) Garrett op. cit., p.18; Mills and Saprai op. cit., p.576, 583; Weinstock op. cit., p.563. 26 This objection is echoed in Beck (2019) but he appears not wholly to endorse it and certainly doesn’t defend it with the depth and force that Hussain does. Beck op. cit., p.554.

consumption motivated by other kinds of moral reasons, which he thinks are less problematic.

These are, (i) Expressive reasons – considerations about expressing moral approval or disapproval,

but not as a means to changing behavior; (ii) Unmediated change reasons – considerations about making

a difference, but not by changing incentives for other market agents (e.g. reducing one’s own CO2

emissions); (iii) Integrity reasons – considerations about keeping one’s hands clean and avoiding moral

complicity.27 Hussain also distinguishes social change considerations from all of the non-moral

considerations and reasons for consumption I outlined earlier – which he calls “price-quality

considerations.” According to Hussain,

When [consumers] make choices based on price-quality considerations, they can approach their choices as private purchasing decisions: they are not required to focus on the common good, deliberate with their fellow citizens, or make their reasons public. But when consumers make choices based on social change considerations, they must shift gears and approach these choices as part of the legislative process: they must focus on the common good, deliberate with their fellow citizens, and make their reasons public.28

The central thought seems to be this. Most consumption decisions are private matters – or

as Hussain sometimes puts it, they belong to “the sphere of private choices.”29 In this sphere,

consumers are mostly permitted to buy and sell as they see fit, to pursue their own interests and

whims. However, when a consumer starts introducing a certain sort of moral reason into her decision

making – viz. social change considerations – she is driven out of the private sphere and into the

public sphere, where the norms are not so permissive. Here, consumers are only permitted to act if

and when their decisions are consistent with the “procedural values that are essential to the

justification of our liberal democratic social order.”30 Hussain describes a set of strict normative

criteria that must all be satisfied for an act of SCEC to count as consistent with these democratic

27 Hussain op. cit., p.113. 28 Hussain op. cit., p.138. 29 Hussain op. cit., p.112. 30 Hussain op. cit., p.117.

values. He says SCEC decisions (i) must be embedded in a process of public reasoning and be based

on some reasonable conception of the common good, which should include a commitment to

securing rights and basic liberties for all citizens; (ii) must be representative and equal, with each

group of stakeholders having a similar amount of input and influence; and (iii) must not aim at an

issue that has already been addressed by formal democratic legislative processes.31

Hussain points out that very few SCEC boycotts satisfy these criteria. Few are embedded in

public reasoning – that is, few boycotters seek to justify their decisions with a public discussion of

their reasons and arguments. Even fewer are premised on a public discussion among all relevant

stakeholders, each with roughly equal say. Instead, boycotts tend to disproportionately advantage a

few loud, monied voices, and tend therefore to reflect the preferences and interests of the global

rich who “command the attention of market actors, including multinational corporations, in a way

that consumers in the developing world do not.”32 Finally, many SCEC boycotts do target issues that

the formal legislature has already addressed (e.g. gay rights, climate change), and so, inappropriately

seek to overturn the results of representative democratic processes. Hence, most SCEC boycotts are

impermissible because non-democratic.33

This is a very striking conclusion.

The default presumption is, I take it, that of course we’re allowed to buy things and refuse-to-

buy things pretty much whenever we want, for whatever reasons we want. (Indeed, that was the gist

31 Hussain op. cit., p.126. 32 Hussain op. cit., p.120. 33 It’s worth noting, Hussain doesn’t take these to be perfectly exceptionless constraints on permissible boycotting. He says that “clearly there are cases where injustices are so severe that morality does not require citizens to give formal democratic politics a privileged position in social life. In the case of apartheid, for instance, the laws were so unjust that even undemocratic measures would have been permissible to change them.” He seems to think these exceptions are quite rare, though, and so for simplicity I’ll proceed as though his constraints are meant to be exceptionless. (And try to steer away from examples that involve clear and colossal injustice, that might count as exceptions.) Hussain op. cit., p.134.

14 of the plausible argument with which I opened this section.) The Public Sphere Objection claims that’s just not so. When we enter the marketplace hoping to make a difference, to change the way businesses and other consumers act by altering their incentives, we have a moral obligation to ensure that our refusals are properly democratic.

Does the Public Sphere Objection stand up to scrutiny? I do not think it does. However, the

Objection needs to be developed more fully (and considerably modified) before I’ll be in a fair position to articulate my reasons for thinking it fails. In particular, I need to offer a fuller explanation of the public sphere/private sphere metaphor, which I skimmed over in the interest of getting the whole Objection down at once.

What does it mean to say such-and-such an action belongs to “the private sphere,” or to say that so-and-so’s decisions push them into “the public sphere?” And why, on Hussain’s account, do consumers in these different spheres have such radically different permissions to consume? The next two sections are devoted to these questions.

Markets, Shields, and Spheres

Two observations to get us started. First, the course of social life is frequently and dramatically altered by goings on in the world’s markets. Second, these changes are predominantly non-democratic. Consider, for example, Apple Inc.’s launch of the iPhone in 2007, which was both non-democratic and seriously impactful. Apple didn’t bring together a representative sample of global stakeholders or hold a public dialogue on the desirability of iPhones; they didn’t gather reasons and arguments, founded on plausible conceptions of the common good and intended for eventual use for some formal legislature’s consideration of the desirability of iPhones. They simply identified a profit opportunity, designed a product, and brought it to market. It sold absurdly well and, in so doing, left a large impression on the shape of our society.

Does the Public Sphere Objection condemn Apple’s decision? It does not.

Hussain argues that market decisions like Apple’s are morally justified because the market,

itself, is morally justified. The free market is justified despite causing non-democratic changes because

“the procedural defects of the market exchange process... can (if reasonably well managed) generate

profound improvements in people’s lives… [and] no procedurally sound process could achieve

comparable results.”34 35 More precisely, Hussain argues that the free market is justified because it

allows society to achieve a vast number of Pareto improvements, and it does so better than any

alternative system of resource allocation.

A Pareto improvement is a movement from one distribution of resources to another, such that

at least one party prefers the new distribution and no parties prefer the old distribution – somebody

wins; nobody loses. In economics textbooks, market transactions are often given as paradigm

examples of Pareto improvements. When an agent, A, freely agrees to transact with B, the result is a

Pareto improvement: A and B both prefer the new distribution of resources to the old one (else they

wouldn’t have agreed to transact), and no one else disprefers the new distribution because they all

have exactly the same resources they had a moment ago, pre-transaction. Pareto improvements

appear eminently easy to justify because, seemingly by definition, no one has a good reason to

complain. This makes them a highly desirable kind of social change. And since the free market is

really, really good at producing Pareto improvements, the free market therefore seems to be a highly

desirable system of resource allocation.

Hussain’s argument is that the free market is justified, even though it causes non-democratic social

change, because it is the best system for achieving Pareto improvements. And, crucially, this broad

34 Hussain op. cit., p.136-7. 35 I’ll be using “free market” as a convenient shorthand for Hussain’s “reasonably well-managed market exchange processes.”

justification for the entire free market serves as a covering justification for individual market

decisions like Apple’s. Apple’s iPhone launch caused big and non-democratic changes, but that’s okay

because when they showed up to market, iPhones in hand, they were pursuing Pareto improvements

(You want fancy smartphones; we want money – Let’s trade!) On this view, when any agent shows up to

market to pursue her own interests, the free market justification covers her acts of consumption and

shields her from complaints about acting undemocratically. Whatever social changes she causes are

justified because they were caused in pursuit of Pareto improvements.

On the other hand, Hussain argues that consumers who enter the marketplace with the

intention of pursuing the common good, rather than their own self-interest, are not covered by the

general justification for free markets. This is because there are large and persistent differences of

opinion among consumers, producers, and workers about what the common good is and about how

best to promote it, which leads to differences of opinion about which distributions of resources are

preferable. The result is that consumers who engage in SCEC “do not present a significant

opportunity for Pareto improving transfers [and do] not contribute to the market achieving its

justifying end.”36 The consumer engaging in SCEC can’t plead, “I’m only trying for a Pareto

improvement!”, and so she is not shielded from complaints about being undemocratic.

This is what the ‘sphere’ talk is meant to indicate. When Hussain says that a consumer is

acting “within the private sphere,” he means that she is acting under the aegis of the general

justification for free markets. The consumer is creating opportunities for Pareto improvements by

making decisions that reveal her price-quality preference, and since her actions contribute to the free

market’s justifying end, they are covered by the free market’s general justification. This puts her in

the private sphere, where she doesn’t need to fret about democracy or prep for formal legislative

36 Hussain op. cit., p.137.

procedures or engage in public reasoning. She can just act, and her actions are presumptively justified

– even if they end up promoting non-democratic change. Obversely, to say the consumer is acting

“within the public sphere” is to say that the presumptive justification is absent or withdrawn. She

isn’t shielded by the general justification for free markets. She can’t just act. She does need to fret

about democracy. According to the Public Sphere Objection, consumers are positively required to

square their consumption behavior with democratic values whenever they intend for their

consumption to promote the common good by influencing others’ incentives and behavior. This is

the moral difference between Social Change Ethical Consumption and self-interested consumption:

only the self-interested consumer is consistently generating opportunities for Pareto improvements.

Necessary Modifications to the Public Sphere Objection

Once the public sphere/private sphere machinery is laid open, it is apparent that Hussain’s

original statement of the Public Sphere Objection is unsatisfactory and requires two important

alterations – one making the Objection broader in scope, the other narrower.

First, Hussain’s original formulation goes awry in its focus on only one kind of moral

intention – namely, “social change” intentions to affect others’ behavior by altering their economic

incentives. Among all the moral reasons a consumer might have for purchasing, Hussain claims,

these considerations are particularly problematic because consumers acting on them “do not present

a significant opportunity for Pareto improving transfers.”37 If, for example, Mahalia really likes

Brand X chocolates but now refuses to buy them solely because she wants to disincentivize the use

of child labor in cocoa production, then her purchase does not signal her price-quality preferences

37 Hussain op. cit.

18 and so does not generate opportunities for Pareto improvements. This failure explains why her social change consumption belongs in the public sphere.

However, this failure is not unique to social change considerations. Other kinds of moral reasons present this same problem. If Mahalia declines to purchase a chocolate bar merely to express moral disapproval, then her purchase also does not signal her price-quality preferences and so does not generate opportunities for Pareto improvements. If Mahalia declines to purchase a chocolate bar merely to keep her hands clean (that is, to preserve her moral integrity) or if she declines merely to reduce her greenhouse gas emissions (but not in a way that would necessarily change another party’s behavior), then, again, her purchases do not signal her price-quality preferences and so do not generate opportunities for Pareto improvements. Hence, social change considerations are not morally distinct from other kinds of moral considerations – at least, not in the respect Hussain has suggested. They do not uniquely fail to create opportunities for Pareto improvement.

Here is another way to put the point. Hussain is really juggling two distinctions here: (i) a distinction between social change considerations and other kinds of moral reasons for consumption and (ii) a distinction between social change considerations and non-moral reasons for consumption.

The trouble is that the way Hussain draws distinction (ii) undermine the moral importance of distinction (i). Either the failure to generate opportunities for Pareto improvements is sufficient for pushing an act into the public sphere or it isn’t. If it is, then all kinds of morally motivated consumption must be in the public sphere because they all equally fail to generate Pareto opportunities. If it isn’t, then the

Public Sphere Objection fails because it cannot demonstrate a moral difference between self- interested consumption and ethical consumption – and, thus, must either claim that all consumption is subject to democratic constraints (which, I assume, is absurd) or none is (which is the view

Hussain wants to reject.) Sustaining distinction (ii) requires abandoning distinction (i). We need

distinction (ii) to get the Public Sphere Objection off the ground. So, we must abandon distinction

(i).

Thus, the Public Sphere Objection needs to be restated to include all moral considerations:

When a consumer makes a consumption decision for reasons other than the satisfaction of her own non-moral

preferences, she is not creating opportunities for Pareto improvements and so is acting in the public sphere.38

And there is a second alteration we must make to the Public Sphere Objection. In this case,

the problem arises from a mismatch between Hussain’s definition of ‘Social Change Ethical

Consumption’ and Hussain’s explanation for why these acts belong in the public sphere. First

consider his definition. Hussain claims that your decision to, e.g., buy Fair Trade coffee counts as an

instance of SCEC whenever “you base your decision to buy the Fair Trade coffee at least partly on

[social change considerations.] What is necessary is just that [a social change consideration] is one

factor in your decision.”39 That is, Hussain claims that the presence of a social change consideration

among your reasons for purchasing the coffee is necessary for your act’s counting as an instance of

Social Change Ethical Consumption – and it’s sufficient, too, because “just that” feature is

necessary.

But if we define SCEC this way, then by the logic of the Public Sphere Objection, it does

not appear that all SCEC acts belong in the public sphere. To illustrate, suppose that Aaliya, Beth,

and Cali all buy Brand X Fair Trade Coffee, even though it’s more expensive than other, non-Fair

Trade coffees. The Fair Trade label plays a different role in each woman’s decision to buy Brand X.

Aaliya really likes the taste of Brand X – so much so that she would buy it even if she didn’t care

38 It may not be obvious why we would say, in the first place, that a consumer acting on social change considerations is failing to pursue Pareto improvements. This is rather hard to pin down and will, in fact, be the primary focus of a later section of this chapter. For now, it suffices to make my point that this conditional seem plausible: If acting on social change considerations counts as failing to pursue Pareto improvements, then so does acting on other kinds of moral reasons. 39 Hussain op. cit., p.113.

20 about supporting coffee growers. Beth likes the taste of Brand X, too, but given the extra cost, she’d be indifferent between Brand X and a cheaper, non-Fair Trade coffee if she didn’t also care about supporting coffee growers. Cali doesn’t prefer the taste of Brand X and would buy a cheaper, non-

Fair Trade coffee if she didn’t care about supporting coffee growers. By Hussain’s definition, all three women count are performing SCEC because the Fair Trade label factors into each woman’s decision making. Yet by the lights of the Public Sphere Objection, only one of these decisions belongs in the public sphere. Aaliyah and Beth seem to belong in the private sphere because they are generating opportunities for Pareto improvements. Aaliyah is generating an opportunity for a Pareto improvement because she strictly prefers Brand X on price-quality grounds; Beth is doing the same because she prefers having-coffee to not-having coffee and is indifferent, on price-quality grounds, between Brand X and non-Fair Trade coffee. Only Cali is failing to generate opportunities for

Pareto improvements since only she would refuse to buy Brand X were it not for the Fair Trade label. Hence, of the three SCEC decisions, only Cali’s is in the public sphere.

Accordingly, the Public Sphere Objection needs to be re-stated to clarify that it’s not simply engaging in SCEC that places one in the public sphere – which is what Hussain claims. Rather, it’s engaging in SCEC when one would not perform that same act were social change considerations not a factor in one’s decision. Only SCEC acts like Cali’s fail to generate opportunities for Pareto improvements and thereby belong in the public sphere.

Putting these two necessary alterations together yields the Modified Public Sphere

Objection: When an individual makes, for moral reasons, a consumption decision that she wouldn’t make for purely self-interested reasons, she is acting in the public sphere. Decisions in the public sphere are permissible only if consistent with democratic procedural values. Consumption decisions of this sort (i.e. introverted boycotts) are mostly not consistent with these values. So, most introverted boycotting is not permissible. The Modified Objection is both weaker and stronger than the original. It only applies in cases where there’s a conflict between what

a consumer wants for herself and what the consumer thinks she ought to do, but it applies regardless

of the kind of moral reasons that motivate her to consume ethically.

To sum up: Hussain argues for a moral distinction between self-interested consumption and

social change ethical consumption on Pareto improvement grounds. This distinction is critical to his

argument but is apparently inconsistent with two other aspects of the original Public Sphere

Objection. (i) The distinction between social change considerations and other kinds of moral reasons for

consumption and (ii) the claim that all acts of SCEC, as defined by Hussain, belong in the public

sphere. Fixing these two issues yields the Modified Public Sphere Objection (MPSO.) This is the

version we should subject to moral scrutiny, and in the next two sections, this is version I’ll argue we

should reject.

Case-based Objections to the Modified Public Sphere Objection

The (original) Public Sphere Objection has already received a handful of challenges. Nicole

Hassoun (2019), Martin Beckstein (2014), and Valentin Beck (2019) all point out that inequality

causes non-democratic distortions in many domains, not just in the marketplace, and so it’s

unreasonable to forbid well-intentioned boycotts, in particular, for promulgating political

inequality.40 Beckstein further denies that all public sphere processes must be deliberative. He points

out that, for instance, the very act of casting a vote is not deliberative, does not involve citizens

exchanging reasons.41 Hassoun argues that although the formal legislature might ideally address and

fix all important social issues, it doesn’t.42 Some issues are never addressed, others make it on the

40 Beck, op. cit. p.557; Beckstein, op. cit., p.51; Hassoun op. cit., p.42. 41 Beckstein op. cit., p.50. 42 Hassoun op. cit., p.39.

agenda and are mishandled, still others seem to be caused by the formal legislative process itself. In

the absence of institutions that successfully secure justice, she argues, consumers must be allowed to

pursue it on their own – and non-democratically, if need be.

None of these replies strike at what I take to be the Public Sphere Objection’s central

mistake.43 (Though, I do think Hassoun’s point that the Objection is overly optimistic about the

prospects for legislative success hits home.) The mistake, I’ll argue, rests with the attempt to

articulate a moral difference between ethical consumption and self-interested consumption – that is, with the

appeal to Pareto improvements. Before I develop this reply, however, I want to offer a more direct,

case-based response to the MPSO. Consider these two cases.

The Conflicted Omnivore

Wei is a wealthy citizen of a wealthy nation who is conflicted about meat-eating. On the one hand,

he loves the taste and smell of meat, lives in a country where meat is cheap and pervasive, and is

surrounded by meat-loving friends and family – many of whom have something of a gleeful carnivore

mentality. But Wei worries that his meat purchases support factory farms, harm animals, and

increase the amount of suffering in the world. He doesn’t want to make a big deal about these

concerns, or even to talk them over with his friends, but he’s seriously considering giving up meat

for this reason – that is, in the hopes of making factory farming just a little less profitable.

The Conflicted Businesswoman

43 Since authoring this chapter, however, Barry and MacDonald have argued against the Public Sphere Objection along lines similar to my own. Barry and MacDonald op. cit., p.311-6.

Imani is a small business owner in a wealthy nation. She is considering offering her employees

tuition benefits at a nearby, accredited college. She doesn’t need to do this – she isn’t having

problems with hiring or employee retention or under-training. Almost certainly, offering tuition

benefits will hurt her bottom-line. But Imani believes strongly in the moral importance of not just

being fair to one’s employees but fostering them, helping them flourish. Because of this conviction,

she’s prepared to swallow the cost of helping some of her employees attend college.

In the first case, the MPSO condemns Wei’s meat refusal. Wei surely would choose to buy

meat if he were acting for only self-interested reasons, which means, by refusing, he would be acting

within the public sphere, and that refusal would be non-democratic, for at least three reasons. First,

he isn’t planning to make his reasoning public or deliberate with his friends – much less a

representative sample of stakeholders. Second, as a wealthy member of a wealthy nation, he would

be exercising an outsize amount of political power and denying equal say to those of lesser means.

(It’s possible, e.g., that the global poor want to support factory farming but can’t because they can’t

afford meat.) Third, the democratic process has already addressed the question of which animals are

acceptable to slaughter for food and which are not (Horses: No. Cows: Yes.)44 To refuse meat would

be to oppose in action the results of the democratic legislative process. So according to the MPSO,

Wei is not allowed to act on this moral reason. And since that is his only reason for wanting to refuse

meat, Wei isn’t permitted to refuse.45 Which is just to say, according to the MPSO, Wei is morally

required to buy meat.

44 See, Kelly, Erin. 2018. “Ban on Slaughtering Horses for Meat Gets Last-Minute Renewal in Spending Law Trump Signed.” USA Today. 45 Wei could refuse for other reasons – perhaps, telling himself he’s just refusing for No reason at all really! Just being a frivolous vegetarian! But that would be acting in bad faith.

The MPSO reaches a similar verdict in the second case. Since Imani wouldn’t offer this

benefit to her employees were she acting only for self-interested reasons, her decision belongs in the

public sphere.46 But Imani, like Wei, isn’t being properly democratic. She’s not engaging in public

deliberation; she is wielding an outsized amount of political power. Hence, by the MPSO, it would

be wrong for her to offer tuition benefits to her employees.

It’s worth noting that the original Public Sphere Objection also yields these results in the two

cases. Wei is concerned about his meat purchases promoting factory farming, which means his

refusal would be partly motivated by a desire to decrease aggregate demand for meat and thereby

alter incentives for factory farmers. Imani is also intending to influence behavior. (That’s the whole

point of offering the tuition benefit: as an incentive to her employees.) Since both would be engaged

in SCEC and since neither decision would be appropriately democratic, the original Public Sphere

Objection also implies that both acts are impermissible.

These results strike me as incorrect. Surely no consumers are morally required to buy a

product merely because they have only moral reasons for not wanting to buy it. Surely no business

owner is morally forbidden from assisting her employees merely because she has only moral reasons

for wanting to assist them. This is my direct, case-based reply to the MPSO.

However, I suspect that proponents of the MPSO would accuse this reply of question-

begging. It might be said: All you’ve done is give a couple cases, describe the verdicts of the MPSO, and engage in

a bit of table-banging – “If the MPSO were correct, then it would be correct in these cases! But how absurd!” I grant

that more needs saying to adequately engage with the MPSO and those who find it (and its verdicts)

46 I assume the MPSO applies to business decisions as well as consumer decisions. If consumers enter the public sphere when they make purchases for moral reasons that they wouldn’t make were they acting for self- interested reasons, then surely businesses do too. After all, both groups derive justification for their market decisions from the general justification for free markets, and both groups can write large and undemocratic changes on society.

plausible. At the very least, though, the Conflicted Omnivore and Conflicted Businesswoman cases are a

useful starting point. They highlight something important about the MPSO: that it is a deeply radical

story about our permissions to consume that would saddle consumers (and businesses!) with some

very foreign-looking moral requirements. It is, for example, an uncommon thing to find oneself

morally forbidden from trying to assist others. And it is quite unusual to find that one’s good moral

reasons are not only non-justifying, but de-justifying. And it is extraordinary to be forbidden from

doing the thing that seems right precisely because it seems right. Accordingly, I suspect that the case-

based objection may be persuasive and sufficient for some readers. The MPSO simply seems too

radical to be true.

The next section is for the unconvinced.

A Full Reply to the Modified Public Sphere Objection

I submit: the MPSO goes awry in its attempt to distinguish self-interested consumption from

ethical consumption.47 The difference that it points to – namely, the tendency to promote Pareto

improvements – is not a real difference between the two categories of consumption.

This pushes us headlong into a question I’ve heretofore been skirting around: What exactly is

the difference supposed to be between self-interested consumption and ethical consumption such that Pareto

improvements justify the one but not the other?

The difference cannot be that self-interested consumers intend to achieve a Pareto

improvement while ethical consumers do not. Self-interested consumers mostly don’t intend that!

Many lack the Pareto improvement concept, and of those who possess it, few think of their purchases

47 For simplicity, I’ll be referring to all the acts of consumption that the MPSO says are in the public sphere as “ethical consumption” and to all the acts that the MPSO says are in the private sphere as “self-interested consumption.”

as, or intend them to be, movements to distributions that at least one person (me!) prefers and no persons disprefer.

The difference between ethical consumption and self-interested consumption also cannot be that

the self-interested consumer achieves Pareto improvements while the ethical consumer does not. Lots

of self-interested consumption fails to achieve Pareto improvements. If Sylvester buys a taco from a

food truck, and later comes to regret the purchase – because, e.g., his order got mixed up or the

food tastes bad – he has failed to generate a Pareto improvement.48 If Amelie goes to college for a

semester then drops out, deeply regretting the loss of time and money, her purchase has failed to

create a Pareto improvement. And other market agents can experience transaction-regret, too. If

Bobby Business fixes the wrong price tags to his merchandise, he may later regret under-charging his

customers. Investors in MoviePass Inc. surely regretted the company’s decision to sell unlimited

subscriptions to cinema shows for $10/month once it became clear the practice was causing the

company to hemorrhage money – and ultimately leading to its demise.49 Simply put, self-interested

market agents sometimes make bad deals. Sometimes they are the ones who regret the new

distribution of resources.50

Hussain gestures at a slightly different explanation for the difference between ethical and

self-interested consumption:

What makes [self-interested] consumerism different... is that [it’s] internal to the market exchange process. The price-quality preferences of consumers are an essential component in the vast social opportunity for Pareto improving transfers that I mentioned: it is the correspondence between these consumer preferences and the preferences of workers and investors that creates the opportunity... By contrast, [ethical consumerism] is not internal to the process in the same way. The social change preferences of individual consumers tend to

48 Sylvester could ask for a refund and thereby restore himself to a preferred distribution but, presumably, the taco vendor would disprefer that distribution of resources – he would be short the costs of one taco. 49 See, Chow, Andrew R. 2018. “Tracking MoviePass’s Bumpy History as Turmoil Continues.” The New York Times, 2018, sec. Movies. 50 Not all cases involve consumption accidents or unexpected regret. Sometimes self-interested consumers know in advance that they’ll regret their purchases. X knows that she’s lactose intolerant, and she knows from past experience that eating a quart of ice cream will, in the final accounting, have been a serious mistake and a very bad time. But sometimes she consumes the ice cream anyway – too weak to stop herself from a non- Pareto improving purchase.

conflict with the social change preferences of workers, investors, and other consumers. These preferences do not present a significant opportunity for Pareto improving transfers.51

Hussain seems to think the difference between the two kinds of consumption amounts to a

difference in tendency. That is, ethical consumption tends not to lead to Pareto improvements (and so

is not internal to the market exchange process) whereas self-interested consumption does tend to lead

to Pareto improvements (and so is internal to the market exchange process.) The reason ethical

consumption lacks this tendency, he claims, is that people disagree about what kinds of social

change are desirable. Hence, ethical consumption often leads to states of affairs that at least one

other market party disprefers (because they have different beliefs about what serves the common

good.) Notice, though, there are two distinct ways to read this explanation:

Explanation A: An act of ethical consumption is aimed at an ultimate outcome that at least one

other market party will tend to disprefer (to an alternative outcome), whereas an act of self-

interested consumption is aimed at an ultimate outcome that no other market parties will tend to

disprefer.

Explanation B: An act of ethical consumption moves society to a new distribution of resources that

at least one other market party will tend to disprefer (to the old distribution), whereas an act

of self-interested consumption moves society to a new distribution of resources that no other market

parties will tend to disprefer.

51 Hussain op. cit., p.137. First emphasis in original, second emphasis added.

Of the two explanations, A seems closer to Hussain’s original intent, so let’s start with that one. This explanation says that ethical consumption is different because the common good outcome that the ethical consumer is pursuing is one that not all market parties can be expected to prefer.

Explanation A fails for two reasons. First, it’s not clear that this is a real difference between the two kinds of consumption. Self-interested consumption can sometimes aim at outcomes which at least one other market party disprefers. Suppose, e.g., that George decides not to order a side of chili fries with his lunch today because he’s pursuing the ultimate outcome improving my health by cutting out meat. Tyson Foods, among others, may not agree with George that this is a desirable outcome. If George succeeds at cutting meat out of his diet, he will buy fewer Tyson brand meat products. So here is a case of self-interested consumption aimed at an ultimate outcome that at least one other market party disprefers. (I have no idea whether self-interested consumption decisions tend to be like this, but the point is that a proponent of Explanation A owes us a reason for thinking the ultimate outcomes that ethical consumers aim at are more frequently controversial than are the ultimate outcomes that self-interested consumers aim at.) There’s a second and more decisive reason why Explanation A fails. Notice, first, that a single act of ethical consumption hardly ever produces the consumer’s desired common good outcome. Sweatshop labor doesn’t disappear after Robin decides not to buy that hoodie. Coffee farmers don’t have middle-class wages and retirement accounts now that Javier has purchased a 12 ounce bag of Fair Trade coffee beans. At best, the consumer’s decision pushes the world slightly closer to the desired outcome than it was before. But, then, if the ethical consumer doesn’t achieve their desired outcome, the fact that someone disprefers that still-hypothetical outcome is irrelevant – at least insofar as we’re trying to assess which acts tend to produce Pareto improvements. The question isn’t whether there’s disagreement about the desirability of the consumer’s vision for society; the question is whether, after the act of ethical consumption, anyone disprefers the new distribution of resources to the old one. If A is trying to

answer the first question (about disagreeable visions for society) in the affirmative, then the

difference A picks out between ethical consumption and self-interested consumption is not a

difference in Pareto improvement (which is what we’re trying to find) – and may not be a real difference

at all. Obversely, if A is trying to answer the second question in the affirmative – that is, if A is just

trying to say, after an act of ethical consumption there tends to be someone who disprefers the new distribution of

resources – then A and B are identical explanations. So Explanation A is inadequate. It either fails to

pick out a morally relevant difference between ethical consumption and self-interested consumption

or is a sloppy way of stating Explanation B.

So let’s consider Explanation B. Of the two, this one seems to fit the actual text of Hussain’s

explanation less-well, but it does have the advantage of being clearly related to Pareto improvements.

B says that ethical consumption tends to produce dispreferred distributions of resources while self-

interested consumption does not. Hence, ethical consumption, unlike self-interested consumption,

tends not to be Pareto improving.

The trouble with Explanation B is, simply, that it’s false. In particular, it is false that acts of

ethical consumption tend to move society to a new distribution of resources that at least one party

disprefers to the previous distribution. Suppose the consumer has just refused a purchase for moral

reasons. That means, there isn’t a new distribution of resources at all. A moment ago, the resources

were distributed in such-and-such way and now, a moment later, post-refusal, they are still

distributed that way. So no one is worse off than they were a moment ago; no one has a reason to

disprefer the new distribution to the old. In the obverse case, if the consumer has just made a

purchase for moral reasons, there really is a new distribution of resources, but it is surely a Pareto

improvement over the old one. The consumer herself prefers the new distribution!52 The business

52 To stave off objection, I should clarify: the ethical consumer all-things-considered prefers the new distribution, even if she prudentially prefers the old one. I am assuming the concept of Pareto improvement, where it appeals to

she just transacted with also prefers the new distribution. And, as before, no one else seems to be

any worse off than they were a moment ago. Hence, it’s not true that ethical consumption tends not

to produce Pareto improvements. So Explanation B is inadequate. That can’t be a morally relevant

difference between self-interested consumption and ethical consumption. It’s not a difference at all!

Now, there are two obvious respects in which other market parties really might disprefer acts

of ethical consumption. First, it is sometimes true that bystanders to a transaction have preferences

about who owns the goods being transacted. Maybe, for instance, the Sweatshop Sweater Co.

prefers distributions of resources in which their ethical competitors have full inventories and no

consumer dollars over distributions in which their competitors have depleted inventories and many

consumer dollars. If so, then there’s a sense in which all ethical sweater purchases must fail to

generate Pareto Improvements – namely, because the Sweatshop Sweater Co. disprefers all the

resulting distributions.

But this, too, fails to pick out a real difference between ethical and self-interested

consumption. In any competitive industry, there will be firms who can be said to disprefer the

distributions of resources that result from their competitors’ sales. Adidas disprefers distributions

where Nike has few shoes in stock but plenty of consumer dollars over distributions where Nike has

plenty of shoes in stock and few consumer dollars. That means there’s a sense in which all self-

interested Nike shoe purchases fail to generate Pareto Improvements.

Of course, to this point we’ve been assuming that preferences like these can be screened out;

a sale of Nike shoes does count as a Pareto improvement because Nike and the shoe customer both

preferences, is appealing to all-things-considered preferences and not just preferences-in-a-respect. After all, lots of transactions are dispreferred in-a-respect. I like ice cream cake, and I all-things-considered prefer the distributions where I own an ice cream cake to those where I do not. But even when I acquire an ice cream cake, I still disprefer the part where I’ve surrendered $30. That is, I disprefer-in-a-respect to have an ice cream cake even though I don’t all-things-considered disprefer it. But that’s how purchases are. You can’t buy your cake and keep the cash, too.

31 prefer the new distribution and no one else is directly affected. But if the present suggestion is correct and ethical consumption decisions fail to be Pareto improving whenever some market bystander disprefers the resulting distribution, then for precisely the same reason, we’ll have to say that self-interested consumption decisions often fail to be Pareto improving on account of begrudging bystanders. This is not a moral difference.

There is a second respect in which other market parties might disprefer acts of ethical consumption. They might disprefer the new distribution of resources in the sense that they disprefer it to the one that would have obtained had the consumer not made that particular decision. That suggests,

Explanation C: An act of ethical consumption moves society to a new distribution of

resources that at least one person will tend to disprefer to the distribution that would otherwise

obtain had the act not been performed, whereas an act of self-interested consumption moves

society to a new distribution of resources that no other market parties will tend to disprefer

to the distribution that would otherwise obtain had the act not been performed.

This explanation is obviously even more divorced from the text of Hussain’s reply.

However, of the three explanations we’ve considered, C is the only one that allows us to articulate a respect in which market parties might have a legitimate complaint about ethical consumption. It’s not that ethical consumption represents a controversial vision for society or that it leaves other people worse off than they were before, it’s that the consumer who starts making moral purchases – purchases she wouldn’t make if she were acting for only self-interested reasons – deprives businesses of customers they would otherwise have had. If Javier buys a bag of Fair Trade coffee instead of a cheaper, tastier non-Fair-Trade variety, then that gives the Cheap Tasty Coffee Company grounds

for complaint: Actually, we prefer the distribution of resources that would have obtained had you bought our coffee.

If Robin decides for moral reasons not to purchase that clearance-rack hoodie and so goes home

with one fewer garment, the hoodie merchant has a complaint: I’m not a fan of your not-buying my goods.

However, there is a critical problem with Explanation C. The problem stems from the fact

that the notion of comparison that C employs is different from the one employed by the concept,

Pareto improvement.

Recall, a Pareto improvement is defined as a movement from one distribution of resources

to another such that at least one party is better off (or has better-satisfied preferences) and no parties

are worse off (or have less satisfied preferences.)53 Notice, this definition has embedded in it a

temporal comparative account of benefit. A temporal comparative account of benefit says, a person is

benefitted by an act if and only if that act leaves them better off than they were before.54 The Pareto improvement

concept takes this idea, then (i) applies it specifically to acts that move society from one distribution

of resources to another, and (ii) aggregates across all members of society. This gives us our standard

definition:

A society is (Temporally) Pareto-improved by a market decision if and only if that decision results in

a distribution of resources where at least one person is better off than they were before, and no persons are

worse off than they were before.

53 Here’s a typical example from an Economics textbook: “If trade moves the allocation [of resources such that] B is better off… and A is no worse off; this is a Pareto improvement.” Barr, Nicholas. 2012. Economics of the Welfare State. OUP Oxford. pg 45. 54 This is a simplified treatment of the accounts of harm spelled out in Hanser (2008). (Harm being the negative valence correlate of benefit.) Hanser, Matthew. 2008. “The Metaphysics of Harm.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2): 421–450.

On the other hand, Explanation C appeals to a counterfactual comparative account of benefit.

This account says, a person is benefitted by an act if and only if that act leaves them better off than they would otherwise be. We can define a correlative notion of social improvement using the counterfactual account and following the same procedure:

A society is Counterfactually Pareto-improved by a market decision if and only if that decision

results in a distribution of resources where at least one person is better off than they would otherwise be, and

no persons are worse off than they would otherwise be.

Here is one crucial difference between these two notions of Pareto improvement. Although the free market produces a massive number of Temporal Pareto improvements, it does not produce many Counterfactual Pareto improvements. Almost every consumption decision leaves someone worse off than they otherwise would have been.

When I decide to buy a used car from person A rather than person B, I thereby deprive B of business she would otherwise have received from me. When you decide not to go out on the town tonight, there are restaurants, bars, and Uber-drivers you leave worse off than they otherwise would have been. When we shop at one store and not another, when we buy one product and not another, when we buy one brand and not another, when we buy something on-sale rather than at retail price, when we decide not to buy at all, we inevitably leave some party worse off than they would otherwise have been. Hence, the free market does not tend to produce Counterfactual Pareto improvements; free market transactions do not tend to leave everyone no worse off than they would otherwise be. And so, even if Hussain is right that the free market is justifiable for producing many

Temporal Pareto improvements, it’s not the case that the free market is justifiable for producing many

Counterfactual Pareto improvements. (Because it doesn’t do that!)

This points to two ways in which Explanation C fails. First, we cannot use the notion of a

Counterfactual Pareto improvement to draw a distinction between public sphere actions and private sphere actions. The free market doesn’t get its justification from Counterfactual Pareto improvements, so there’s no general Counterfactual Pareto improvement justification for free markets to justify the private/public distinction. A second reason why Explanation C fails is that it doesn’t pick out a real difference between ethical consumption and self-interested consumption. Nearly all consumption decisions leave someone worse off than they otherwise would be. So we cannot use this fact to create problems for ethical consumption in particular.

I conclude, then, that the MPSO should be rejected. It should be rejected because it does not succeed at drawing a morally relevant distinction between ethical consumption and self-interested consumption and so does not succeed at showing that ethical consumption needs to abide by democratic constraints. The notion that Hussain appeals to – Temporal Pareto improvement – cannot do the work because it’s not the case that ethical consumption and self-interested consumption differ in any meaningful way in their ability to produce Temporal Pareto improvements. And the most plausible replacement concept – Counterfactual Pareto improvement – can’t do the work because, again, it doesn’t pick out a real difference between the two categories of consumption (and anyway doesn’t seem to be something that market transactions ever accomplish.)

I assume (as does Hussain) that our self-interested consumption decisions do not need to defer to democratic values and procedures. Which means, since we have failed to identify a morally relevant difference between self-interested consumption and ethical consumption, ethical consumption does not need to defer to democracy either. The PSO fails.

Chapter 2 – Ethical Consumption is Business-as-usual

An Extended Defense of Introverted Boycotting

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I drew a distinction between two kinds of boycotting activities: introverted activities and extroverted activities. Both involve consumers wielding market powers for moral reasons. An introverted boycotter wields her own market powers, making or refusing purchases for moral reasons. An extroverted boycotter wields (or tries to wield) for moral reasons other peoples’ market powers, pressuring other parties to make or refuse particular transactions. It therefore seems that extroverted boycotting presupposes the efficacy and permissibility of introverted boycotting. (If we both thought boycotting futile, would I bother threatening you with one? If we both thought boycotting immoral, would you urge me to join yours?) And this is why we started our inquiry where we did: by considering the presumptive permissibility of introverted boycotting.

I have already defended that presumption against the Public Sphere Objection, which is the best developed and furthest reaching argument on offer. But it is not the only argument. Ethicists have raised a variety of other moral concerns about the practice. Boycotting stands accused of being unfair, of being objectionably harmful, and of being counterproductive. The present preponderance of opinion seems to be that boycotting is a moral minefield – perilous, erratic, probably best avoided altogether.

This will be a chapter for minesweeping. I argue that boycotting is far less morally problematic than others have made it out to be – that, in fact, none of the concerns raised to date seriously undermine consumer permissions to make ethical consumption decisions.

Two Constraints

We are investigating the ethics of boycotting, and I want to begin with a few topic-limning remarks about what I take that to mean. (What questions are we trying to answer? What will progress look like?)

In the previous chapter, I defined a ‘boycott’ as a market transaction made or refused for moral reasons. That for moral reasons clause, I argued, is necessary for distinguishing boycotting behaviors from other kinds of refusals-to-transact (from, e.g., refusals to buy that which is distasteful, inconvenient, unaffordable, or substandard.) Intuitively, what sets boycotters apart from other consumers is their pursuit of the common good – whatever they take that to be.

Boycotting is obviously not the only way to pursue the good. There are many other methods and, crucially, some are better than others. Persuasive arguing, for instance, tends to be a better method for promoting the good than fist fighting. It is more effective, less harmful, and agreeably legal. And this explains why our moral license to fist fight in pursuit of the good is less expansive than our moral license to argue in pursuit of the good. (Which is to say, if there are occasions when we’re permitted to throw a righteous punch, the occasions when we’re permitted to state a righteous argument are far more numerous.) This sort of comparative assessment must be one of the goals of boycott ethics. Moral agents have options in how they go about making the world a better place, and we want to know, is boycotting a relatively good option or a relatively bad option for pursuing the good – and why?

If it turns out to be relatively good, we should be encouraged to boycott more often and in the stead of other activities; if it turns out to be relatively bad, we should be encouraged to boycott less often and to channel our beneficence through other activities. Thus, our topic is defined on one side by the contrast between boycotting and other means of pursuing the good.

A second contrast defines our topic: the contrast between ethical consumption and normal consumption. By “normal consumption,” I mean the broad category of consumer decisions that are both routine and prudentially motivated. This includes, e.g., the purchase of a tank of gas or a morning coffee, an auto-renewing subscription to Netflix, a retirement account asset, an electricity bill, a pack of holiday decorations, an ATM fee, and a bottle of dishwasher detergent. Another of our goals in doing boycott ethics should be sorting out the moral differences between normal consumption and ethical consumption. We already have a commonsense view about the moral status of normal consumption – permissible and not especially praiseworthy or blameworthy – and we would like, first, to know how the moral status of ethical consumption differs and, second, to better understand the relative importance and proper role of moral reasons and prudential reasons in our consumption decisions.

These remarks suggest two guidelines for satisfactory arguments about the ethics of boycotting.

First, arguments that meaningfully advance our understanding of boycott ethics should pick out morally salient features of boycotting behaviors in particular – which is to say, they should pick out features that boycotts have (though, not necessarily all boycotts) and which other good- promoting activities lack (though, not necessarily all other activities.) Call this ‘the Particularity

Constraint.’

The Particularity Constraint isn’t itself particular to boycotting ethics. We should accept something like this Constraint when investigating the relative goodness of any well-intentioned behavior. Suppose we wanted to explain why fist fighting is relatively bad. Here’s a poor explanation: fist fighting is relatively bad because there’s always a risk that we’ve mis-identified which people need punching and, thus, a risk that our fists will accidentally set back the good, rather than promote it. This explanation is poor because the feature it picks out is nothing special about fist fighting. It is equally

38 true of, say, voting decisions that there’s a risk of voting for the wrong candidates because we’ve misidentified the good. There’s a risk when donating to charity that we’ll send our dollars to the wrong causes. There’s a risk when arguing about ethics that we’ll wind up defending the wrong conclusions. Because this type of risk is ubiquitous, it does not explain why fist fighting is relatively bad. A good explanation would, instead, point to features that are relatively distinctive of fist fighting. And that’s the gist of the Particularity Constraint. Since we are trying to work out how relatively good/bad boycotting is, satisfying arguments (i.e. ones that help us in our work) should focus on features that are distinctive of boycotting behaviors. Such arguments will identify ways in which boycotts are different from alternative methods of promoting the good and will explain how those differences affect the moral worth of boycotting behaviors. Arguments that violate the

Particularity Constraint will largely fail to advance our understanding of boycotting ethics because they will largely fail to tell us anything about the moral dimensions of boycotting behaviors in particular.

There is another plausible constraint. It says that satisfying arguments about boycotting ethics should not have substantial and implausible implications for the permissibility of normal consumption. Call this ‘the Normal Consumption Constraint.’ It demands, in essence, that our arguments about ethical consumption not overgeneralize (and in disagreeable ways) into arguments about all consumption.

There are a couple reasons why we should we accept this Constraint. First, it seems plausible that most normal consumption decisions really are permissible – and thus, that arguments implying otherwise should be rejected. One bit of evidence for this is the fact that most of the time, most of us act as though normal consumption is permissible. We act like we’re permitted to walk into a store and buy the things we like, for whatever reasons we like, and leave the things we don’t. We act like we’re allowed to change our minds, our habits, and our tastes, freely and without serious moral

reflection. We act like these things are permissible by doing them, and then by being un-troubled by

our having done them. That’s not true of everyone, of course. Some people are troubled by normal

consumption; some people are persistently uneasy about pursuing their own interests in the market.

These people should also accept the Normal Consumption Constraint. A person who feels ill-at-ease

with capitalism, consumer culture, and the institutions of the global market must nevertheless and in

the meantime muddle on as a consumer. It may be morally bad to consume as we do, but it is

apparently not the case that we can avoid normal consumption, and so it must not be the case that

we ought to avoid it, either.1

And this draws us to the second reason in favor of the Normal Consumption Constraint.

Any argument against boycotting that can, with small modifications, also serve as an argument

against consumption simpliciter seems to be doing something disingenuous. At the very least, such an

argument has been mislabeled; we ought to re-tag it as an ‘Objection to General Consumption’ and

assess it according to its merits as such. Suppose it were argued that boycotting is immoral because

boycotters impose their own idiosyncratic standards on other market parties and without their permission. I think

we’d be right to complain about the objector’s narrow focus on boycotting behaviors when

comparable sins stain the ledgers of normal consumers. Normal consumers could decide at any

moment that, say, good jeans really ought to be dark-wash or that good yogurt really ought to be

low-sugar, and they could then impose these standards (of taste) on firms without their permission,

forcing industry members to fall in line or fall behind. And that seems morally acceptable. (That is,

consumer fickleness is allowable, even if not something to celebrate.) Hence, our objection violates

1 Here one might be inclined to cite hardcore off-the-grid-ers as the ethical ideal. Perhaps they’re right to walk away from the market rather than fight vainly against it from the inside. Maybe. But (a) considering the magnitude of the sacrifice demanded by going off the grid, this move seems at best supererogatory; (b) we can reasonably question whether these individuals actually succeed at disentangling themselves from the institutions of the market; and (c) the world contains neither cabins nor woods sufficient for an en masse off- the-grid decampment.

40 the Normal Consumption Constraint; it has substantial and implausible implications for our permissions to engage in normal consumption. Once we notice that consumers routinely impose standards of taste on firms without their permission, and note our own disinclination to complain about that, it does not seem plausible to object to boycotting on essentially the same grounds.

This suggests an important point of clarification. While the Normal Consumption Constraint is a useful heuristic, reminding us to consider whether our arguments overgeneralize in unattractive ways, it is not meant to have the force of unbreachable law. We ought not require, for instance, that arguments about boycotting have zero implications for normal consumption. That would be too strong. If an argument were to imply that a handful of normal consumption decisions which we might have initially thought were permissible are actually impermissible, that might be an acceptable implication. In each case, we would simply have to balance the intuitive force of the objection against the intuitive force of the initial judgment that the normal consumption behaviors in question are permissible.

From here on, I’ll be assuming that the Particularity Constraint and the Normal

Consumption Constraint are both reasonable requirements. As we’ll see, much of what’s been said against boycotting fails to satisfy one or the other of these constraints.

Two Kinds of Objections

Connie Consumer is our prototypical boycotter. She has what she takes to be good moral reasons for thinking that X is morally bad, and she plans to oppose X with her purchasing decisions.

(Or, alternatively, she has good reasons for thinking Y is morally good, and she plans to promote Y with her purchasing decisions.) Let X range across a wide variety of possible consumer complaints – exploitative labor practices, financial malfeasance, dangerous products, immoral corporate policies,

toxic political affiliations, environmental mismanagement. We ask, What sorts of objections might be raised

against Connie’s decision to boycott, and to what extent do these objections undermine her permissions to boycott?

First, let’s split Connie’s decision into two discrete steps.

Step 1: Connie decides that X is morally bad and that she’s allowed to oppose it.

Step 2: Connie decides to oppose X by boycotting.

Sometimes we may object to a particular boycott because we disagree with Step 1. We think

the consumer has picked the wrong cause. These are Substantive Objections to boycotting.2 To

cite one popular example, maybe Connie lives in 1930s Germany and is wondering whether to join

the burgeoning “Don’t Buy Jewish” boycotts.3 The most obvious objections to this boycott are

Substantive. We might point out that the ability of German Jews to enjoy normal economic relations

with the rest of society is a significant moral good, not a moral bad, or that religious and ethnic

discrimination is a serious moral bad, not a moral good. These objections seem sufficient for

explaining why Connie ought not participate in this boycott. And these count as Substantive

Objections because they attack the boycotters’ aims or cause (viz. discrimination against German

Jews) rather than their particular methods. The problem rests first and foremost with the decision to

pursue discrimination and not with the choice to do so with a boycott.

2 Most Substantive Objections take issue with the first conjunct of Step 1 – the claim about X’s moral badness. But it’s possible to take issue with the second conjunct, instead. That is, there may be cases where a consumer is correct in thinking that such-and-such a cause is good but incorrect in thinking that she’s allowed to promote it. Radzik (2017) offers an example of this sort. She points out that it’s sometimes more important for us to mind our own business than to promote the good. Were I to boycott your business in order to dissuade you from committing adultery against your spouse, I would seemingly be correct that your marital faithfulness is morally good but mistaken in thinking I’m allowed to promote it with my purchases. Radzik, Linda. 2017. “Boycotts and the Social Enforcement of Justice.” Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (1): 102– 22. See p.113. 3 This case is also cited in Beck (2019) and Hussain (2012). For an extended discussion and critique of the case, see Beckstein (2014). Beck, Valentin. 2019. “Consumer Boycotts as Instruments for Structural Change.” Journal of Applied Philosophy. 36 (4): 543–559. See p.553; Beckstein, Martin. 2014. “Political Consumer Activism and Democratic Legitimacy.” Studies in Social & Political Thought 24: 41-64. See, p.52-3; Hussain, Waheed. 2012. “Is Ethical Consumerism an Impermissible Form of Vigilantism?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40 (2): 111–43. See, p.117-8.

In other cases, we may object to a boycott because we disagree with Step 2. That is, we may

grant that a consumer’s aims are acceptable but deny that she should go about promoting them with

a boycott. These are Procedural Objections. Hussain’s Public Sphere Objection is one of these.

His complaint with, say, a consumer who boycotts factory farms isn’t that factory farming is actually

a good thing – which would be a Substantive Objection – but that opposing factory farms with a

boycott is inappropriate. His point is that, of all the ways you might oppose factory farming, social-change-

boycotting in particular is wrong because it’s non-democratic. Procedural Objections grant the cause while

decrying the method.

On Substantive Objections and Why We Can Ignore Them

Although Procedural Objections have drawn the lion’s share of attention in the boycotting

literature, a handful of authors have also defended Substantive Objections. Nicole Hassoun (2019)

claims that boycotting cannot be used “in ways that violate basic rights or liberties or result in great

environmental destruction and so forth.”4 And as illustration, she points out that “white people

should not discriminate by, for instance, refusing to buy from minority ethnic or racial groups

because [the white people] think white people should rule.”5 This is a Substantive Objection because

it primarily takes issues with the consumers’ cause (white supremacy) rather than their methods (the

refusal to buy.) Dennis Garrett makes a similar point, asking rhetorically, “How defensible is a

boycott if the ultimate goal is the deprivation or restriction of a basic right of the target

organization?”6 Again, a Substantive Objection: one should not deprive others of their basic rights

(whether by boycott or by other means.)

4 Hassoun, Nicole. 2019. “Consumption and Social Change.” Economics & Philosophy 35 (1): 29–47. See p.45. 5 Hassoun op. cit., p.39. 6 Garrett, Dennis E. 1986. “Consumer Boycotts: Are Targets Always the Bad Guys.” Business and Society Review 58 (2): 17-21.

Waheed Hussain also makes this point about basic rights, but he adds that boycotts must

also be “directed at (significantly) advancing an agenda framed in terms of a reasonable conception

of the common good.”7 This demand seems to embed both a Substantive Objection and a

Procedural Objection. There is a Substantive concern about boycotts that aim at an end which

cannot be framed in terms of a reasonable conception of the common good. (Hussain thinks there is

something defective about such an end such that we ought not pursue it – by boycotts or other

means.) And there is a Procedural Objection about boycotts which fail to significantly advance

whatever end they aim at. (In such cases, the complaint isn’t that the goals can’t be framed in the

right way but that they ought not be pursued via boycott since doing so won’t significantly advance

their achievement.) Finally, Valentin Beck claims that “organised consumer boycotts are only

legitimate if they are based on justifiable substantive demands.”8 He considers a case in which a

religious group calls for consumers to boycott a store run by a gay couple and concludes that this

“would be highly condemnable, because it would clearly violate basic norms of non-discriminatory

treatment.”9 This is a Substantive Objection because Beck’s primary concern is with the decision to

violate norms of non-discrimination, not with the decision to do so with a boycott.

I submit that we can ignore all such Substantive Objections. They do not meaningfully

undermine consumer permissions to introvertedly boycott. Indeed, as a category, they all seem to

violate the Particularity Constraint. I claimed earlier (and argued brusquely) that arguments which

violate this Constraint thereby fail to advance our understanding of the moral dimensions of

boycotting. Let me now offer a less-laconic defense of that claim and of the Particularity Constraint.

7 Hussain op. cit., p.126. 8 Beck op. cit., p.553. 9 Beck op. cit., p.554.

When we propose a particular Substantive Objection to boycotting – or, what comes to the same thing, when we suggest a Substantive Constraint that boycotters must respect – we can express our moral concern at different levels of generality. We might say something reasonably specific, like, it’s wrong to use a boycott to deprive Jews of their economic livelihoods. Or we might say something more general, like it’s wrong to use a boycott to deprive any religious, cultural, or ethnic group of their economic livelihoods.

At the extreme of maximal generality, we might propose a sort of master constraint like, it’s wrong to use a boycott to promote evil or to oppose the good.

The upside of such a master constraint is that we don’t need to argue for it. (What part of

‘don’t promote evil’ sounds bad to you?) The downside is that it’s neither interesting nor action-guiding.

The master rule is uninteresting because it expresses what is very nearly an analytic moral truth – viz. if you think it would be wrong to join this boycott, then you ought not join this boycott. And precisely because people disagree about which causes count as evil, people will also disagree about what the master constraint requires of them. As long as Connie Consumer believes that, say, anti-Semitism is non- evil, she will deny that the master constraint tells against her joining a “Don’t Buy Jewish” boycott.

And this is also why the constraint is non-action-guiding. From the perspective of the individual, the only boycotts it rules out are those that she herself accepts as evil, and since the consumer is already morally persuaded against joining those boycotts, we wouldn’t expect to change the course of her behavior when we get her to accept our master constraint.

We see a less extreme example of the same phenomenon in the popular objection to boycotts that undermine basic rights. While this constraint is eminently plausible, it too trades off usefulness for obviousness. Everyone abhors rights violations; not everyone agrees about who has basic rights and which rights they have. A bigoted boycotter who earnestly believes he threatens no rights can accept this constraint and continue to boycott without contradiction. We may, of course,

disagree with him! But the point is that we cannot show him that he is boycotting wrongfully merely

by pointing out that boycotts should not undermine rights. There’s no disagreement about that!

Hussain’s argument against the American Family Association (AFA) boycotts of the mid-

2000s has precisely this problem. In their heyday, the AFA frequently sought to “promote the

Biblical ethic of decency in American society” by organizing boycotts against market agents whom

they deemed objectionably supportive of LGBT+ causes or individuals.10 Hussain argues that these

boycotts are clearly immoral because of “their impact on basic freedoms.”11 Since boycotts must not

undermine basic freedoms and since the AFA boycotts undermined the basic freedoms of LGBT+

individuals and their market allies, those boycotts were impermissible. While this argument may be

sound, it’s not persuasive. Surely the members of the AFA weren’t thinking to themselves, Our

boycotts undermine basic freedoms, but that’s okay! Rather, because they viewed homosexuality as deviant

and immoral, they would simply deny that basic freedoms were at stake. The AFA members could

simultaneously accept Hussain’s Substantive Constraint (Don’t use boycotting to undermine basic freedoms!)

and continue boycotting, without contradiction. Hussain will have persuaded them of nothing.

Of course, Hussain could have proposed a more specific Substantive Constraint, one that

does directly entail that the AFA boycotts were impermissible (e.g. one must not use boycotts to prevent the

normalization and non-discrimination of LGBT+ individuals.) Certainly if any members of the AFA

accepted that constraint, they’d need to concede that they were wrongfully boycotting. But, of

course, they wouldn’t accept it! This way of arguing against the AFA simply begs the question. The

goodness of normalizing homosexuality is precisely what’s at issue. And, notice, by moving from a

10 ACLU. 1995. “The Religious Right in Washington.” 1995. Accessed from: https://web.archive.org/web/20070403192146/http://www.aclu-wa.org/detail.cfm?id=149. 11 Hussain op. cit., p.118.

46 general constraint to a specific one, we’ve reversed the original trade-off. We’ve now purchased being interesting and action-guiding at the cost of being obvious.

And this is the crux of my complaint about Substantive Objections – and their violation of the Particularity Constraint. Substantive Objections to boycotting aren’t really about boycotting.

They’re arguments about which things are worthy of promotion. And to defend a Substantive

Objection – to say something new or interesting or persuasive about which causes are the good ones – is perforce to abandon our discussion of boycott ethics and strike off into the wilds of some other topic. I cannot simply claim, for instance, that boycotters aren’t allowed to promote pro-choice causes because abortion undermines basic rights and expect my pro-choice readers to nod along. To avoid begging the question, I’ll need to make a lengthy detour through procreation ethics. At which point, returning finally to our original topic, maybe I’ll state another Substantive Objection like, boycotters aren’t allowed to oppose nuclear power plants, then STOP – I’m off to write another book defending that claim. The problem isn’t merely that such detours are impractical. It’s that they’re irrelevant. Even were I to persuade you that abortion is wicked or that nuclear power is wonderful, I wouldn’t thereby have improved your understanding of boycott ethics. That would be like trying to improve your understanding of shoveling ethics by giving a sound argument against strikebreaking. (“Ahh, since strikebreaking is wrong, we now know that strikebreaking excavators are engaged in wrongful shoveling!”) This is the thrust of the Particularity Constraint: to do boycott ethics, we need to say things about boycotts in particular. Arguments which violate this constraint are not arguments about boycotting.

And this is why we can ignore all Substantive Objections to boycotting. These Objections are not necessarily incorrect or mistaken, but they are unhelpful. It is not our task to sort out which aims are wicked and which are worthy. That’s the job of applied ethics, broadly construed. And even if we could sort that out, it wouldn’t meaningfully advance our understanding of boycott ethics.

Procedural Objections

Setting Substantive Objections aside leaves us to consider Procedural Objections against boycotting. As I’ve mentioned already, the Public Sphere Objection is the best developed Procedural

Objection on offer, but it is hardly alone. Indeed, the existing literature on boycotting has the curious distinction of being both largely exploratory and largely univocal. Although some authors are explicitly ambivalent about the merits of their arguments (“One might say this, but would that argument be sound?”) and others target a relatively small subset of boycotts, the literature considered as a whole can seem to form a preponderance of evidence against boycotting.

In what remains of this chapter, I will argue that this is a mistake. Along the way, I’ll also impose some organization on the arguments we encounter and, where necessary, develop those that need developing. To telegraph what’s coming: I think Procedural Objections fall into three broad categories. (i) Some object that boycotting wrongfully harms innocents (i.e. parties acknowledged as blameless for whatever misdeeds motivate the boycotters.) (ii) Some object that boycotting is wrongfully unfair to the (non-innocent) parties being targeted. (iii) Some object that boycotting is counterproductive. I’ll argue that none of these concerns successfully undermine consumer permissions to engage in introverted boycott activities – to make or refuse purchases for moral reasons.

Does Boycotting Wrongfully Harm Innocents?

A number of philosophers have expressed the worry that boycotting wrongfully harms innocents – which is to say, individuals with negligible involvement in whatever moral misdeeds

motivate the boycott.12 There are two slightly different complaints here. There is a general worry that

boycotts by their very nature inflict unjustified and foreseeable harm on innocents, and there is a

specific worry about a subclass of boycotts that intentionally inflict harm on innocents.

The standard story about boycotts is that they provoke change, when they do, by inflicting

economic losses on their targets. But boycotts are not surgical strikes. The losses suffered by a

particular target tend to branch outward through her Rolodex – to her employees, owners,

shareholders, suppliers, buyers, contractors, landlords, tenants, customers, and neighbors. (And then

to some of their relatives, both familial and economic.) These “peripheral agents” share in the target’s

misfortunes even when they do not share in the target’s misdeeds. Thus, boycotts foreseeably harm

innocents. This is of moral importance because acts that foreseeably harm innocents seem to require

extra justification.

For boycotts, this extra justification would presumably arrive in the form of efficacy – genuine

success at promoting the good – but as our objectors point out, that efficacy is not always

forthcoming. If “the success of a boycott seems at best distant and speculative,” Mills argues,

“immediate and real harm to innocent parties cannot be dismissed.”13 Rodin and Yudkin state that

“if alternative strategies seem likely to ameliorate the moral evil with fewer harmful consequences,

then boycotts would not be justified until such plausible lower-cost strategies have been reasonably

attempted and shown to fail.”14 Nussbaum concurs. In the absence of efficacy, “it is difficult to see

what is accomplished... that cannot be more effectively accomplished” by an alternative method.15

12 Garrett (1986), Mills (1997), and Nussbaum (2007) all raise this concern. Garrett op. cit., p.20; Mills, Claudia. 1996. “Should We Boycott Boycotts?” Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (3): 136–148. See, p.139; Nussbaum, Martha. 2007. “Against Academic Boycotts.” Dissent Magazine. 2007. See, p.33. 13 Mills op. cit., p.139. 14 Rodin, David, and Michael Yudkin. 2011. “Academic Boycotts.” Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (4): 465– 485. See, p.474-5. 15 Nussbaum op. cit., p.33.

(Nussbaum describes a handful of other strategies including censuring, organizing public

condemnation, refusing to reward, offering help to the harmed, and being vigilant on behalf of the

truth.16) This is the Foreseeable Harm Objection. All boycotts cause foreseeable harm to

innocents, and boycotts that do not successfully promote the good – and thus do not offset the

harms done – are pro tanto wrong

A second, related objection points out that boycotts may also intentionally (not just

foreseeably) harm innocents. Sometimes boycotters set out to injure both the guilty and innocent

together. This may happen particularly in cases where the target of the boycott is some large

institution, state, or government. Mills cites the 1992 Colorado boycotts as an example.17 That year,

Colorado voters amended the state constitution to forbid local governments from passing any anti-

discrimination policies that would include sexual orientation as a protected status. Progressives

called for retaliatory boycotts against the state’s tourism industry, boycotts that would inevitably

inflict losses on all Coloradans whose interests were entangled with tourism, including ski resorts,

hospitality firms, local attractions and merchants (museums, parks, gift shops, restaurants, grocery

stores), contractors and employees (ski instructors, hotel valets, waiters, clerks, guides), as well as any

beneficiaries of state programs funded in part by tourist-paid taxes. Observers at the time noted that

the areas of Colorado most affected by the boycott (namely, popular tourist destinations like

Boulder, Denver, and Aspen) were also the areas where voter disapproval to Amendment 2 was

strongest.18 Presumably, this was not a mere accident or unwanted side effect; presumably, the

economic losses inflicted on liberal tourist-town voters were both foreseen and intended. The whole

16 Nussbaum op. cit. p.31-2. 17 Mills op. cit., p.136. 18 Johnson, Dirk. 1992. “Colorado Faces Boycott Over Its Gay-Bias Vote.” The New York Times, December 3, 1992, sec. U.S. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/03/us/colorado-faces-boycott-over-its-gay-bias- vote.html.

point of boycotting Colorado, after all, was to make things worse for Coloradans. The losses in

tourism dollars were a motivational stick wielded against the state’s citizens – voters on both sides of

the amendment – to drive them in the boycotters’ desired direction.

Our second objection concludes much as the first did. Actions which intentionally harm

innocents require extra justification – possibly even more so than actions which only foreseeably

harm innocents. Since consumers have access to less harmful methods for promoting their ends,

boycotts that intentionally harm innocents without offsetting promises of efficacy are pro tanto

wrong. This is the Intentional Harm Objection.19

Neither of these objections is successful. Both violate the Normal Consumption Constraint.

Many consumer purchases inflict foreseeable losses on peripheral agents. Just about any shift

in consumption – from one firm to another, one industry to another, one product to another – will

inflict foreseeable losses on someone. Consider, for example, how consumer demand for ice cream

will tend to crater during an unexpectedly cool June. This is a misfortune for both ice cream

merchants and peripheral agents – employees, shareholders, creameries – all of whom are perfectly

innocent, insofar as an uncommonly chilly June is not a wrongdoing that is driving consumers away

and for which blame needs to be assigned.20 By the lights of the Foreseeable Harm Objection, ice

cream consumers must surely require extra justification to inflict these foreseeable harms, and it’s

not clear they have it. (After all, if they’re worried about staying warm, there are less harmful ways to

accomplish their ends. They could buy a warm drink, jog in place, or bring a blanket to the ice cream

19 Mills (1997) and Friedman (2001) both raise this concern. Friedman, Monroe. 2001. “Ethical Dilemmas Associated with Consumer Boycotts.” Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (2): 232–240. See p.237-8; Mills op. cit., p.139. 20 Those who think the ice cream industry is too steeped in animal exploitation to count as innocent should feel free to substitute some other industry whose fortunes fail with the weather – surf shops, tanning parlors, vegan Fair Trade hot chocolate biodiesel food trucks.

parlor.) But this is implausible. We do not think consumers, in the thoughtless pursuit of their own

interests, wrong those whose economic fortunes they cause to flag.

The point isn’t only that ethical consumption decisions and normal consumption decisions

can both foreseeably harm innocents. It’s that the harms done are effectively indistinguishable. If

Charles and Charlene both eat one banana per day then suddenly decide to stop, the harms that their

fruit refusals inflict on innocents will be the same – even if Charles is refusing bananas for frivolous

aesthetic reasons and Charlene for pressing moral reasons. The harms done by Charles surely do not

raise our moral hackles. I submit that Charlene’s shouldn’t either.

The Intended Harm Objection also violates the Normal Consumption Constraint. Consumers

sometimes intentionally inflict losses on innocents in order to get them to do what they want – and

for mere self-interested reasons, rather than principled moral reasons. Consider the case of New

Coke. Facing declining sales and market share in the mid-80s, the Coca Cola Company decided to

reformulate their eponymous product to meet changing consumer tastes. They replaced the old

Coke formula with the so-called “New Coke,” a lab-concocted, focus-group-tested, winning

alternative. Consumer backlash was swift and intense. Some protested; some placed angry customer

support calls; still others sent irate letters threatening never to purchase a Coke product again. Mere

months later, facing slumping sales and dismal international buy-in, the company brought back the

original formula – billed as “Coca-Cola Classic.”

There were plenty of economic parties injured by this consumer campaign – from Coke

executives and employees, down through shareholders, bottlers, and retailers. All of these parties

were innocents, in the sense employed by the Intended Harm Objection, since there was no

wrongdoing in the first place.21 None of the injured parties were receiving their moral comeuppance.

21 Notwithstanding the hyperbolic, moralistic tone of the consumer response. The company’s own self- hagiographical account reports that, “people seemed to hold any Coca-Cola employee... personally

Consumers weren’t logding a moral complaint. Their issues were aesthetic. They didn’t like the new

product, and they objected to its having replaced the old product. They set out to inflict economic

harm on the company and its executives until they got what they wanted.

By the lights of the Intentional Harm Objection, the angry Coke consumers surely required

extra justification for their actions – and should have averted to methods that didn’t involve

intentional harm. So this Objection also violates the Normal Consumption Constraint. I assume

there is nothing particularly morally concerning about the consumer reaction to New Coke; Coke

and affiliates were not wronged by the economic misfortunes to which they were intentionally

subjected. And the same can be said in other cases of consumer backlash and intentional harm. One

sometimes hears, for instance, stories of disgruntled consumers threatening to ruin a business when

they don’t get their way. (“I’m never shopping here again! And I’m going to tell my friends about

this, and they’ll never shop here either!”) While we may frown at such behavior as impolite or

childish or of poor character, it does not seem to be immoral on account of the intention to inflict

economic harms on innocents.

More generally, I submit that the Harm Objections have gone awry by overstating the moral

importance of making things worse for innocent market parties. It is certainly nothing special about

boycotting that it has complex effects on the economic fortunes of peripheral agents. Most

consumption has foreseeable and complicated effects on peripheral agents; our economic fortunes

are necessarily entangled with others’. And since we appear untroubled by the downstream harms of

normal consumption decisions – whether trivial or critical – it is not plausible that the

responsible for the change… [Protesters] carried signs with “We want the real thing” and “Our children will never know refreshment.”” (Which, admittedly, if one believed that latter outcome imminent, might have been cause for moral concern.) “The Real Story of New Coke.” 2012. The Coca-Cola Company. https://www.coca- colacompany.com/stories/coke-lore-new-coke.

53 indistinguishable harms done by boycotters constitute decisive reasons not to boycott. Indeed, the potential for downstream harms is only half the story. Both Harm Objections overlook the fact that consumption, ethical or normal, inevitably creates winners as well as losers. If the Colorado tourism industry lost millions to the ‘92 boycotts, other states’ residents (Montanans, Utahns, Californians) surely gained in equal measure. Pepsi, unsurprisingly, enjoyed a brief spike in sales during the summer of our New Coke discontent. Such downstream benefits are no less pervasive than downstream harms.

This is a general feature of markets: they create winners and losers. It’s unruly and often arbitrary, but it’s no more concerning from boycotters than it is from ice cream consumers or from

Coke superfans. Similarly, intentionally harming innocents to extract concessions may sound troubling on its face, but as we’ve seen, it’s neither particularly remarkable nor overly concerning. This is nothing more than a spooky-sounding way of describing one of the many operations of market incentives.

The angry soda partisans wanted to communicate their displeasure, and so they spoke to Coke in the shared language of incentives. (“You want sales? You won’t get ‘em from me until you bring back old Coke.”)

When it comes to innocents and harms done, boycotting is just business-as-usual.

Is Boycotting Unfair?

Fairness objections are, by far, the largest family of arguments against boycotting. Unlike the previous two objections which expressed concerns about innocents, the fairness complaints are primarily interested in the ways that boycotters (mis)treat their intended, culpable targets. All of these complaints turn on the observation that boycott targets – even the genuinely guilty ones –

possess rights to fair treatment. And, thus, boycott targets may be wrongfully mistreated when well-

intentioned consumers are unfair.22

The moral demand for fairness is typically a demand for treatment that is both unbiased and

proportionate. In this context, being unbiased means (a) giving similar treatment to people with similar

circumstances or characteristics, and (b) giving similar treatment to people with dissimilar

circumstances or characteristics insofar as those differences are irrelevant to their desert or need.

Being proportionate means treating people differently when their different circumstances or

characteristics do affect their desert but only in proportion to those differences. So, for example, it is

fair for a teacher to assign different grades on an assignment in proportion to how many questions

each student answered correctly. This is because differences in correct answers seem to merit

differences in grades received. But it would be unfair for the teacher to give some students higher

marks for answering more questions incorrectly (because that would be disproportionate to their

desert), and it would also be unfair for her to give students higher marks for having wealthy parents

(because differences in family wealth do not merit differences in exam scores.)

Fairness objections to boycotting include charges of biased treatment as well as charges of

disproportionate treatment – three variations of the former and two of the latter. Each of the next five

sections considers one of these unfairness complaints.

22 For thoroughness, I should note that Mills (1997) and Radzik (2017) both mention and reject the complaint that boycotts wrong their targets because they employ coercive threats. (“Meet our demands or we will ruin you.”) One might wonder where this complaint falls in my taxonomy since it isn’t a fairness complaint but does concern the mistreatment of boycott targets. In short: I don’t think this complaint needs to be taxonomized because no one actually endorses it – and for good reason. Mills and Radzik both point out that issuing a coercive threat is primarily objectionable when the act being threatened is one the threatener is not permitted to perform. Since consumers are generally allowed to withdraw patronage from other market parties, the “threat” is really just an alert to their target about the conditions under which the consumer will take permissible action. (c.f. “Heads up, Coke: I’m not going to be buying any more of your product if you keep selling this nasty New Coke stuff.”) Mills op. cit., p.139-40; Radzik op. cit. p.118-9.

We may already note at the outset that fairness objections seem to be headed for trouble

with the Normal Consumption Constraint. The marketplace is hardly a reliable source of fair

outcomes. It is not uncommon to see, for instance, apparently indistinguishable firms finding very

different degrees of success for reasons clearly unrelated to merit, or to see firms which do merit

success – ones with good business plans, good products, good ideas – flounder while less

meritorious firms flourish. We often see small investors lose their shirt in the market then watch as

that shirt is promptly transferred to some other, bigger investors who don’t need it. We see

consumers of limited means or uncommon needs go under-served because they don’t represent a

solid profit opportunity; indeed, we can observe how profit motives consistently drive product

availability, product affordability, and product development in directions that only sporadically align

with what consumers merit or deserve. All of this is to say: unfairness is a prevalent and unsurprising

result of billions of market parties each following their own tastes and advantage.

I don’t mention this in order to celebrate the unfairness of markets. That’s not the point. I

mean only to suggest that normal consumption and ethical consumption do not obviously differ

much in their tendency to promote fairness. As we’ll see, it’s no easy task to identify varieties of

unfairness that are unique to (or uniquely concerning in) cases of boycotting.

Bias Objection #1: Individual Inconsistency. Mills (1997), Nussbaum (2007), Rodin and Yudkin

(2011), Dain and Calder (2007), Radzik (2017), and Beck (2019) all consider whether boycotters act

unfairly when they fail to apply the same standards to all market parties.23 It often seems that

boycotters choose to single out a particular party for economic sanctions on the basis of convenience

23 Rodin and Yudkin seem to endorse this objection, as does Nussbaum. Mills and Radzik say this concern merits consideration but do not wholeheartedly endorse it. Beck wants to reject it. Beck op. cit., p.549; Mills op. cit., p.144; Radzik op. cit., p.111; Rodin and Yudkin op. cit., p.476.

rather than deservingness. Firm Z may be targeted over Firm Y because, say, Z has better brand

recognition, or because the complaint against Z is easier to state, or because Z has been more in the

news recently, or because Z’s misbehavior confirms some pre-existing bias or prejudice (e.g. bankers

are greedy.) None of these are clear differences in Firm Z’s merit relative to Y. If I know all of this and

then decide to boycott only Z, I may treat Z unfairly. I would be singling out a particular firm for

economic sanctions while ignoring others of roughly similar culpability. This is the Inconsistency

Objection. It says that insofar as consumers fail to apply similar penalties to similarly culpable

parties, their boycotts are pro tanto wrong.

Beck (2019) offers a couple replies to this Objection.24 First, he points out that fairness

concerns are often outweighed by other sorts of moral reasons. For instance, if the boycotters hope

to prevent serious future harms or if they anticipate that a boycott against Firm A has a greater

chance of success than boycotts against equally culpable firms, then that may be enough to justify

their inconsistent behavior. Second, he notes that consumer inconsistency may often be excused on

account of ignorance. Bad actors are not always forthcoming about their moral misadventures, and

that means consumers may often be excused for failing, in ignorance, to sanction with perfect

consistency.

While these observations seem basically correct, they do not appear to give us any reason to

reject the Inconsistency Objection. After all, the Objection says inconsistent treatment is a pro tanto

wrong. Beck’s two replies seem to be specifications of circumstances in which that pro tanto

presumption is defeated or excused by countervailing considerations.

A better reason to reject this Objection is that it violates the Normal Consumption

Constraint. In the course of normal consumption, consumers often behave inconsistently toward

24 Beck op. cit., p.550.

57 other market parties, and we do not find that morally troubling. Maybe Roberto places impatient

Customer Support calls whenever his packages from Company X are even slightly late, but he lets

Company Y’s late deliveries go unremarked. Such behavior is clearly inconsistent, but it is implausible that Roberto is wronging Company X. Or suppose Zaheer refuses to listen to country music on principle, but also has a soft spot for Willie Nelson, whom she finds ineffably charming.

She is being inconsistent, but she isn’t wronging, say, Kenny Chesney by refusing to give his music a fair hearing. Any consumer with brand loyalty and a bit of self-awareness may also be treating other market parties inconsistently. Ralph knows there’s not really a difference between Advil and generic ibuprofen, but it makes him feel better to buy Advil for his family. He too is being inconsistent, but the manufacturers of generic ibuprofen do not have a serious moral complaint against him.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the Inconsistency Objection fails because consistent treatment, broadly construed, is morally irrelevant. Rather, the problem is that the Objection has overstated the importance of consistent treatment among market parties. The importance of consistency in our conduct towards others seems to depend on the nature of our shared relationship. Consider, as a contrast, the relationships among parents and children. It is very important that parents treat their children consistently– both individually, each parent treating each child like s/he treats the others, and collectively, the parents coordinating consistent treatment between themselves. This is for a few reasons. Parents are supposed to take the interests of their own children especially seriously, including their interests in being treated fairly; parents are supposed to foster the moral development of their children and this often includes modelling good behavior (like being fair); parents are supposed to avoid the appearance of overt favoritism toward any particular child to prevent harming their other relationships or their other children’s interests.

Relationships among market parties are not like this. Consumers have no special duties to businesses; they do not need to give special consideration to business interests; they are not

responsible for fostering businesses’ moral development or for modelling moral behavior; they do

not need to avoid the appearance of business favoritism to protect vital and vulnerable relationships.

Consumer consistency is not a high moral priority.

So fails the Inconsistency Objection. It is implausible that businesses are wronged when

consumers – ethical or normal – single them out for special (mis)treatment.

Bias Objection #2: Group Capriciousness. While proponents of the Inconsistency Objection

worry that individual consumers act unfairly by holding different market parties to different

standards, Yael Peled (2019) makes an analogous complaint about groups of consumers.25 The

concern arises specifically for boycotts with vague goals or that issue non-specific calls for consumer

action (End sweatshop labor! Oppose North Carolina’s transphobic legislation! Promote environmentally responsible

palm oil production!) By failing to explain exactly how their goals should be achieved, these campaigns

leave it up to the individual to sort through and select among a wide range of possible responses.

The individual’s choice of action may therefore turn out to be somewhat arbitrary; many possible

responses may not occur to her and other responses, unchosen, may appear to be equally good and

justifiable. Peled wants to distinguish this sort of random arbitrary treatment, which is morally neutral,

from capricious arbitrary treatment, which is not. In this case, the difference between randomness and

capriciousness is one of scale. In the aggregate, Peled argues, thousands or millions of random and

morally neutral choices can compound into something morally objectionable. Boycotted parties are

25 Peled’s complaint is narrowly directed at the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement – a global consumer action campaign that exerts social and economic pressures on Israel-adjacent agents in the hopes of changing certain of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. In presenting this as an objection to all boycotting, I’m doing a bit of extrapolation and have elided a few of Peled’s reasons for thinking capriciousness is a problem for the BDS movement in particular. But this is not unfair since Peled herself considers her focus on the BDS case to have important implications for the ethics of boycotting, generally. Peled, Yael. 2019. “The Ethics of Boycotting as Collective Anti-Normalisation.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 527–42. See, p.527.

left “in a state of permanent uncertainty concerning whether and which specific practice [of

opposition] will be individually chosen, by which boycotter and where.”26 And Peled thinks this sort

of capricious treatment “can be plausibly argued to be a harm in itself.”27

This is the Capriciousness Objection. It says that boycotting is pro tanto wrong when the

collective action, the boycott, is sufficiently un-organized and un-directed that boycotting consumers

end up subjecting others to consistently inconsistent treatment. I class this as an unfairness objection

because it seems to amount to a complaint about bias – i.e. about different consumers treating

similar cases differently, for reasons of disorganization.

Does the Capriciousness Objection undermine consumer permissions to boycott? It does

not. It, too, violates the Normal Consumption Constraint. In the aggregate, lots of consumer

behaviors appear capricious, and this does not seem morally objectionable. Plenty of business

owners exist “in a state of permanent uncertainty” about whether and which specific choices will be

made by whom and when. A clothier specializing in high-end denim garments is subject to

unreliable, multi-year crests and troughs in denim popularity. A purveyor of beard grooming

products is at the whim of consumer facial hair trends. A manufacturer of electric juicers must

weather unpredictable seasons of juice cleanses, kale mania, high-fiber diets, and fructose

disparagement. Unorganized groups of consumers routinely subject other market parties to

capricious treatment, and it is not plausible that we wrong business by failing to coordinate our

changing tastes with others or by failing to give advance warning that, say, next year beards are out.

(Supposing we even could!) If anything, the Capriciousness Objection seems to violate the Normal

Consumption Constraint more flagrantly than did the Inconsistency Objection. It seems more

26 Peled op. cit., p.535. 27 Peled op. cit., p.536.

reasonable to demand that individuals make their own actions internally consistent than to demand

that they coordinate consistent treatment with others.

In the final diagnosis, the Capriciousness Objection suffers the same malady as the

Inconsistency Objection. It has overestimated the moral importance of coordinated treatment in

relationships among market parties. While coordinated treatment can be very important in the right

circumstances (for parents with their children, for nurses with their patients, for air traffic

controllers with their planes), this is best explained by the presence of special duties and the

potential for grave harm. Among market parties, in contrast, inconsistent treatment seems at worst

mildly regrettable.

Bias Objection #3: Hypocrisy. There’s a third and final kind of bias objection. Mills (1997),

Radzik (2017), and Dain and Calder (2007) all consider whether boycotters sometimes misbehave by

being guilty of the very thing they would oppose.28 Such boycotters are behaving hypocritically, and

hypocrisy is a kind of bias, a failure to render unto oneself the same treatment one has rendered

unto (morally similar) others. This is the Hypocrisy Objection.

It might not be obvious why we should be concerned about hypocrisy per se. No doubt

hypocrisy is a bad thing: to be a hypocrite is to exhibit a disagreeable mismatch between the moral

sentiments one expresses and the moral guidelines that appear to govern one’s behavior. (“You’re

always telling other people to cut their carbon emissions, but you have a private jet?”) The hypocrite

fails to live up to the standards she imposes on others – either by ignoring/forgiving her own moral

failings or by suffering from a weakness of will that prevents her from living up to her own ideals.

28 Reactions to this objection are mixed. Radzik seems to endorse it; Mills is more ambivalent; Dain and Calder reject it but also run it together with the Inconsistency Objection. Dain, Edmund, and Gideon Calder. 2007. “Not Cricket? Ethics, Rhetoric and Sporting Boycotts.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (1): 95–109. See, p.102; Mills op. cit., p.144; Radzik op. cit., p.116.

Nevertheless, one might think that that’s all there is to say about the badness of hypocrisy: a moral

hypocrite has, by definition, behaved badly (because it’s bad to ignore one’s own moral failings, and

it’s bad to do what one knows one shouldn’t), but there’s no extra badness that comes along with

hypocrisy itself. That’s just sloppy double counting – dinging a person for acting badly then dinging

them again for (correctly!) condemning actions like that.

If that’s what one thinks about hypocrisy, then the Hypocrisy Objection will likely seem a

non-starter. The hypocrite boycotter has misbehaved in the past – else she wouldn’t be a hypocrite –

but it’s double counting to ding her for boycotting. There’s no new misbehavior here, no reason to

think she’s forbidden from boycotting. This seems to be Dain and Calder’s reason for dismissing the

Hypocrisy Objection.29 They point out that “the general hypocrisy of an agent [cannot] cancel the

moral weight of all her actions.”30 Which is to say, I take it, that backward-looking considerations

about a consumer’s prior misconduct do not defeat her forward-looking reasons for wanting to

boycott (e.g. I want a better environment for my children.)

However, Mills and Radzik, who are most responsible for developing this argument, do not

direct their complaints against consumers who aim to promote the good with their boycott. Hypocrisy

of that variety (You used to support evil, but now you want to oppose it?!) does not seem unfair or

objectionable – which Dain and Calder correctly point out. Mills and Radzik are instead concerned

about cases where boycotting is used as a form of social punishment or as a means of social

shunning. The thought seems to be that hypocrisy is most concerning – or especially awful – from a

person who is heaping social scorn on others for misdeeds that he himself is guilty of.

Consider

29 Dain and Calder op. cit., 102 30 Dain and Calder op. cit.

Lunch Thief

Michael works a typical 9-5 in a large office. Most days he grabs lunch at a neighborhood deli, but

occasionally, when he’s feeling lazy, he’ll stay in for lunch and swipe someone else’s food from the

break room fridge when no one’s looking. He’s never caught. Another employee, Adnan, is caught.

A small uproar follows, and Michael finds himself joining an informal campaign of social ostracism

against Adnan: ignoring him in the hall, excluding him from social events, engaging him in only the

sparest, most essential business conversations.

The withdrawal of social intimacy from Adnan seems intended to deliver a stern message

(“You are not worthy of our company, lunch thief.”) Coming from Michael, though, this message

feels unfair, feels both false and galling. The intuitive pith of the Hypocrisy Objection is that

hypocrisy is most objectionable in circumstances like Michael’s, in cases of social punishment.

Compare: it would also be hypocritical for Michael to suggest installing a webcam to monitor the

fridge for lunch thieves or for him to express disapproval of lunch thievery (“What a scummy thing

to do!”), but neither of those responses seem as acutely awful as joining in the social punishment of

Adnan. This case seems to me to support Mill’s and Radzik’s suggestion that hypocrisy is uniquely

concerning in cases of social punishment.

Of course one need not share my judgment about the case, and even if one does, one might

think there are plausible error theories that convincingly explain away our judgments.31 Perhaps

when we judge that Michael is doing something uniquely objectionable in shunning Adnan, we are

primarily reacting to Michael’s implicit assertion that he is morally better than Michael. That’s not

true. And since we know it’s bad to implicitly assert false things, we judge Michael has behaved

31 I am grateful to an audience at the CU Boulder Center for Values and Social Policy at which I presented this material for suggesting this line of reply.

badly. Or perhaps we are imagining Michael enjoying the feeling of moral superiority over Adnan.

That seems distasteful. And since we think that it’s bad to enjoy false feelings of superiority, we

think that Michael has behaved badly. Should one find either of these error theories convincing one

is, presumably, all the less likely to be moved by the Hypocrisy Objection.

But let’s suppose one does share my judgment about the case and does think this judgment

supports the claim that hypocrisy is uniquely concerning in social punishment cases. Mills’ and

Radzik’s worry is then that consumers may sometimes be guilty of hypocritically socially punishing those

they boycott. Their version of the Hypocrisy Objection turns on two claims. (i) Many boycotts are

best understood as punishments. And (ii) when hypocrites engage in these “social punishment

boycotts,” their behavior is wrongfully unfair.

Let’s start with the first claim.32 It is certainly common to hear boycotts described in the

language of punishment. Companies are “penalized” for their bad behavior; they are “sanctioned”

by consumers; they are “tried in the court of public opinion.” The Hypocrisy Objection insists that

this pattern of language use goes beyond mere metaphor; many boycotts really are best understood

as punishments – i.e. as morally akin to other paradigm cases of punishment.

Radzik’s argument takes Boonin’s (2008) account of punishment as its starting point.33 On

this account, originally developed for the legal context, a punishment is an authorized, reprobative,

retributive, intentional harm. Of these five criteria, Radzik notes, at least four readily apply to

boycotts. Boycotts often express disapproval (are reprobative), are often prompted by misconduct (are

retributive), and are often meant to set back the target’s economic interests (are harms and are

32 I should note that Mills doesn’t offer a defense of (i). Rather, she wonders whether hypocrisy concerns would undermine our permissions to boycott if boycotting were primarily given a social punishment justification. Her treatment of the Hypocrisy Objection is therefore conditional: if boycotts are best understood as social punishments, it seems wrong for hypocrites to boycott. Only Radzik argues that the antecedent is true. 33 Boonin, David. 2008. The Problem of Punishment. Cambridge University Press.

intentional.) But it is not clear that boycotts satisfy the authorization requirement. Characteristically,

an agent who would impose a punishment on another must have the right sort of authority over

them – as do judges over defendants, parents over children, and employers over employees.

Boycotts don’t seem to fit this pattern. They are penalties-among-equals – citizens penalizing

citizens, consumers penalizing consumers, market parties penalizing other market parties – where

neither agent nor target has clear authority over the other. This may lead us to conclude that

boycotts don’t belong in the moral category punishment after all; paradigm punishments involve, and

require, authority; boycotts do not.34

Radzik resists this conclusion. She accepts that punishments require authorization – indeed,

this claim plays a key role in her argument – but she doesn’t think this requirement excludes

boycotts.35 Rather, she claims we can “locate a distinctive form of authority in the moral

community… a symmetrical (rather than hierarchical)” relation among relative equals.36 We might

call this kind of authority ‘moral standing.’ Roughly, to have moral standing in a given case is to be

in a social position – relative to the wrong, to the wrongdoer, to the victim – such that one is

entitled to enforce the moral rules and hold the wrongdoer accountable. Radzik thinks that moral

standing in social punishment cases is a functional analogue to authority in paradigm punishment cases.

If that’s right, then boycotts apparently do satisfy the authority requirement and so do count as bona

fide punishments.

34 Alternatively, we might conclude that “punishment” is ambiguous. In legal contexts, punishments are understood to require authorization while in non-legal contexts punishments are understood not to require authorization. This conclusion is as inimical to the Hypocrisy Objection as the conclusion that boycotts are not punishments. Without an authorization requirement, there is no reason to think that hypocrite boycotters punish illegitimately when they punish without authority. 35 Rodin and Yudkin also endorse the authorization condition on punishment. From this they infer that “private acts of punishment are not legitimate.” Rodin and Yudkin op. cit., p.484. 36 Radzik op. cit., p.116-117.

The Hypocrisy Objection follows directly. Because Radzik held onto the authorization

condition – punishments require authority – she can now insist that just as legal punishments require

legal authority, social punishment boycotts require moral standing. Among the ways a boycotter can

lack moral standing is by being a hypocrite, by being guilty of the very thing that she is trying to

punish.37 Hypocritical boycotters are pretending to have a moral authority they do not in fact

possess. (Or, as Mills puts it, are falsely assuming “a significant moral gap between themselves and

those they would [boycott.]”38) This is how we secure claim (ii) of the Hypocrisy Objection. Since

social punishments require moral standing and since that is precisely what hypocrites lack,

hypocritical boycotters punish illegitimately, are wrongfully unfair to their targets.

To its credit, the Hypocrisy Objection does apparently respect the Normal Consumption

Constraint. Since normal consumption decisions are predominantly not best understood as

punishments, we do not require moral standing to engage in normal consumption. Our normal

consumption permissions are therefore largely intact.39 And for this reason, I regard the Hypocrisy

Objection as the most interesting and promising of the unfairness complaints – both among those

we’ve seen and those to come.

Nevertheless, the Objection fails.

37 A consumer’s moral standing may also be determined by their “relationship to the wrong…, the nature of the wrong..., the quality of the evidence of wrongdoing and blameworthiness, and the nature of the social harm being imposed.” Radzik op. cit., p.116. 38 Mills op. cit. 144 39 There are conceivable exceptions. For example, the New Coke case we considered earlier could be described in the language of punishment (“... then the angry Coke fans punished Coke for swapping the old formula for an inferior new one...”) and plausibly those consumers were engaged in reprobative, retributive, intentional harming. Supposing we can extend Radzik’s moral standing requirement to cover this case and supposing some of those consumers were guilty of misdeeds similar to Coke’s (Of replacing a good thing with a worse thing? Of upsetting someone by removing a beloved option?), the Hypocrisy Objection might be said to condemn some of the old-Coke partisans as misbehaving hypocrites. But regardless, I’d not be inclined to display such a case as evidence against the Hypocrisy Objection.

Crucially, the comparison between authority and moral standing fails to support the claim that moral standing is required for social punishment boycotting. The argument equivocates between two different kinds of requirement – which becomes apparent when we examine cases of authority failure. Consider a case of legal authority failure. Imagine, for instance, a judge who confronts a pair of brawling college students in a parking lot and issues them a jail sentence. Or, a judge who spends her off hours in another judge’s courtroom, calling out judicial sentences from a pew in the back. These attempted punishments are unauthorized and illegitimate. But notice, the absence of authorization means a failure to punish. The punishments are illegitimate in that they do not actually result in penalties and are not actually punishments. That’s simply not the kind of illegitimacy at issue in social punishments. The consumer who boycotts without moral standing doesn’t thereby fail to impose penalties and so fail to punish. She does impose penalties! If there’s a sense in which her punishment is illegitimate, it’s that it is unjustified. Hence, the sense in which legal punishments require authority (namely, to successfully punish) is not the sense in which social punishments require authority (to justifiably punish.)

This is a critical problem with no quick fix. All the ways we might disambiguate our claim –

Punishments require authority – create new problems for the Hypocrisy Objection.

It won’t help the Hypocrisy Objection to stick with the success requirement, claiming punishments attempted without authority are unsuccessful, but possibly justified. That would imply that hypocritical boycotters are not engaged in punishment. While non-hypocrite consumers have moral standing, both penalizing and punishing permissibly, hypocrite consumers penalize but, lacking moral standing, fail to punish. That’s surely not the point of Hypocrisy Objection, that only unhypocritical boycotters are punishers.

It also won’t help the Hypocrisy Objection to abandon the original success requirement in favor of the justification requirement, claiming punishments attempted without authority are unjustified, but

possibly successful. This is an unacceptable reading of the authorization requirement in the original

paradigm cases of punishment. An individual who attempts to impose legal punishments (e.g. fines,

jail time) without the correct legal authorization isn’t unjustified but possibly successful. For her, the

absence of authorization means failure.40

This is the key contrast between legal and non-legal punishments. In the legal case, the judge

or whomever is an agent of the state. She is wielding the state’s powers pursuant to the state’s interests

and doing so only with the state’s backing. Legal punishers require legal authority (in the success

sense) because it’s the state’s backing that gives the punisher access to the state’s coercive powers.

Boycotters, in contrast, don’t need backing. They are wielding their own market powers pursuant to

their own interests. And if they do punish, they do so on their own authority; they succeed on their

own say so.

Given these difficulties with the analogy to cases of legal punishment, one might try

supporting the comparison between authority and social standing by appealing to a different paradigm

example. Parent/child cases, for instance, may seem to be a better analogue. Consider a man who

presumes to punish someone else’s errant child with a scolding after he catches her chasing a

neighborhood cat with an axe. Granting that his punishment really is illegitimate, we seem to have a

case in which authority is required for justification rather than success. (That is, the neighbor does

successfully scold, just without justification.) Perhaps, then, this is the correct comparison for

Radzik’s argument: boycotts require social standing in the same way that parental punishments require

authority.

40 For similar reasons, it won’t help the Hypocrisy Objection to insist on both requirements (i.e. punishments attempted without authority are both unjustified and unsuccessful.) This response is doubly bad. It entails that hypocritical boycotters aren’t engaged in punishment, and it is implausible as a characterization of the role of authority in paradigm cases of punishment.

But that won’t do. The sense in which the zealous neighbor is unjustified is not the sense in

which a hypocritical boycotter is unjustified. The zealous neighbor punishes illegitimately (if he

does) by encroaching on the authority of the child’s parents, whose parental privileges plausibly

include the authority to determine how their child is disciplined and by whom. But that means the

neighbor is primarily mistreating the child’s parents, rather than the child herself.41 Which is of no

help to the Hypocrisy Objection. The complaint about social punishment boycotting isn’t that the

consumer is stepping on the toes of some other authority, whose proper job it is to punish the moral

failings of businesses; the complaint is that the consumer is mistreating the punished themselves.42

Recall that the Hypocrisy Objection turns on two claims. (i) Most boycotts are best

understood as punishments, and (ii) when hypocrites engage in these “social punishment boycotts,”

their behavior is wrongfully unfair. To this point, I have been arguing that the case for (i) is

inadequate. More precisely, I’ve argued that the proposals on the table either fail to count boycotts

as satisfying the authorization condition, and thus fail to count them as punishments, or fail to support

the Hypocrisy Objection. If we accept that punishments require authority, then that suggests

boycotts are not punishments since there are few relationships of authority among market parties.

Radzik proposes we substitute moral standing for authority in such cases, but that’s no help. The sense

in which paradigm punishments require authority – when extended to boycotting cases and

replacing authority with moral standing – does not support the claim that boycotters without moral

standing wrongfully mistreat those they punish. At best, we get the claim that hypocritical boycotters

41 I suppose one could insist that the neighbor’s presumptuous decision to punish is primarily offensive for the way it treats the child. But that strikes me as very implausible. The parents’ anger (“How dare you yell at my child?!”) is not directed at child-scolding per se, nor is it in defense of the child’s behavior. It’s the fact that he scolded that upsets them. 42 In this sense, the parental punishment case seems, at best, to support Hussain’s Public Sphere Objection (“It’s the democratic state’s job to punish companies, not the job of vigilante consumers run amok!”) I assume the Hypocrisy Objection doesn’t amount to a badly-worded version of the Public Sphere Objection.

penalize but don’t punish. Hence, the comparison between moral standing and authority may get us (i),

but it moves us no closer to (ii).43

This seems to leave the proponent of the Hypocrisy Objection with a couple of options.

First, she could support the Hypocrisy Objection by ignoring claim (i) and arguing directly for (some

version of) claim (ii). She might try to argue that some boycotts, whether literally punishments or not,

require moral standing and are wrongfully unfair without it. Or she might, second, reject the

authorization condition on punishments. After all, if punishments don’t require authority, the absence of

authority relations among market parties would not disqualify boycotts from counting as

punishments.

Upon closer inspection, though, this second option just collapses into the first. Without the

authorization condition, the appeal to punishment turns into an argumentative cul de sac. The original

dialectical purpose of insisting that boycotts count as bona fide punishments was to support the idea

that boycotts require moral standing – in the same way that legal punishments require authority.

That path is closed off without the authorization condition. (Because no punishments require

authority.) Thus, on this route, we get to call boycotts ‘punishments’, but we are no closer to

showing that boycotters require moral standing. We still need an argument for that – the production

of which is the first strategy.

From here, prospects seem rather dim. Any arguments for the Hypocrisy Objection – or

arguments for the claim that boycotters require moral standing – face at least three serious challenges.

43 Rodin and Yudkin offer an argument strikingly similar to Radzik’s but for a different conclusion. They take it as obvious that boycotts are punishments and claim that this fact means consumers ought to defer to an impartial authority before initiating a boycott “since we generally believe that punishment requires authority and that private acts of punishment are not legitimate.” But like Radzik’s argument, this one trades on an ambiguity in the claim that punishments require authority. It’s not true that boycott punishments are only successful if initiated by an impartial authority. Rodin and Yudkin op. cit., p.484.

First, the argument must offer some account of the conditions under which a consumer

counts as a hypocrite. Broadly speaking, there seem to be two ways to do this. We might say that

hypocrites are individuals whose community is culpable for crimes comparable to those they mean to

punish, or we might say that hypocrites are individuals who themselves are culpable for comparable

crimes. Both strategies face serious difficulties. The trouble with defining ‘hypocrisy’ in terms of

community guilt is that community guilt is of dubious moral relevance. The misbehaviors of a

community are not one and the same as the misbehaviors of its members, nor does it follow from

an individual’s membership in a misbehaving community that she endorses or contributes to that

misbehavior.

Obversely, if ‘hypocrisy’ is defined in terms of individual guilt, then the Hypocrisy Objection

must wrestle with a looming mismatch problem between consumer wrongs and market bads. The

problem is that consumers will rarely be guilty of something clearly comparable to that which they

seek to oppose. You and I do not chop down forests. We do not run our own brutal sweatshops or

donate millions to secret industry lobbyists. Suppose Company X is caught engaging in wage theft.

Which consumers are forbidden from boycotting X on account of hypocrisy? Those of us with

workers of our own, whose wages we also steal? Those of us who have cheated before? If so, does it

need to be financial cheating? Is it enough if a consumer cheated a little on her taxes a few years

back? My point is that it will not be easy to flesh out the Hypocrisy Objection with some defensible,

useful, and substantial application conditions for is guilty of the same thing she punishes. This is no small

matter. If we cannot answer these questions, we cannot tell what the Hypocrisy Objection forbids.

There is a second problem with insisting that boycotters require moral standing, and it

emerges from the presumption of moral symmetry between acts of punishment and acts of reward.44

44 I am grateful to my adviser David Boonin for suggesting this concern.

Rewarding acts are the opposite of punishing acts – approbative benefits rather than reprobative harms.

And given the obverse relationship between the two, the presumption should be that what goes for

one should go for the other. (Which is to say, the burden of proof rests with those who would deny

the symmetry.) This makes trouble for the Hypocrisy Objection because the claim that buycotters

require moral standing to reward other market parties is implausible. Suppose Magda is a non-

recycling, non-composting, toxic waste dumping litterbug who nevertheless professes to care deeply

about the environment. Her environmental concerns are, let’s suppose, her honest and actual

justification for buying all her furniture from IKEA. If what goes for punishment goes for reward

and if boycotters require moral standing to punish, then Magda requires moral standing to reward

IKEA for their excellent environmental track record. Since she doesn’t have moral standing on

environmental issues, the Hypocrisy Objection seems to imply that she rewards illegitimately (in the

justification sense.) This seems very implausible. It seems very strange to claim that Magda’s act of

rewarding is morally bad and unjustified because of facts about her – as opposed to facts about

IKEA.45 Accordingly, the proponent of the Hypocrisy Objection seems to owe us either a good

reason for rejecting the punishment/reward symmetry or a satisfying error theory that can explain

why it’s not that implausible to think hypocritical buycotters reward illegitimately.

There a third problem. While Radzik’s original formulation of the Hypocrisy Objection

seemed to respect the Normal Consumption Constraint – arguing that only boycotts require moral

standing because only boycotts count as punishments – that is not a core feature of hypocrisy

concerns per se. Hypocrisy is not the sole province of boycotters; normal consumers can be

45 People do sometimes turn down rewards because of their distaste for the party proffering the reward. Some of these people may even be thinking that there’s something bad about this reward or about the act of rewarding, given it’s source. But it’s not clear that the reward giver in these cases really is awarding illegitimately, without justification. And, anyway, Magda’s case is not like this. IKEA is not about to refuse the patronage of environmental hypocrites.

72 hypocrites, too. Maybe Joaquin refuses to patronize his neighborhood bodega because “it’s filthy and disgusting in there,” even though, compared to his own house, the bodega’s as clean as a surgery room and, anyway, Joaquin himself has felt wronged in the past when his step-mother refused to visit him on account of the squalor. Compare this case to Lunch Thief. In that case, the objection was that the social shunning of Adnan carried a presumptive message (“You are not worthy of my company”) that rang false from Michael’s mouth and, seemingly, cast his own shunning as a kind of wrongful mistreatment. The analogous complaint about Joaquin is unmoving – even though his refusal carries a similar presumptive message (“You are not worthy of my business”) and even though there is a sense in which Joaquin is being unfair – namely, he’s ready to punish in the bodega owner a failing he forgives in himself. But I feel no inclination to say that he’s wronging anyone.

(Alternatively, we might imagine Country Club Carl remarking to his posh golf buddies, “You’ll never catch me with an Apple product. That whole company is so insufferably elitist.” Carl is a hypocrite, but it’s implausible that he is wronging Apple Inc.)

This third problem looms for any future attempts to defend the Hypocrisy Objection. Since we apparently don’t think that normal consumers act wrongly by purchasing hypocritically, an adequate defense of the Hypocrisy Objection will need, first, to identify some key moral difference between hypocritical normal consumption and hypocritical ethical consumption and, second, to show that this difference explains why boycotters need to avoid hypocrisy but normal consumers need not. Radzik has offered an argument like this; she suggested that the moral difference is that only boycotts are punishments. Since punishments require authority (while non-punishments do not), boycotters require moral standing (while normal consumers do not.) That argument having failed, the Hypocrisy Objection now appears poised to commit the same mistake as the other unfairness complaints.

Disproportionality Objection #1: Overharm. The first three fairness complaints focus on bias.

They claim the boycotter can wrong his targets by failing to treat similar cases similarly, by failing to

coordinate similar treatment with other consumers, or by failing to treat others as well as he treats

himself. Two final fairness complaints focus on disproportionality – i.e. failures to treat different cases

differently, but only in proportion to their differences in merit.

Radzik (2017) raises such a concern. She points out that in some cases “the severity of the

pressure applied to the target [is] excessive compared to the good being pursued by the coercer,”

and she worries that consumers, though well-intentioned, may go too far.46 Indeed, this seems to be

a pervasive problem since “the intensity of [any] boycott is hard to manage. Organizers… generally

have little control over how many people join in or when those participants resume relations with

the target. Boycotts can be harder to end than to begin.”47 That is, since even well-organized

boycotts tend to be undirected, with no one in charge, no one capable of pumping the breaks, and

no way even to gauge whether the boycott is getting out of hand, boycotters run the risk of inflicting

disproportionate damages. Let’s call this ‘the Overharm Objection’. It says that boycotting is pro

tanto wrong when it inflicts losses on a target that exceed the target’s or cause’s (de)merits.48

46 Radzik op.cit., p.119. 47 Radzik op.cit., p.116-7. 48 This concerns shows up elsewhere in different guises. Nussbaum and Garrett worry about so-called “secondary boycotts” that target peripheral agents who are partly culpable for the same wrongdoings as the primary target but not deserving of the same level of harm. (Which concern is distinct from the Foreseeable Harm Objection since the secondary targets aren’t held to be innocents.) Mills suggests that boycotts may sometimes be unfair because a target is being held accountable in the economic domain for actions taken in the political domain. Both of these seem to be special cases of the Overharm Objection. The concern about secondary boycotts seems to be that boycotters are extra likely to overharm secondary targets because those agents have only minor demerits. And Mills’ concern about economic harms for political wrongs is a degenerate case where the amount of economic harm deserved is zero, and so of course the boycotters overharm from the get-go. As will become clear, the Overharm Objection fails in these cases as in all the others. Garrett op. cit., p.20; Mills op. cit., p.141; Nussbaum op.cit., p.33.

This Objection also runs afoul of the Normal Consumption Constraint. The problem here closely parallels those raised against the Foreseeable and Intended Harm Objections. Seemingly, most of the harms that market parties suffer at the hands of normal consumption are overharms, in that they are harms in excess of the subject’s merit. From the normal consumer’s perspective, no parties particularly merit or deserve to do better than others – not in the moral sense of deserve employed by the Overharm Objection. Consider, for example, the harms done to mobile wallet app

Isis and French rock group Isis Child in 2014, following the ascendancy of ISIS, the jihadist military group. These parties clearly did nothing to deserve or merit their ill fortune. And yet, many skittish consumers chose not to buy an Isis Child t-shirt or selected a different mobile wallet app. They harmed these market parties far in excess of their merits. But it is implausible that these consumers thereby did anything pro tanto wrong – not even if they were explicitly aware of the others’ blamelessness for the unfortunate association.

So the Overharm Objection overgeneralizes. It appears to condemn all sorts of unconcerning business losses as wrongful overharms. Indeed, the Overharm Objection appears to condemn normal consumption with more force than it condemns ethical consumption. The ethical consumer can at least plead uncertainty about whether her contributions exceeded her target’s desert; the target deserved some losses, and she couldn’t tell whether those losses had already been inflicted. Not so in cases of normal consumption. Since it’s clear that no harm is deserved, all harm inflicted is known to be overharm.

It might be pointed out that normal consumers mostly overharm by accident while boycotters overharm intentionally, so perhaps the Overharm Objection should be restated as a complaint about the wrongfulness of boycotting with the intention of inflicting excessive losses. But that’s no better.

This variation of the Objection seems to trade on an ambiguity between intending to inflict disproportionate losses and intending to inflict losses which then turn out to be disproportionate. The former

reading might seem objectionable but is not psychologically plausible. A consumer who intends to

inflict disproportionate losses must, in so intending, believe that her targets have already suffered enough

harm (or, less coherently, believe that her targets deserve to suffer more harm than they deserve.) So

on this reading, the Overharm Objection forbids something trivial (“do not boycott when you think

boycotting would result in more harm than you think right”) and resembles one of those obvious-

and-uninteresting Substantive Objections considered earlier. If, on the other hand, we read the

objection as condemning merely the intention to inflict harms, which then turn out to be out of

proportion, then we have simply circled back to a version of the Intended Harm Objection. (This

time applied to targets rather than innocents.) As we noted in our earlier discussion, the intention to

harm is not a consistent difference between ethical consumption and normal consumption.

Sometimes normal consumers do intend to harm. And this is allowable! This is business-as-usual.

Disproportionality Objection #2: Relative Innocents. Beck (2019) expresses a different worry

about proportionality.49 He is concerned about boycotts that target parties whose behavior is

relatively good. This is a close cousin to the Inconsistency Objection, but where that concern was

about targeting X while failing to also target the equally culpable Y and Z, Beck is worried about

targeting X instead of the more culpable Y and Z. While Beck denies that fairness requires targeting

all culpable firms, he does think that fairness requires us to choose targets who deserve it relatively

more. This is the Relative Innocents Objection. It says that boycotting is pro tanto wrong when it

targets firms that are relatively morally good compared to other possible targets.50

49 Beck op.cit., p.551. 50 Rodin and Yudkin express a similar concern, claiming that “it is unjustifiable to boycott against evils of lesser moral gravity whilst abstaining from a boycott against actions higher on the scale” because, they argue, boycotts may only be imposed rarely and in grave circumstances. Rodin and Yudkin op. cit., p.477.

This Objection fails, and for reasons that should by now feel familiar.

Like the Overharm Objection, the Relative Innocents Objection seems to draw its initial

plausibility from an ambiguity between the intention to impose undeserved harms and the intention to

impose harms which then turn out to be undeserved. The former seems genuinely objectionable but

implausible as a description of any real cases; the latter seems plausible as a description of real cases

but not genuinely objectionable.

Like the Foreseeable and Intended Harm Objections, the Relative Innocents Objection

appears to overstate the moral badness of consumers intentionally harming those who do not

deserve it. We do not typically worry about the negative effects of normal consumption on innocent

market parties, so it’s hard to see why we’d worry about the negative effects of ethical consumption

on relatively innocent market parties. If anything, ethical consumers are doing something less

worrying since (a) they are motivated by moral reasons (rather than reasons of taste or self-interest)

and (b) those who suffer at their hands are at least somewhat deserving.

Like the Inconsistency Objection, the Relative Innocents Objection appears to overstate the

importance of fairness among market parties. We do not typically worry about the unfairnesses of

the market, about the catastrophic failures and meteoric successes that befall the worthy and

unworthy in roughly equal measure. So it is hard to see why we should be worried about the

unfairness of harming the somewhat-unworthy.51

For all these reasons, the Relative Innocents Objection should be rejected.

Thus concludes our survey of the five fairness-based complaints about boycotting.

51 To clarify, my claim is only that consumers do not wrong those they sanction by choosing to sanction the relatively un-wicked. That’s compatible with saying that consumers may nevertheless do the wrong thing by choosing to boycott one party over another. Maybe X is so horrendously wicked that it’s obligatory to boycott them and only supererogatory to boycott the not-that-wicked Y. In that case, it would be wrong to choose to boycott Y and not X. But it wouldn’t be wrong because it somehow mistreats Y. That’s what the Relative Innocents Objection claims, and that is the claim we should reject.

Does Boycotting Work?

A final objection to boycotting is pragmatic. Rather than argue that boycotters mistreat others

– by harming innocents or by being unfair to targets – proponents of this kind of objection argue

that boycotting is ineffective.

I’ve intentionally left this concern for last to restrain the temptation to use pragmatic

considerations as a coup de grace for otherwise faltering objections. (“Here’s a respect in which X

could be problematic. Maybe that doesn’t seem so bad by itself, but keep in mind that X doesn’t

even work as intended.”)52 Here at the end of our discussion, we are in a position to see that there is

no pro tanto presumption that boycotting is wrong. And in the absence of other good arguments

against boycotting, the argumentative burden for pragmatic objections is rather high. It’s not enough

to argue that boycotting is predictably ineffective. There’s no obvious reason why we’d be forbidden

from boycotting if that’s the worst that can be said. It’s not immoral to fail in one’s efforts to do

good – not even if failure was the likely outcome from the start. It would be silly to carry a fire

extinguisher with you at all times, ready to douse sudden flames but doubtful you’ll need to. It would

be overcautious and predictably unhelpful – but not wrong. Similarly, a sound argument that

boycotting is predictably ineffective may show that boycotting is silly and overcautious, but it won’t

show that boycotting is wrong.

To shift the presumption of permissibility against boycotting, a pragmatic objection needs to

show that boycotting is positively counter-effective. Moreover, this must be shown to be predictably

or consistently true – not just in-principle or occasionally. An objection to boycotting on the

grounds that it could backfire would, after all, violate the Particularity Constraint. The bare possibility

52 Mills’ statement of the Foreseeable Harm Objection and Beck’s response to the Inconsistency Objection both have something of this flavor.

of backfire is shared by a great many other methods for promoting the good. Charitable efforts can

backfire.53 Moral arguments can backfire.54 The possibility of backfire is a standard risk for well-

intentioned behavior – and is not typically regarded as a good reason to abstain from trying to do

good. Only when the possibility of backfire rises to a likelihood – or, perhaps, when the backfire-risk-

weighted expected value of the behavior is negative – do we have strong countervailing reasons to

abstain. This is what the Backfire Objection claims of boycotting. It says that boycotting is prima

facie wrong because boycotts predictably do more harm than good.55

Although a variety of doubts have been raised about the efficacy of boycotting, the empirical

evidence falls far short of this conclusion. Members of the anti-boycott crowd mostly point out that

various kinds of counter-effects could occur in response to boycotts. Beck points out that a boycott

which targets a relatively innocent firm could end up signaling “that firms are being targeted

arbitrarily, and that malpractices are therefore unlikely to be systematically addressed and

sanctioned,” thereby encouraging future misbehavior.56 Mills and Saprai point out that “boycotts are

not like blockades… because [boycotters] cannot prevent the actions of other consumers from

negating their [own] actions.”57 Mills notes that there is “some danger” of backfire because boycott

targets may become recalcitrant in the face of criticism and because the extra publicity a boycott

53 To cite one notable example, the popularity among wealthy Westerners of “voluntourism” opportunities at orphanages in developed nations appears to be increasing child-trafficking in these regions. That’s a rather grave backfire. For details, see Punaks, Martin, and Katie Feit. 2014. “The Paradox of Orphanage Volunteering.” Next Generation Nepal. http://nextgenerationnepal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/The-Paradox-of-Orphanage- Volunteering.pdf. 54 There’s even an eponymous “Backfire Effect,” a phenomenon whereby attempts to correct false beliefs with evidence can paradoxically strengthen confidence in those beliefs. See, Nyhan, Brendan, and Jason Reifler. 2010. “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.” Political Behavior 32 (2): 303–30. 55 I say “prima facie” in this case, rather than “pro tanto”, to acknowledge that this concern may not only be defeated by countervailing considerations but may turn out not to be a concern at all – as in cases where there’s good evidence that a particular boycott won’t backfire. 56 Beck op. cit., p.551. 57 Mills and Saprai op. cit., p.578.

gives the firm may draw other consumers to the target’s business or cause, outweighing the

boycotters’ efforts.58 Radzik makes the same two points but concludes that boycotts “often

backfire” for these reasons.59 60 Finally, Rodin and Yudkin worry that endorsing good boycotts in the

present my hurt our ability to oppose bad boycotts in the future.61

While these considerations are apropos, they don’t by themselves make the case that

boycotts consistently and reliably backfire – not without considerably stronger empirical evidence.

Indeed, a quick look at actual cases may lead one to the opposite conclusion. To cite a couple of

recent examples: advertisers withdrew from Bill O’Reilly’s FOX News program following

revelations of multiple sexual harassment suits and the subsequent calls for an advertising boycott.62

The NFL moved to ban on-field kneeling during the national anthem following consumer outcry

over the practice.63

We should of course be wary of doing too much post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. It will be a

serious challenge in any particular case to suss out how much of the final outcome was due to the

boycotters’ efforts and how much was due to other factors. But the point is that simply looking at

boycott cases does not give one the impression that boycotts are reliably ineffective or

counterproductive. And in the absence of better empirical evidence to support the claim of

consistent backfire, it seems reasonable to reject the Backfire Objection.

58 Mills op. cit., p.137. 59 Radzik op. cit., p.121. 60 The concern about recalcitrance is also echoed in Rodin and Yudkin (2011). Rodin and Yudkin op. cit., p.474. 61 Rodin and Yudkin op. cit., p.471. 62 Stewart, Tessa. 2017. “Inside the Bill O’Reilly Advertiser Boycott.” Rolling Stone, 2017. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/inside-the-bill-oreilly-advertiser-boycott-127520/. 63 Breuninger, Kevin. 2018. “NFL Bans on-Field Kneeling during the National Anthem.” 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/nfl-bans-on-field-kneeling-during-the-national-anthem.html.

Thus concludes our survey of the Procedural Objections to boycotting. I have argued that none of them seriously undermine consumer permissions to boycott. Coupled with my earlier arguments for dismissing the entire category of Substantive Objections as uninteresting, the conclusion is that introverted boycotting is broadly permissible. What constraints there are are obvious and uninteresting. (e.g. Don’t boycott when you think doing so would be evil; Don’t boycott when you think a target has already been harmed enough; Don’t boycott when it’s clear to you that doing so would be counterproductive.)

In the next chapter, I’ll offer a defense of consumer permissions to engage in extroverted boycotting, to support and promote the purchasing decisions of others.

Chapter 3 – Jus in Boycott

A Defense of Extroverted Boycotting

Introduction

In the last two chapters I defended the permissibility of ethical consumption from a literature that predominantly argues the opposite. I concluded that the existing objections to ethical consumption all fail and for more-or-less the same reason: they are overgeneral. Some of these objections overgeneralize into complaints about all acts of consumption; others overgeneralize into complaints about all benevolent activities. Overgeneral complaints like these are doubly defective.

They are defective, first, because they fail to tell us anything about the moral dimensions of ethical consumption in particular – which is the presumptive goal of any objection to ethical consumption – and they are defective, second, because they implausibly imply that a variety of other apparently unobjectionable acts are impermissible. The central finding of the last two chapters has been that ethical consumption is morally no worse than normal consumption – and potentially quite a bit better. The significance of this finding is just this: so long as we take ourselves to have broad permissions to engage in normal consumption, we should also take ourselves to have broad permissions to engage in ethical consumption.

This chapter is not about ethical consumption decisions per se. (Though, the next chapter will return us to that topic.) This chapter is about the moral dimensions of behaviors that promote, support, or aim at ethical consumption, behaviors I’ve been calling ‘extroverted boycotting’. Our question is again one of permissibility. By what means and to what extent, if any, may we support our ethical causes by supporting and promoting the transaction decisions of other market agents?

Here are the conclusions I intend to draw. I argue that we do have permissions to extrovertedly boycott and that these permissions may be derived from our permissions to introvertedly boycott. As for how we may support our boycott campaigns – which particular means we may adopt – I defend a view with two parts. This view says, first, that our permissions are relatively restrictive: that we may adopt in support of our causes only those means that we can accept our ideological opponents’ adopting in support of their causes. It says, second, that our permissions to extrovertedly boycott do not vary with the apparent moral urgency of our cause. I defend this view with an argument from epistemic humility and by way of analogy to two other domains: to the political domain, where there is already wide acceptance of analogous constraints on permissible activism, and to the martial domain, where many endorse principles of jus in bello that mirror the principles I am defending here – principles, we might say, of jus in boycott.

An Argument, a Challenge, a Reply

Let me open with some general remarks about our object of moral assessment, the category extroverted boycotting.

Whereas the introverted boycotter is trying to influence the market from within – via her own purchasing decisions – the extroverted boycotter stands a few steps back from the market. She is trying to influence the decisions of other market agents. She opposes Wicked Product Y by, e.g., getting other consumers to refuse Y, getting other manufacturers to make Y alternatives, or getting other companies to stop carrying and advertising Wicked Ys.

Since there are many and diverse strategies for getting other agents to act in accordance with our designs, the behaviors that count as extroverted boycotting are accordingly many and diverse.

Consider all the manifestations of persuasion. Efforts at moral persuasion might include the sharing

83 of information, the explicit offering of arguments, and the expressing of moral outrage. Any of these may be done verbally, in print, online, or offline, through media coverage, through petition, or through art. Efforts at prudential persuasion might bring to bear various economic incentives

(patronage, employment, discounts, profits, reputational gains, market access, good stock performance – or the loss of any of these) or social pressures (shaming, admiring, scolding, praising, shunning, befriending.) Efforts at persuasion can themselves be supported and promoted. I might support your efforts at persuasion by helping you standardize your messaging, planning and organizing your activities, or coordinating your timing with others.

Should our efforts at persuasion fail, we can also resort to blocking other parties from acting against our interests – i.e. denying them the option to do other than we’d like. The most popular strategy of this sort is the obstructionist boycott. Here the aim is to overwhelm or overflow some important resource that’s essential for completing transactions. By filling all the aisles, occupying all the phone lines, or overwhelming all the web servers, we can forestall some unwanted business.

Most coordinated boycotts employ a mix of strategies. In issuing a public call-for-boycott, we may be simultaneously requesting cooperation, expressing moral disapproval, and attempting to persuade – perhaps with information about the target’s bad behavior, with moral claims about the goodness of the cause, and with an assertion that together we can make a difference. A protest is also a mixed strategy: an attempt to persuade (signs! speeches!), a bid for media coverage, and a signal of social uptake.

The point is that the category of behaviors I’m calling ‘extroverted boycotting’ is quite diverse – as diverse as the strategies we can dream up for getting other people to act in accordance with our wishes. This diverse category is our object of moral assessment. May we engage in these sorts of behaviors? May we persuade and cajole other market agents to make market decisions that support our ends?

If ethical consumption per se were morally objectionable, the answer would be No. In that case, boycott promotion would be inappropriate because evil promotion is inappropriate. It’s morally bad to induce others to wrongdoing. But consumption decisions don’t seem to be evil. (At least, that’s what I spent the previous two chapters arguing, and that’s what I’ll be assuming from here on.) And since consumers have broad permissions to introvertedly boycott, extroverted boycotters are not inducing other consumers to evil.

This observation suggests a plausible argument in defense of extroverted boycotting.

Consider some category of action, , of which the following is true. First, we have good reason to think -ing is broadly permissible; second, we have good reason to think -ing is a relatively effective way to promote the good – and, indeed, that the more people who , the better.

(These conditions might be satisfied by, for instance, picking up litter, volunteering at a charity, adopting from an animal shelter, or donating to help with a friend’s unexpected medical bills.) Those of us who believe in the promise and permissibility of -ing may want to supplement our own effort to by promoting -ing to others (after all, the more -ers, the better!), and others of us who can’t – being too sick, too poor, too busy, or too far away – may still want to encourage others to in our stead.

This decision, to promote or support -ing, seems prima facie unobjectionable. Since you believe it’s good and proper for you to and also believe it’s good and proper for me to , seemingly it’s also good and proper for you to encourage me to . Consider recycling. You and I are each individually permitted to recycle, and it seems good for us to recycle. Surely, then, it’s also allowable for you to encourage me to recycle, or to promote recycling in general. Likewise with donating to Oxfam. You and I are each permitted to donate to Oxfam and, when we do, we each do a good thing. That’s good evidence that we may also encourage others to donate to Oxfam.

I submit that we should say the same thing about ethical consumption. Consumers are

allowed to make ethical consumption decisions (so I have argued) and sometimes, at least, ethical

consumption seems like a good thing to do, like a relatively effective way to promote certain goods.1

So that’s good evidence that you and I may also support and promote similar consumption decisions

in others.

We can extend this line of reasoning to other sorts of market decisions, too – e.g. to

advertiser decisions, product certification and labeling decisions, marketplace withdrawals, or,

simply, other decisions to extrovertedly boycott. It seems permissible for Company X to withdraw

its ads from Network Y, for Manufacturer Z to mark its products as having such-and-such attractive

property, for Firm W to move its operations from one market to another.2 And since these decisions

can also apparently be effective ways to promote the good, that seems like good evidence that we’re

also allowed to support and promote these decisions – e.g. to indicate that so-and-so’s ad withdrawal

would be welcome, that some particular product label would be motivating, that such-and-such

decision would increase our willingness to transact.

This is my primary argument in defense of extroverted boycotting. As stated, however, there

is at least one respect in which it may seem critically insufficient. (To say nothing of possible

objections to its premises! But those are addressed later in this chapter.) As we noted earlier, the

1 I’ll hold off on defending that second condition (Do we have good reason to think our ethical consumption is an effective way to promote the good?) until the next chapter. 2 I haven’t actually defended our permissions to perform these activities. But those conversations, were we to have them, would closely parallel the dialectic of the last two chapters. We ask, e.g., Do market agents have permission to withdraw from a marketplace for moral reasons? We then observe that it seems broadly permissible for agents to withdraw for non-moral reasons (e.g. because this location is unprofitable, because it’s too hard to staff, because it’s irremediably infested with termites.) Since moral reasons are our best and most urgent justifications for action, we would then conclude that market agents must also have broad permissions to withdraw from a marketplace for moral reasons. That is, unless there is some reason to think that morally- motivated withdrawals are morally worse than non-morally-motivated withdrawals. We might then consider a variety of proposals – harms done to innocents, unfair treatment of targets, the possibility of backfires – and observe that these problems all arise for non-moral withdrawals too. Therefore, etc.

category of extroverted boycotting does not consist in any particular kind of behavior or singular species

of moral action; it is, rather, an untidy collection of different behaviors (sit-ins, op-eds, retweets,

protests, graffiti) which have in common only a particular aim or end (to support and promote the

boycotter’s aims) and a high-level, generic strategy (by influencing the decisions of other market

parties.) My defense of extroverted boycotting is therefore primarily a defense of that unifying aim,

and my argument, if it succeeds, seems only to demonstrate the moral legitimacy of adopting this

aim.

One might sensibly object, That’s not enough! A defense of consumer permissions to aim at

boycott-promotion is not what’s wanted. What’s wanted is a defense of consumer permissions to act

on that aim; what’s wanted is an account of the particular, permissible steps that consumers may take

to promote their boycotts. This request seems all the more pressing in light of the existing literature

on boycotting, which is flush with suggestions for steps that we may not take. Garrett (1986) argues

that we may not use physical or social intimidation tactics to grow our boycotts.3 Beck (2019) and

Weinstock (2019) object to the use of deception – either by lying about a target’s misdeeds or by

misrepresenting one’s own reasons for boycotting.4 Garrett and Beck complain about those who

issue calls for boycotts while hiding in anonymity.5 Radzik (2017) and Beck are uneasy about

boycotters demanding concessions that are out of proportion to the target’s perceived misdeeds, and

they express doubts about the moral defensibility of trying to grow a boycott that is already too big –

i.e. one that’s already injuring the target in excess of its demerits.6 Villasenor (2018) and Weinstock

3 Garrett, Dennis E. 1986. “Consumer Boycotts: Are Targets Always the Bad Guys.” Business and Society Review 58 (2): 17-21. See p.20. 4 Beck, Valentin. 2019. “Consumer Boycotts as Instruments for Structural Change.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 543–559. See, p.553; Weinstock, Daniel. 2019. “Dissidents and Innocents: Hard Cases for a Political Philosophy of Boycotts.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 560–74. See p.564. 5 Beck op. cit., p.554; Garrett op. cit., p.21. 6 Beck op. cit., p.553; Radzik, Linda. 2017. “Boycotts and the Social Enforcement of Justice.” Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (1): 102–22. See p.119.

condemn the use of institutional power to coerce an institution’s members to join a boycott

campaign – at least in cases where the coercive measures are unjustified or would interfere with

institutional duties.7

There are, in sum, plenty of suggestions for what we may not do to promote or support

boycotting. But little has been said about what we may do.8 Given my argumentative position, it’s not

unreasonable to think that I ought to say something.

Here’s a first pass at an answer.

In a number of crucial respects, the present concern is a mirror image of one we

encountered in the previous chapter. That chapter was concerned with introverted boycotting, a category

I introduced to pick out one particular means or species of behavior – viz. morally-motivated purchasing

decisions – and in that chapter I drew a distinction between two kinds of objections to this category:

Substantive Objections and Procedural Objections. Substantive Objections reject particular ends as

wicked or impermissible, and they are prior to Procedural Objections in that they imply, when

sustained, that the end in question ought not be promoted by any means. Procedural Objections are

complaints about the moral value of particular means, and they are posterior to Substantive

Objections in that they do not imply that particular ends ought or ought not be adopted. A

Procedural Objection is typically a tailored complaint about some specific means/end pair (“This

particular method is an inappropriate way to pursue this particular goal.”)9

7 Villasenor, John. 2019. “The Trouble With Institution-Led Boycotts.” The Chronicle of Higher Education Jan 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Trouble-With/245367; Weinstock op. cit., p.567-570. 8 Nor may we conclude that tactics heretofore unmentioned are presumptively permissible. No one has complained in print about boycotters kidnapping other consumers to stop them from making bad purchases, but that definitely belongs on our shortlist of boycott no-nos. 9 I say “typically” because some normative theories posit the existence of categorically immoral means – i.e. unsuitable always and everywhere for pursuing any end – and the Procedural Objections such theories make against these means are not relativized to a particular end. For example, we commonly attribute to Kant the view that it’s always and everywhere wrong to make a promise that you have no intention of keeping. His objection to insincere promising is not tailored to any particular ends but applies tout court. (Indeed, the Universal Law of Nature formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative might aptly be glossed as a template

In the previous chapter, we considered a handful of Substantive Objections to introverted

boycotting (e.g. It would be wrong to use our purchases to deny people their basic liberties!) And I argued that

we can ignore these Objections because, as a general matter, when we are inquiring into the moral

dimensions of some particular means – like making purchases – our beliefs about which ends are good

or bad must be taken as givens and not as the grounds of dispute. We know that people disagree

about which things are good/bad and about which causes are worth promoting/defeating. Of

course those same people will have those same disagreements about which things are worth

promoting with our purchasing decisions. And we can ignore them. Those disputes pre-date this

discussion, and this discussion is no place to resolve them. Indeed, even if we could resolve them

right now, that would tell us very little about the ethics of purchasing decisions in particular. (If, for

example, I provide you with a persuasive demonstration that strikebreaking is immoral, you would

thereby learn just as much about boycotting ethics as you would about shoveling ethics or bomb

threat ethics – it’s wrong to break a strike with a !) Hence, I concluded that our focus should

remain on the moral value of the process before us and not on the substance of what we may do with it.

The present chapter reverses this dialectic. We are now concerned with extroverted boycotting, a

category I’ve introduced to pick out a particular end or aim (namely, promoting and supporting a boycott

campaign.) I have already defended the substance of this end; I’ve argued that it’s acceptable to have

boycott-promotion as an aim. The present challenge is to say something about what processes

(methods or means) we may use to pursue it.

The symmetry between this conversation and last chapter’s invites a symmetric reply. We

might say: as a general matter, when we are inquiring into the moral dimensions of some particular

end – like boycott promotion – our beliefs about which means are good or bad must be taken as

for generating end-agnostic Procedural Objections – i.e. objections to particular means that are categorical in scope.)

89 givens and not as the grounds of dispute. We know that people disagree about the goodness/badness of different means (e.g. lying.) Of course those same people will have those same disagreements about the badness of adopting those means to support boycotting. We can ignore them. Those disputes pre-date this discussion, and this discussion is no place to resolve them.

Indeed, even if we could resolve them, that would tell us very little about the ethics of boycott promotion. (If, for example, I provide you with a new and persuasive argument about the badness of lying, you would thereby learn just as much about boycotting ethics as it would about parenting ethics and advertising ethics.) Surely our focus should remain on the substance of boycott promotion

– the moral value of this end in particular – and not on the morality of the various tactics or means we might employ to pursue it.

I think this reply is correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go as far as I’d like. The trouble is that our original question remains even after we’ve waved away all pre-existing disagreements. Even if we all agree that lying is somewhat bad, it still makes sense to ask, May we lie to promote our boycott campaign? We can disagree about how best to answer that question without disagreeing about the badness of lying. (Although, if we also disagree about the badness of lying, we may get confused about what precisely is at issue.)

That’s true of lying, but it’s not true of all means. Lots of other strategies will rest at one or the other moral extreme, being either extremely objectionable or extremely unobjectionable. Obviously, you’re not allowed to torture me to stop me from making bad purchases. Just as obviously, you are allowed to talk with your spouse or partner about joining you in avoiding such-and-such bad products. Our existing views about the moral value of these two methods (torture, spousal conversation) are sufficient for drawing the kinds of conclusions being demanded. Spousal

conversation, being extremely unobjectionable, is a fine way to support one’s boycott. Torture, being

extremely objectionable, is an un-fine way to support one’s boycott.10

The point generalizes. The means that we already regard as morally terrible (torturing,

kidnapping, nuking, bio-terrorizing) are ones that would-be boycott promoters are forbidden to

adopt. The means that we already regard as morally benign (talking to one’s spouse, sharing a New

York Times article, giving an argument in good faith, painting a picture to express one’s anger) are

ones that would-be boycott promoters are permitted to adopt. Certainly, if you and I disagree about

which means belong on those lists, we’ll also disagree about whether boycotters may employ them.

But – and this is the point I was making by comparing the present discussion to the one from the

previous chapter – this is not the place to resolve those disagreements; our individual views on these

matters must be taken as givens and not as the grounds of dispute.

Thus, at the extremes it’s easy to state which means or tactics consumers may adopt to

promote boycotting. Extremely benign means are permissible; extremely malign means are

impermissible.

This reply leaves the intermediate space unsorted. That sorting will occupy us for the next

two sections.

Moderately Objectionable Means and the Proportional Permissions View

10 To be clear, our existing views about the badness of torture/spousal conversation are sufficient not because you and I agree on these matters but because we view them as extreme cases. Torture is extremely objectionable; spousal conversation is extremely unobjectionable. If you and I had opposite opinions about the badness of torture – if you thought it deeply evil while I thought it perfectly benign – we would still be able to draw easy conclusions about our permissions to torture in support of boycotting. The conclusion I’d draw (Pro-boycott torturing is fine!) would be wrong, of course, but the point is that I wouldn’t have a hard time drawing it.

Some of the means available to us for promoting our ends are of intermediate badness. We

find them rather more objectionable than, say, painting pictures and rather less objectionable than,

say, bioterrorism. The employment of these moderately objectionable means (MOMs) to pursue our ends

is neither granted to us with impunity nor forbidden without exception. (A plausible list of MOMs

might include lying, manipulating, restraining, stealing, bribing, intimidating, and harassing.) While

these means are all prima facie objectionable – each involving serious maltreatment of others – the

presumption against them is relatively moderate and potentially overridable. That is to say, MOMs

are bad, but not so bad that we may never employ them.11 Typically, our permission to employ one

of these MOMs depends both on how bad we take the MOM to be and on how good and morally

urgent our cause is.12 May I lie to a friend to protect her feelings? That depends on how bad I think

it is to lie to a friend and on how good it would be, in this case, to protect my friend’s feelings. May I

bribe a guard to let me into a secured building? That depends both on how bad I think bribery is

and on how good it would be, in this case, for me to gain access to this building.13 The question

11 Of course, some ethicists think that all means are potentially justified in the right circumstances. The traditional Consequentialist position would have it that, for instance, we’re allowed to torture whenever not torturing would clearly lead to the worse outcome. I don’t mean to be taking a stance on this. It’s enough for my purposes that you and I will never find ourselves in torture-justifying circumstances – and certainly not when our goal is merely to promote some boycott campaign. In contrast, you and I likely will find ourselves in circumstances that would permit us to employ some of the MOMs on my shortlist – to lie or steal or intimidate. 12 It also depends on how well our cause would be served by adopting this means and on how alternative means stack up along these dimensions (i.e. how bad, how effective.) 13 All of the categories of action I’ve been talking about (lying, torturing, bribing) are relatively high-level determinables, and it’s worth noting that different determinate acts in each category may be objectionable to different extents – such that a particular determinate in one category may not be categorically worse (or better) than the determinates in another category. So, for instance, a relatively mild act of tortue, like subjecting a prisoner to 90 minutes of the Barney and Friends theme song, may be less objectionable than a relatively severe act of theft, like stealing a diabetic’s entire supply of insulin. I don’t think anything crucial turns on my decision to talk at this level of generality. My arguments would run basically the same if I said, “of course you can’t support a boycott by pulling out someone’s left big toenail with a pair of Stanley pliers!” Rather than “of course you can’t support a boycott with torture!”

92 before us now is whether consumers may employ these moderately objectionable means to support their boycott campaigns.

Of these two considerations – How bad is this tactic? How morally good is this cause? – the first is not something to be answered here. At least, that was the point I was arguing in the last section: our views about how bad various tactics are must be taken as givens and not as the grounds of dispute.

That just leaves the matter of moral goodness (or, as I may sometimes refer to it, the matter of moral urgency or importance.) May boycotters employ moderately objectionable means to support their causes, and to what extent if any do those permissions depend on the apparent moral goodness/urgency of their causes?

One position – and probably the default position – is that boycotters do potentially have permission to employ MOMs, but these permissions are proportional to the apparent moral importance of their cause. Call this the ‘Proportional Permissions View’. It says that the list of means boycotters may take themselves to have permission to adopt is a function of the apparent moral urgency of their cause. The greater the cause, the more license to support it.

One argument for this View is that, simply, it seems plainly correct in a wide variety of other

(non-market) circumstances. (Which fact we sometimes express with the adage, Desperate times call for desperate measures.) It seems true that the things we may do to save three children from severe head injuries are more expansive than the things we may do to save one child from a sprained ankle. It seems true that the things we may do to save a friend’s house from burning down are more expansive than the things we may do to save a stranger $5. Why not say the same of boycotts? The things we may do to oppose government-sanctioned inequalities in basic civil liberties (as in the Montgomery Bus Boycotts) are more expansive than the things we may do to stop a fast-food chain from opposing marriage equality in particular (as in the recent Chick-fil-A boycotts.) This is one reason to like the PPV.

A second argument for the PPV can be distilled from a brief discussion in Hussain (2012).14

As we saw in Chapter 1, Hussain thinks that ethical consumers must in all their efforts defer to

formal democratic processes and politics, yet he also acknowledges that “there are cases where

injustices are so severe that morality does not require citizens to give formal democratic politics a

privileged position in social life.”15 Which is just to say, Hussain thinks our permissions to boycott

non-democratically depend on the moral urgency of our cause. Deference to democracy is a side

constraint that gets relaxed when “injustices are so severe.” This suggests a slightly different way of

making the case for the PPV.

We might reason: if a consumer’s apparent permissions to employ MOMs do not vary with

the apparent moral urgency of her cause – i.e. if we reject the PPV – then there must be one single

set of constraints that apply to all boycotts and causes, irrespective of their apparent urgency. But

that’s implausible. If, on the one hand, all boycotters were given expansive permissions to employ

MOMs, then agents with truly trivial ends would have apparent license to engage in genuinely

objectionable behavior. And that can’t be right; we know that trivial ends don’t justify objectionable

means – not in other domains and surely not in boycotting. If, on the other hand, all boycotters

were given restrictive permissions to engage in MOMs, then the noblest of boycotters, fighting for the

most urgent-seeming of causes, would be hamstrung in their pursuit of the good. And that, too,

seems incorrect. Thus, we should accept that boycotters’ permissions vary with the apparent moral

urgency of their causes; we should accept the PPV.

While I think both of these arguments have some initial plausibility – enough to explain why

the PPV may be counted as the default position – I also think both arguments fail.

14 Hussain, Waheed. 2012. “Is Ethical Consumerism an Impermissible Form of Vigilantism?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40 (2): 111–43. See, p.134. 15 Hussain op. cit.

Much of the appeal of the PPV seems to depend on our choice of examples. So long as I’m imagining boycotters with whom I sympathize, individuals whose causes seem noble and good to me,

I can see the appeal of the PPV. Surely their obvious and exceptional righteousness grants them exceptional license. But this judgment dissipates when I consider boycotters whose causes do not seem noble and good to me. When I consider the American Family Association’s myriad boycotts, which were aimed at preventing the normalization of LGBT+ identities and relationships in Western societies, I do not find the PPV appealing. Suppose the AFA itself were split on exactly how bad

LGBT+ normalization would be. The doom-and-gloom crowd think it would be positively cataclysmic; the decay-and-dismay crowd think it would only be rather bad. Should the doom-and-gloom camp take themselves to have greater permission than the decay-and-dismay camp to engage in moderate objectionable tactics? I’m not inclined to say so. I want to say that irrespective of the participants’ perceptions of moral urgency, it would have been wrong for the AFA boycotters to promote their cause with MOMs. And I feel similarly about other cases where objectionable causes are supported with moderately objectionable tactics – cases where, for instance, my ideological opponents have lied about their target’s misdeeds, have stolen customer data from a target’s servers, have bribed reputable media organizations to give them positive coverage, or have hit a target’s e-store with a

Denial-Of-Service attack, thereby blocking other consumers from completing transactions. I would not be particularly mollified in any of these cases to learn that my ideological opponents were only taking these drastic measures out of a sincere conviction in the exceptional moral urgency of their cause. Nor, I expect, would my ideological opponents feel especially sanguine about any attempts of mine to justify objectionable behavior with an appeal to my own sense of moral urgency.

Insofar as one shares these judgments, one thereby has a good reason to doubt the PPV. We know that other people will use boycotts to support causes that we disagree with, causes that strike us as misguided or wicked. We can anticipate that many of those people will be in epistemic

positions roughly equivalent to our own and will, like us, be acting on some earnestly held beliefs

about what’s good and important. We can expect that our ideological opponents will feel about their

causes the same way we feel about our causes – and will feel about our causes the same way we feel

about their causes. Under such circumstances, we may doubt the PPV for the license it gives our

opponents to pursue their objectionable causes by objectionable means, and they may doubt the PPV

for the same reason, mutatis mutandis.16

It is only a small hop from this observation to a more powerful argument against the PPV.

This second argument is an appeal to epistemic humility. We note: our ideological opponents don’t

have a monopoly on moral mistakes. You and I must have some erroneous normative beliefs of our

own.17 And that means each of us stands poised to commit the same mistake as our opponents:

confusing our self-assurance for righteousness and then using the PPV to justify bad behavior in

service to bad ends.

This seems like a more moving reason to reject the PPV – and does not require that one

share my judgments about the AFA case. Indeed, there’s an instructive analogy here to the principles

of Just War Theory – in particular, to the principles of jus in bello that govern permissible behavior in

16 One might reply, The PPV only appears to license our opponents to engage in objectionable behavior. In actual fact, since our opponents are wrong about the righteousness of their causes, they are also wrong about what the PPV gives them permission to do. The PPV only licenses moderately objectionable means to those whose causes are actually morally urgent. But that’s not helpful. The PPV as I’ve formulated it just is a principle about appearances. There is of course a correlative view about our objective permissions – about what actual permissions we have in light of the actual moral urgency of our causes – and it may be that that Objective Proportional Permissions View is the correct account of consumer’s actual permissions. But that’s not the question I’m trying to ask or answer. I’m trying to understand what consumers should take themselves to be permitted to do in support of their boycott campaigns. More particularly, I mean to be asking whether the appearance of urgency that attaches to some of our causes has any bearing on the tactics we are subjectively permitted to adopt. I am considering the PPV as one plausible answer to that question. 17 There are so many chances to go wrong! Even if I have all true beliefs about which things are good and about what the moral rules are, I might still be wrong about how good the various good things are or about the relative importance of the various rules, or I might be wrong about which acts promote the good and which violate the moral rules.

conducting war.18 In war, as in politics, it is not uncommon for parties on both sides of a dispute to

think themselves in the right, to think that they are the ones fighting justly against a morally bankrupt

foe. Of course, one of the two sides must be in the wrong – and very often it’s both! – but each side

will tend to believe that that dubious honor rests with their opponent. Since villainous states and

righteous states are both subjectively certain of their own righteousness, it seems that insofar as

we’re generating rules about what agents in war should take themselves to be permitted to do, it would

be disastrous to accept principles of jus in bello that allow exceptions for certainty. We dare not say,

for instance, it’s wrong to use civilians as human shields unless you’re really sure your side is in the right.19 That is

little better than saying “It’s not wrong to use civilians as human shields.” In execution, any

exceptions we carve out for the righteous will also supply excuses to the self-assured. And nearly

everyone is self-assured.

This is the gist of my complaint about the PPV. Since nearly every boycotter is convinced of

the righteousness of her cause – why else would she be boycotting? – we don’t want to adopt

principles of jus in boycott that make special exception for exceptionally righteous causes. We should

not say, for instance, “it’s wrong to intimidate other consumers into supporting your boycott unless

you’re really sure your cause is morally urgent.” That is little better than saying, “Go ahead and

support your boycott with intimidation tactics.” The exceptions that the PPV carves out for the

righteous must also supply excuses to the self-assured.

What then of the two arguments I offered earlier in support of the PPV? I submit that the

second argument – the one that said rejecting the PPV would unacceptably hamstring truly righteous

18 This analogy was suggested to me in conversation by Luc Bovens. The broader comparison between boycotting and Just War Theory is also made by Weinstock (2019) – though he makes a different use of it. See, Weinstock op. cit., p.572. 19 ... and unless the harms to be done are proportionate to the goals to be achieved and there are no other means by which you might accomplish the same goals and at lesser cost...

boycotters – is simply mistaken that this consequence is unacceptable. For the reasons I’ve been

trying to articulate, we should positively want to hamstring ourselves (and our ideological opponents)

for fear that we (or they) will confuse our self-assurance for righteousness and support our

objectionable ends with objectionable means. The exceptions the PPV carves out for the righteous

are a bug, not a feature.

The first argument – the one that supports the PPV by comparing boycotting to other ends

where our permissions really do seem to vary with urgency – should be rejected on the grounds that

the analogy it offers is inapt. Or so I argue in the next section.

The Restrictive Permissions View and a Better Analogy

In opposition to the PPV, let me propose the Restrictive Permissions View. It says two

things: first, that our permissions to extrovertedly boycott do not vary with the moral urgency of our

cause, and second, that our permissions are restrictive and generally don’t include the employment of

moderately objectionable means. More specifically, the RPV restricts consumer permissions

according to the following principle: that we should take ourselves to be permitted to employ in

pursuit of our own causes only those methods that we may simultaneously endorse as permissible

for our ideological opponents to employ in pursuit of their causes.20 We are, in other words, to

refrain from any tactics that our ideological opponents ought also to refrain from.

One reason to like the RPV is its sensitivity to the concerns raised against the PPV. The

RPV acknowledges that in boycotts, as in war, there will often be an epistemic symmetry between

oneself and one’s adversaries – common feelings of urgency, of importance, of self-assurance – and

20 I have indexed the RPV to each individual’s existing normative views because, as I argued above, this chapter is not the place to settle pre-existing disagreements about which means are objectionable or about how objectionable they are.

that this fact creates incentives for each side to want to set limits on what methods all sides may

employ to promote their ends. This view further acknowledges that in boycotts, as in war, we should

keep sight of the fact that there will be a time after and outside the present conflict when both sides

will need to reach accord and get along, and it counsels us therefore to remain wary of our own

shortsighted and motivated reasoning, that we not dupe ourselves into treating others in ways we

won’t be able to retroactively justify – either to them or to ourselves. More generally, the RPV

acknowledges the possibility for normative error, the possibility that we’re the ones who’ve gotten it

wrong. It counsels humility and restraint. It counsels us to avoid the double fault of supporting

objectionable ends with objectionable means.

Beyond these sorts of observations, perhaps the best way to support the RPV is by analogy –

an analogy not to the martial domain this time, but to the political. The constraints that the RPV

imposes on the promotion and support of boycott campaigns closely track the constraints that we

already accept on the promotion and support of political causes.21

Consider the parallels. Consumers have market powers: certain abilities to influence events

in the marketplace. These powers are largely grounded in other parties’ desires to transact. Each

consumer may decide when and with whom to transact, and each thereby directly adds or subtracts

her voice from various market outcomes. (More vinyl records! Fewer SUVs! Cheaper furniture!) And

yet the consumer’s market power is also thoroughly diluted by the presence of billions of other

consumers, each making their own individual consumption decisions, each adding their own voice

to the same great market cacophony. Many of these voices end up opposing one another, their

21 Beckstein (2014) also employs this analogy but for a different purpose. While I use it to support my view about how we may permissibly support our boycott campaigns, Beckstein uses it in reply to Hussain’s Public Sphere Objection, suggesting there is nothing uniquely undemocratic about trying to extend one’s basic market powers by persuading others to one’s cause – since our efforts in the economic domain often mirror our efforts in the political domain. Beckstein, Martin. 2014. “Political Consumer Activism and Democratic Legitimacy.” Studies in Social & Political Thought 24: 41-64.

owners making contrary decisions about what’s good, for them or for society. A deeply similar set of

circumstances obtain in the political domain. Citizens have political powers: certain abilities to

influence events in the theatre of politics. Many (though not all) of these powers are grounded in

citizens’ having a vote. Each voter may decide whether and for whom to cast her vote, and each

thereby adds or subtracts her voice from various electoral outcomes. And yet the citizen’s electoral

power is also thoroughly diluted by the presence of thousands or millions of other voters, each

casting their own votes, each adding their own voice to the same great electoral cacophony. Many of

those voices end up opposing one another, their owners making contrary decisions about what’s

good. And in the same way that a consumer can extend her small share of direct market power by

trying to guide the transactions of other market agents – i.e. can engage in extroverted boycotting – a

citizen may extend her small share of political power by trying to guide the decisions of other

political agents. And our original question about boycott activism also arises for electoral activism:

What exactly should citizens take themselves to be permitted to do in support of their electoral ends?

I take it the commonsense, received view looks a lot like the RPV. Citizens are permitted the

same obviously unobjectionable tactics as boycotters (talking to spouses, sharing articles, giving

arguments) and are forbidden the same obviously objectionable tactics as boycotters (torturing,

kidnapping, bio-terrorizing.) We also generally think them forbidden from employing the sorts of

tactics we’ve classed as moderately objectionable (stealing, restraining, bribing, intimidating.) Our norms

governing political activism – and our laws, in many cases – take a dim view of such behavior.

Clearly, this is not because our political causes tend to be morally trivial and non-urgent.22 The

22 One 2013 poll of U.S. adults found that ~13% believed that then-President Obama to be the Antichrist – with another 13% being “unsure” whether he was. I can think of few political causes more urgent than keeping the reigns of state out of the hands of the fundamental enemy of God and goodness. Harris, Paul. 2013. “One in Four Americans Think Obama May Be the Antichrist, Survey Says.” The Guardian, 2013, sec. US news.

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explanation seems to be, instead, that there is a widespread acceptance of the RPV. We think that

permissible political tactics do not depend on the urgency of one’s political causes, and that

everyone’s permissions are relatively restrictive. Both sides accept that both sides may offer

arguments, may canvass door-to-door, may protest and petition. Neither side thinks either side may

offer bribes, may steal opponents’ private documents, may physically intimidate, may spread lies

about opponents’ positions, may obstruct other citizens from voting or from political activism.23

Whether or not these facts are best explained by the considerations I offered earlier against

the PPV, those considerations do seem apt and explanatory. In politics, as in boycotts, we can see

many of our own sentiments reflected in our political opponents, in their common feelings of

urgency, importance, and self-assurance. In politics, as in boycotts, we have good reason to be wary

of norms of political activism that grant exceptions for the righteous – lest our opponents (or we

ourselves) confuse their self-assurance for actual righteousness and commit objectionable acts in

support of objectionable ends. In politics, as in boycotts, our norms need to be sensitive to the

rights and interests of our political opponents and to the fact that there will be a time after and

outside the present political conflicts when we’ll need to find accord and get along.

So this is my argument by analogy for the RPV. The circumstances of political activism seem

deeply similar to the circumstances of extroverted boycotting. The RPV seems like the correct

23 One might object that certain partisans are already doing these things. The Trump 2016 campaign apparently benefited from the theft of a cache of Democratic National Committee emails; pols and partisans routinely attempt to mislead voters about opponents’ positions; voter ID laws might be aptly described as voter- obstruction. That might be correct, but it doesn’t show that the agents involved regarded their actions as morally justified for the reasons articulated by the PPV – that is, justified by the moral urgency of their cause. It seems equally plausible that these agents regarded their actions as morally justified because they disagreed that they were engaged in moderately objectionable behaviors – perhaps because they disagreed about which kinds of behavior count as moderately objectionable (e.g. lying isn’t objectionable) or because they disagreed that their actions were members of those kinds. (e.g. lying is objectionable, but this isn’t a lie.) In support of this explanation, we might note how very prevalent are accusations of hypocrisy in U.S. politics. (e.g. “You cried for blood when the last president X’d, but now that your guy’s in office, it’s crickets, huh?”) Hypocrisy charges carry an implicit assumption that – contra the PPV – the same rules of conduct apply to both sides.

101 position concerning our permissions to engage in political activism. So it should seem like the correct position concerning our permissions to engage in extroverted boycotting.

Moreover, this analogy seems more apt than the one offered in the previous section in support of the PPV – the analogy at the core of the first argument for the PPV. I observed that the

PPV seems plausible in a lot of other, non-market cases. (E.g. the things you may do to save three children from severe head injuries are more expansive than the things you may do to save one child from a sprained ankle.) I suggested that the PPV’s status as the default view in other domains of our lives gives us a good reason to accept it in the context of boycotting, too. At the very least, it shifts the burden of proof to me. I should be able to explain why it’s not the correct view in this context.

Here’s the explanation I favor. Acts of extroverted boycotting – like acts of political activism

– are largely public in the sense that they are part of an ongoing societal discourse about what the common good consists in, what kind of future we should aim at, how markets should function, how market agents should behave, and what society should look like. There are, as we’re all aware, a number of ongoing, earnest, intense, and extensive disagreements on these matters. This is something we must bear in mind when we attempt to accomplish our goals in the market (or in the political sphere.) When we strive to make the world a better place, we do so in full view of others’ ongoing, reasonable disagreement with our goals. These facts partly constitute the conditions of epistemic symmetry upon which I leaned so heavily in objecting to the PPV – and, I submit, it is specifically under such conditions that the PPV is unattractive.

After all, these conditions don’t obtain in the sorts of cases I cited earlier where the PPV seems plausible. There’s no ongoing and intense disagreement about whether saving your child’s life is more urgent than saving a stranger $5 or about whether protecting my sibling from a rabid animal is more important than protecting my purse from a curious child. Agents with these sorts of aims, unlike agents with political aims, are not acting in the knowledge that their goals’ goodness, urgency, and import is

102 a matter of ongoing dispute. Accordingly, such agents have far less reason to worry about the possibility of their own moral error, about being able to justify their actions to others, about their opponents (what opponents?) using similar reasoning to justify objectionable actions, and about the need after and outside the present conflict (what conflict?) to reach accord and get along. This seems to be a crucial difference between the non-market cases where the PPV seems plausible and cases of extroverted boycotting. And, I submit, this difference explains why we should adopt a more conservative and restrictive view – the RPV – in the context of political and boycott activism, even if we accept the PPV elsewhere.

Other Objections

Recall my original defense of extroverted boycotting. I proposed a general moral principle: that for any activity, , if -ing is generally good-promoting and broadly permissible, then we ought also to think it permissible to support and promote others’ -ing. (So, for instance, our permissions to support and promote composting may be inferred from the general goodness and permissibility of composting.) Since ethical consumption decisions seem both broadly permissible and reasonably effective – as do most of the other sorts of market decisions boycott organizers might want to promote – I concluded that we’re also permitted to support and promote boycotting. The last few sections were then prompted by one particular concern about this argument: that it doesn’t indicate anything about what in particular consumers may do to support boycotting.

Having concluded that detour, I want to close out this chapter by returning to the original argument and considering what other doubts might be raised against it. Broadly speaking, these come in three flavors – each corresponding to one of the argument’s central claims. First, one may doubt whether consumers really do have broad permissions to make ethical purchasing decisions.

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Those doubts were addressed in Chapters 1 and 2. Second, one may raise big-picture doubts about whether individual purchasing decisions really do promote the good – or make a difference at all.

Those doubts will be addressed in Chapter 4. Finally, one may doubt the general moral principle embedded in my argument – let’s call it the ‘Transfer Principle’ – which claims that our individual permissions to engage in a good-promoting activity imply further permissions to support and promote that activity to others. These are addressed below.

Doubts about the Transfer Principle can themselves be categorized and subdivided. There are, first, doubts about the relevance of the Transfer Principle to boycotting, which are grounded in the common observation that consumption decisions often appear to play little to no role in the success of boycotting campaigns. And there are, second, doubts about the truth of the Transfer

Principle. There are a variety of circumstances in which the Principle seems to fail, and a number of these circumstances may seem to obtain in the case of boycotting. The remainder of this chapter is for putting these doubts to rest.

Are Purchasing Decisions Irrelevant?

One concern about the Transfer Principle arises from certain common views about the

(non-)importance of purchasing decisions. It is commonly observed that consumer purchases are not sufficient for a successful boycott effort. Extroverted efforts seem to be jointly necessary, seem to fill two essential roles. The first is that of coordination and amplification. While boycott campaigns waged on one’s own will mostly fail – the individual being but one consumer among billions, her purchasing decisions but hundreds among trillions – the prospects for a larger, collective boycott campaign are not so dim. By promoting and supporting our causes to others, by coordinating and organizing our collective efforts, we can significantly raise the probability of success. The many may succeed where the one would fail, and extroverted efforts are what get us from the one to the many.

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The other essential role is that of explanation – of detailing, clarifying, and contextualizing

consumer decisions and consumer interests. This is important because purchasing decisions are not,

by themselves, a terribly rich form of communication.24 Boycotts enacted only through purchasing

decisions aren’t likely to be understood either by their targets (“Are sales down because we need to

advertise more, or is this about that deforestation thing?”) or by other consumers (“What’s up with

all these Gluten Free products? Is gluten morally problematic?”) Without extroverted activities,

ethical consumers would mostly fail to explain their moral consumption and so would mostly fail to

generate clear reasons for other parties to change their behavior.

While these two considerations explain why extroverted boycotting may be necessary for

effective boycotting, some philosophers claim that it’s also sufficient. The strongest version of this

position would have it that modern boycott campaigns mostly succeed without the help of ethical

consumption decisions. Friedman claims that “many contemporary ‘boycotts’ are not boycotts at all

but [only] threats of boycotts or calls for boycotts.”25 Along similar lines, Beckstein suggests that

modern boycotts are “more about sending warning signals… than [about] changing consumption

habits.”26 On this view, a boycott campaign is a bit like a parent who gets her children to behave by

counting down from three. The mere threat is enough; there’s no need to follow through. (Nor even

to specify what penalties await those who reach the end of the countdown.)

This is a potential problem for the Transfer Principle because the Principle is meant to be

explanatory. The fact that -ing is good and the fact that we have broad permissions to are together

supposed to entail and explain our permission to promote and support -ing. (We’re allowed to promote

recycling because it’s fine and good for each of us to recycle.) But if Beckstein and Friedman are right that

24 Suggested revision to the old adage: Money talks, but it doesn’t know many words. 25 Friedman op. cit., p.238. 26 Beckstein op. cit., p.54.

105 boycotting is fundamentally about extroverted behaviors – the threats and warning signals – and that purchasing decisions are mostly causally irrelevant, then my appeal to the Transfer Principle may seem rather suspicious. If the effectiveness of the one is not explained by the effectiveness of the other, we might doubt whether the permissibility of the one is explained by the permissibility of the other. How could our permission to do the irrelevant thing truly entail or explain our permission to the relevant thing?

The trouble with this objection is that the case for the irrelevance of consumption decisions is unconvincing. Friedman and Beckstein seem to take it as theoretically obvious that threats and warning signals do the heavy-lifting in cases of boycott success. But that shouldn’t seem at all obvious. In most actual cases, it’s not even clear that consumer pressure, of any sort, was a primary motivation for boycott success. Targets rarely offer a detailed post-mortem on their decision making, and without that, it is typically an open question whether consumer pressure was a primary reason for the target’s concession, was an irrelevant factor, or was something in between. And of course, if we can’t tell whether a boycott was (simply) effective, we can’t tell whether any particular part of the boycott campaign was more effective than any other. In fact, that inference is a challenge even in cases where it is clear that the boycott made the difference. We certainly don’t want to make the bad inference that since the threats are all we see, the threats are all there is. Public threats of boycott are, by their very nature, the visible tip of the boycott iceberg.

Even were we to grant the obvious inefficacy of purchasing decisions, there remains a more fundamental problem with this line of complaint about the Transfer Principle. If boycotters do often achieve their ends with mere threats, that’s surely because the thing threatened is the thing unwanted. That is to say, surely unwanted losses are the motivational core of boycotting behaviors.

Which fact – pace Beckstein – seems to give purchasing decisions at least as strong a claim to being what boycotting is “about,” and which should make my appeal to the Transfer Principle non-

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suspicious.27 We often think, in cases of permissible threat, that part of what makes the threat

permissible is that the threat issuer is permitted to do the thing threatened. That’s an explanatory

connection: that I may partly explains why I may threaten to .28 The empirical concerns these

authors are raising about the relative efficacy of the-threat vs. the-thing-threatened doesn’t seem to

undermine that explanatory relationship.

Nevertheless, there is a weaker version of this position that might support the same

objection. Some authors have argued that consumption decisions, even if they do play some causal

role in a boycott campaign, are relatively unimportant because they are relatively ineffective. Beck

claims that “organised and publicly advertised calls for boycott are much more likely to have a

significant economic and social impact” than individual consumption decisions.29 Beckstein suggests

that “an ‘ethical’ product is better promoted by organizing a boycott than by privately [making

purchasing decisions.]”30 Weinstock thinks that actual consumption decisions are simply “of [lesser]

political significance” and “of much lesser moral moment” than the extroverted calls to boycott

because they are less likely to have any real effect.31 If one agrees with these authors that extroverted

efforts are relatively more important and effective than purchasing decisions, then one might again

have good reason to doubt my use of the Transfer Principle. In this case, perhaps the worry is that

the difference in efficacy constitutes a morally relevant disanalogy between introverted efforts and

extroverted efforts. One might reason, It’s true that consumption decisions seem permissible, but that’s surely

27 Compare: What is nuclear deterrence about? Is it about the threats and theater – usually sufficient for stopping bad behavior – or is it about the nuclear weapons themselves, the unused motivational core of those threats? I’d say the case for the latter is at least as strong as the case for the former. 28 There may be cases where one is permitted to sincerely threaten to perform an act that one is not actually permitted to perform. That possibility is compatible with what I am claiming here. For my purposes, I only need there to be a plausible explanatory link in cases where the threat and the thing threatened are both permitted. I claim that in such cases the permissibility of the latter seems partly to explain the permissibility of the former. 29 Beck op. cit., p.545. 30 Beckstein op. cit., p.52. 31 Weinstock op. cit., p. 565.

107 because consumption decisions seem ineffective. (No effect, no harm; no harm, no foul.) But extroverted boycotting efforts, in contrast, really do make a difference. And that means it’s a mistake to appeal to the Transfer Principle in this case. The inefficacy of -ing is what explains the permissibility of -ing. And we cannot explain the permissibility of -promotion by appealing to the permissibility of -ing because the explanans is missing. - promotion is effective, so it can’t be permissible on account of it’s inefficacy.

The trouble with this version of the argument is that it relies on some implausible views about consumer influence. Recall that I began this section by pointing out that the solitary ethical consumer is unlikely to accomplish her goals using only her own purchasing power. (The market being too big, her influence too small.) But if this is true of her purchases, it seems equally true of her calls for assistance. The public square is no less crowded than the marketplace. Our voices are no more likely to carry. The individual’s efforts to call for a boycott simply raise a new battery of efficacy concerns – e.g. Is anyone reading my impassioned social media posts? Does anyone care about my Google Doc of demands? Would the public protest really have gone differently if I’d stayed home? Have any of my efforts to date actually caused anyone to change their behavior?

My point is not that activists and consumers both are powerless. The point is rather that the former are not obviously more powerful than the latter, are not “much more likely to have a significant impact” and do not perform acts “of much greater moral moment.” My point is that efficacy does not seem like a morally relevant difference between introverted and extroverted boycotting. This is not a reason to doubt my appeal to the Transfer Principle.

Transfer Failures

Most of the time, for most good-promoting activities, the Transfer Principle seems to get things basically right. When we consider volunteering, recycling, helping needy friends, mentoring

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under-privileged children, or being kind to animals, the inference from this activity seems fine and good to

I can promote this activity to others does not seem problematic. But there are exceptions. In a handful of

cases – cases of transfer failure – that inference does seem problematic. These cases all share the

same basic features. Each involves some set of circumstances where individual efforts to promote

and support -ing give rise to a new problem, complaint, or bad outcome – “new” in the sense that

the problem does not arise for individual decisions to – which constitutes a reason why -

promotion is morally worse than -ing. When this reason is sufficiently strong, we have transfer

failure: a counterexample to the Transfer Principle where we’ve permission to but no permission

to promote and support -ing.32

Obviously, my argument requires that boycotting not be a case of transfer failure. In what

remains of this chapter, I shall argue that this is in fact the case. I consider five possible reasons for

transfer failure and argue that none of them defeat consumer permissions to extrovertedly boycott.

None of them block the inference from permission to to permission to support and promote -ing.

Transfer Failure #1: Backfires. Here’s an example of the first kind of transfer failure.

The Influencer

Amal is a social media personality with a large and devoted following who, in her spare time,

volunteers at a local animal shelter. Amal’s volunteer work is one part of her life that she doesn’t share

with her online fans. She worries, for good reason and from past experience, that promoting the

shelter to her followers would do far more harm than good. It’s all too likely that the shelter’s small

32 Since there could also be respects in which -promotion is morally better than -ing, genuine transfer failure will only occur when the new problems are of sufficient weight to render -promotion impermissible over any counterbalancing new benefits.

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staff would be overwhelmed by a well-meant outpouring of support – by the phone-ringing,

website-crashing, adoption-demanding mob.

Amal’s situation is a plausible counterexample to the Transfer Principle. While it seems fine

and good for Amal – or any other particular individual – to volunteer at this animal shelter (to on

their own), it doesn’t seem fine for her to promote this cause to her followers since doing so is likely

to do far more harm than good, to backfire. This is an instance of a more general pattern of transfer

failure: the Transfer Principle seems to fail in cases where efforts to support and promote -ing can

be expected to set back the good rather than promote it.

As we saw last chapter, a number of philosophers have raised backfire concerns about

boycotting. They worry that boycotts may accidentally provide targets with free publicity, may

provoke counter-boycotts, and may worsen target recalcitrance.33 But like last chapter, it is doubtful

that backfire concerns materially undermine consumer permissions to act.

The trouble is that the mere chance of backfire is not motivating on its own. Almost any

well-intentioned act must bear some non-zero risk of backfiring, but we don’t think that that mere

possibility is a good reason to sit on our hands. The risk of backfire seems only to demand restraint

when, like Amal, we positively expect (or positively ought to expect) that our efforts really will do

more harm than good. And boycotters are not often in that position. First, it’s very uncommon for a

boycott to clearly backfire. Given the sheer size and complexity of the market, the relevant

counterfactuals mostly don’t bear their truth values on their sleeves. (How would things have turned out if

our campaign had never gotten off the ground? If we’d tried different messaging? Timing? Tactics?) But, second,

even in cases where there does seem to be a clear backfire effect, there doesn’t seem to be transfer

33 Beck op. cit., p.551; Mills op. cit., p.137; Mills and Saprai op. cit., p.578; Radzik op. cit., p.121; Rodin and Yudkin op. cit., p.474.

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failure. Consider the 2018 Nike boycotts – which were prompted by an ad campaign featuring (and

implying approval of) Colin Kaepernick, a controversial political activist-cum-athlete. It seems

reasonably clear in retrospect that this boycott backfired.34 But it hardly seems that the individual

boycotters could or ought to have anticipated this result in advance – much less in advance and in

relation to their own particular efforts. (“You should have known when you tweeted that picture of your

burning Nikes that you were only making things worse.”) For most boycotters most of the time, the

possibility of backfire remains plausibly remote. So long as that’s true, the mere risk of backfire does

not lead to transfer failure. It does not block our permissions to promote our causes.

Transfer Failure #2: Capriciousness. We can identify a different possible reason for transfer

failure in Peled’s (2019) Capriciousness Objection – which, like the Backfire Objection, also

originally appeared in Chapter 2 as an objection to ethical consumption decisions.35 Peled observes

that generic calls for consumer action (“Stop deforestation!”) often lead individual consumers to

make relatively arbitrary decisions. Having no particular guidance, each consumer must decide on

their own how to answer the call, and these decisions may often end up looking rather arbitrary.

While these individual arbitrary decisions are not objectionable, Peled thinks the net result, the

aggregate consequence of many individual decisions, clearly is. The market parties who suffer many

arbitrary decisions are being treated capriciously. They are wrongfully stuck in a state of uncertainty

about whether, when, and by whom they will be targeted.36

34 According to Youn (2018), Nike reported a ~10% bump in income in the subsequent quarter, primarily driven by revenue growth. That growth seemed to be the result of the opposing Nike buycott campaign. Youn, Soo. 2018. “Nike Sales Booming after Colin Kaepernick Ad, Invalidating Critics.” ABC News. 2018. abcnews.go.com/Business/nike-sales-booming-kaepernick-ad-invalidating-critics/story?id=59957137. 35 Peled, Yael. 2019. “The Ethics of Boycotting as Collective Anti-Normalisation.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4): 527–42. 36 Peled op. cit., p.535-6.

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This is another possible reason for transfer failure. Since collective arbitrary decisions are, by

Peled’s lights, morally much worse than individual arbitrary decisions, our permissions to make

arbitrary decisions on our own (to ) may not transfer into permissions to support and promote

others’ arbitrary decision making – since doing so would amount to fomenting wrongful capricious

treatment.

The trouble with this proposal is that capricious treatment per se does not seem wrongful –

nor does it seem immoral for individuals to support and promote arbitrary decision making at the

collective level. Consider a non-boycott case. Suppose Andres likes to volunteer his time on the

weekends but suffers from paralyzing indecisiveness (Where should he volunteer?!) His solution is to

roll a die each Friday, letting the outcome direct him to a particular volunteer opportunity. Andres

often encourages others to join him – that is, he encourages them to volunteer their time and,

insofar as they feel indecisive, to direct their efforts with the roll of a die. In so doing, Andres is

fomenting capriciousness. He is potentially leaving a number of volunteer organizations in a state of

uncertainty about whether, when, and how many volunteers they’ll have on any given weekend. But

it doesn’t seem to me that Andres is doing anything wrong – or anything particularly objectionable.

What’s more, Andres seems to be behaving permissibly even though he’s doing far more to support

capriciousness than would the average extroverted boycotter. Andres is not only issuing generic calls

to action – failing, as the boycotter does, to specify where, when, and how to act – he’s explicitly

endorsing a random decision procedure. If Andres’ capriciousness-promotion doesn’t seem

wrongful, then neither should the capriciousness-promotion of extroverted boycotters.37

37 Peled actually levels her objection at one particular boycott campaign: the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. It is part of her complaint against this campaign that it is capricious by intention and design. If that’s true, then the Andres case may seem far more similar to the BDS movement than to an average boycott campaign. Andres’ efforts at volunteer-promotion are also capricious by design. And if Andres’ explicit endorsement of a random decision procedure seems permissible, then that casts doubt on whether the intentional capriciousness of the BDS movement is wrongful.

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More generally, it is doubtful that capriciousness itself is a plausible reason for transfer

failure. This is because non-capricious treatment doesn’t seem to be something collectives owe to

other parties by default. The exceptions to this general rule are instructive. Collectives of air traffic

controllers, of nurses, and of parents do seem to have duties to avoid capricious treatment (not

duties to everyone, but to pilots, patients, and children, respectively), but they don’t have these duties

merely because capricious treatment is wrongful. In all three cases, there are special relationships of

dependence between the parties who are owed non-capricious treatment and the collectives who

owe it to them, and in at least two of the cases, a failure to coordinate treatment could easily lead to

serious, even fatal harm. These factors simultaneously explain why these particular collectives do

have obligations to render coordinated treatment and, in their absence, explain why other collectives

do not have such obligations. Most collectives don’t stand in these sorts of special dependence

relations to other parties, nor do they risk gravely harming other parties by failing to render

coordinated treatment. For most collectives – including consumer collectives – uncoordinated

(capricious) treatment of others does not seem particularly objectionable. This is another reason to

reject capriciousness cases as a kind of transfer failure.38

Transfer Failure #3: Non-authorization. Rodin and Yudkin (2011) raise a third possibility for

transfer failure. When it comes to the declaration of academic boycotts in particular, they suggest

that individuals should “adopt a principle of deferring to the authoritative bodies that already exist”

38 This is not to deny the importance of coordination in our efforts to promote the good! It would certainly be bad for everyone to, say, donate to the food pantry on the same day or to show up bearing only peanut butter and canned peas. It could potentially be objectionable to support and promote that behavior (“Everyone bring peas on Tuesday!”), but if so, that wouldn’t be a complaint about the capricious mistreatment of the target. It would be a variation of the backfire complaint, a complaint about undermining one’s own objectives by failing to coordinate appropriately.

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rather than issue calls for boycotts themselves.39 This, too, seems to be an instance of a more general

complaint: when there exists some authority whose proper role it is to declare, organize, coordinate,

and encourage -ing, individuals may be permitted to on their own but may not be permitted to

support and promote -ing – except at the behest or in support of the relevant authority. To

promote -ing without permission would mean wrongfully encroaching on the relevant authority’s

domain.

The suggestion that academic boycotts might sometimes exhibit this kind of transfer failure

has some prima facie plausibility. Suppose I want to promote an academic boycott of Dr. So-and-so

at University U. I issue a call to action over my department’s listserv, I print out fliers on my

university’s printers, I demand of university administrators that they deny tenure to faculty members

who refuse to join my campaign, and I demand of university librarians that they de-shelve his

publications. Given my campaign’s heavy reliance on institutional powers and resources, other

members of my institution may reasonably demand that I desist – at least until I can secure formal

approval from some institutional authority. While I am of course free to boycott Dr. So-and-so on

my own (to, e.g., refuse to check his books out from the library, to uninvite him from giving a guest

lecture in my class), it seems plausible that I am not permitted to support and promote my academic

boycott to others – at least, not so long as doing so requires institutional powers and resources and

so long as I lack formal approval.40 This is a plausible case of transfer failure.

However, it’s far less plausible that these conditions obtain for economic boycotts. At first

glance there doesn’t seem to be any central authority whose job it is to declare, organize, coordinate,

and encourage boycotting in the marketplace – which implies that there’s no authority whose turf is

39 Rodin, David, and Michael Yudkin. 2011. “Academic Boycotts.” Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (4): 465–85. See, p.484. 40 Villasenor and Weinstock both make this point. See, Villasenor op. cit.; Weinstock op. cit.

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being wrongfully encroached upon when consumers decide to do these things themselves. One

might read Hussain (2012) as arguing that this authority effectively rests with formal legislatures and

that insofar as formal legislatures fail to address pressing social problems, this authority devolves to

collectives of stakeholders – so long as they satisfy his list of democratic constraints.41 If that’s right,

we might claim transfer failure whenever a consumer either promotes a cause already addressed by

the formal legislature or promotes a cause in a way that violates Hussain’s list of democratic

constraints.

But this proposal inherits all the problems raised against the Public Sphere Objection in

Chapter 1. Just as normal consumption is clearly not subject to democratic constraints (e.g. you may

buy a couch without public deliberation), efforts to promote and support normal consumption are

clearly not subject to democratic constraints. (It is, for instance, clearly not a requirement on

advertising that each ad be a prelude to formal legislative decision making, nor is it a good objection

to a 5-Star Amazon review that it fails to engage with all the relevant stakeholders.) Since we may

non-democratically promote other people’s transaction decisions when our aims are non-ethical, surely

we may non-democratically promote other people’s transactions decisions when our aims are ethical

– unless, that is, there is some key moral difference between normal consumption and ethical

consumption. But there is not. Hussain’s suggestion (viz. that only normal consumption tends to

promote Pareto improvements) can’t do the job, nor can any of the myriad other proposals

considered in Chapter 2. That’s why the Public Sphere Objection failed, and that’s why we should

reject this proposed kind of transfer failure. There simply doesn’t seem to be an authority whose turf

we are wrongfully encroaching upon when we take it upon ourselves to support and promote our

boycott campaigns.

41 Hussain op. cit.

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Transfer Failure #4: Politicization. We can identify a different possible reason for transfer failure

in Hussain’s worry that ethical consumption campaigns undermine our ability as a society to manage

politicization. It’s important, Hussain argues, for societies to be able to limit the scope and

prominence of political disagreements among their own citizens lest they “undermine many of the

valuable forms of interaction that make up the fabric of social life.”42 A society, not unlike a

marriage, suffers when its members are constantly reminded of their quarrels and grievances, when

old differences are forever relitigated and new grievances are perpetually uncovered. Hussain worries

that this is one of the long-term effects of unrestrained boycotting. Even if boycotts don’t worsen

political disagreements (which they might do!), the methods by which boycotts are supported and

promoted often explicitly aim at bringing particular issues to the forefront of public discussion, and

these issues are often quite politically divisive. This is another possible reason for transfer failure.

Perhaps our permissions to do not transfer into permissions to support and promote -ing when

-promotion worsens politicization, thereby undermining the fabric of social life.

The trouble with this suggestion is that it only seems to supply us with reasons for thinking

other consumers should refrain from extroverted boycotting. While we may all agree that too much

unnecessary politicization is a problem and that the fabric of social life would be improved if it were

better managed, we are not likely to agree over which particular disagreements are the unnecessary

ones. The individual boycotter will see this as a problem only for other consumers and other causes.

She may readily agree that your causes are silly and misguided, that you are being unnecessarily

divisive by politicizing issues that ought not be politicized, but she’ll not say the same of her causes.

42 Hussain op. cit., p.123.

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By her lights, the causes she’s politicizing are just those that ought to be politicized, the ones that

people aren’t taking seriously enough, the ones that belong at the very forefront of public discussion.

The problem of unmanaged politicization seems to arise from a more fundamental problem:

there are persistent and society-wide disagreements about which issues are of primary political

importance. In other words, we disagree about our own disagreements. Some are surely trivial and

worth putting to rest; others are surely urgent and require immediate conference. But there is little

agreement about which are which. While this is deeply unfortunate – many things would be better if

we disagreed less! – that fact doesn’t seem to give me good reasons to refrain from politicizing those

topics that I think ought to be politicized. This is why the possibility of transfer failure on account

of politicization doesn’t seem to undermine my defense of extroverted boycotting.

Transfer Failure #5: Diluted Power. We can identify one more possible reason for transfer failure

in Dain and Calder’s (2007) worry that boycotting may become ineffective if it becomes too

commonplace. They note that boycotters are all by-and-large competing for the same limited

resources – media coverage, consumer attention, and, perhaps, emotional bandwidth. As boycotts

become more common, it may not always be possible “for every new pro-boycott case to gain the

airtime, and capture public attention, to an extent reflective of its moral urgency.”43 This concern,

too, seems to identify a possible circumstance of transfer failure. Perhaps our permissions to do

not transfer into permissions to support and promote -ing when doing so would contribute to an

overall dilution in the power and efficacy of -ing and -promotion (or, of -ing and -

promotion, where is some other benevolent activity worthy of promotion that shares some

limited resources with -ing.)

43 Dain, Edmund, and Gideon Calder. 2007. “Not Cricket? Ethics, Rhetoric and Sporting Boycotts.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (1): 95–109. See p.106.

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The problems with this proposal are consonant with those raised for the previous two. Even if we agree that we should want to reserve our use of this tool – the extroverted boycott – for only the most pressing of causes, that doesn’t seem to give us a good reason to refrain from acting in support of our own causes. Certainly, if there were some appropriate authority, some party to whom we clearly ought to cede the responsibility for declaring and promoting boycott campaigns, that would solve the problem. But there doesn’t seem to be an authority like that. Nor does it help for us all to agree to promote only the most pressing of causes. That’s just it: we don’t agree about which causes those are. Any particular group of boycotters is likely to think that their causes really are the most important ones – that’s why they’re promoting them! We may angrily complain about those other boycotters jeopardizing media attention and exhausting consumers with manufactured outrage, but that’s only a reason for them to stop promoting their cause, not a reason for us to stop promoting ours. (If anything, that’s a reason for me to shout all the louder, to ensure my voice carries over the tumult, the din of small-minded consumers kvetching about their small problems!) Hence, the dilution of boycott efficacy, though possibly regrettable, is not a reason for transfer failure.

I have argued that none of the five proposed reasons for transfer failure successfully undermine my defense of extroverted boycotting. None of these concerns block the Transfer

Principle inference from permission to to permission to support and promote -ing. Of course, I haven’t shown that these five varieties of transfer failure are all the kinds there are. No doubt there could be others that I’ve failed to consider and which might plausibly apply to extroverted boycotting decisions. Still, these five do seem to me to be the possibilities that most merit attention. These are the concerns that philosophers have heretofore been most keen to raise and the ones most often cited as reasons for skepticism about our permissions to extrovertedly boycott. I have argued that these five, at least, do not threaten my defense of extroverted boycotting.

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The conclusion of this chapter is also the conclusion of my defense of consumer permissions to boycott. Having argued, in Chapters 1 and 2, that we have very broad permissions to make morally-motivated purchasing decisions and, in this chapter, that these permissions imply further permissions to promote and support ethical consumption, we are now ready to turn to the question of whether consumers should boycott.

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Chapter 4 – The Helplessness Problem

A Defense of Moral Reasons in the Marketplace

Introduction

In previous chapters, I have simply taken it for granted that consumers have many and varied moral reasons for making purchases. I have also been implicitly assuming a particular story about why consumers have moral reasons. The gist of the story is that our moral reasons principally stem from the connections that our consumption decisions forge between ourselves and (certain normatively relevant features of) the market. We are, upon entering the marketplace, already in possession of a variety of beliefs about the moral character of different products, practices, outcomes, and agents. We believe some to be good and worth promoting; we believe others to be bad and worth opposing. And, crucially, we accept that by participating in the market, we may involve ourselves with some of these goods and bads. This is what gives us moral reasons. Since it matters, morally speaking, whether we involve ourselves in good or bad things, it matters how we consume. The fact that making an A-purchase would involve me in good things, gives me a moral reason to make an A-purchase; the fact that making a B-purchase would involve me in bad things, gives me a moral reason not to make a B-purchase.

In Chapters 1 through 3 we asked, Are we permitted to act on those reasons? And I argued in the affirmative. This chapter is both a step forward in that investigation and a step back. It is a step forward in that we advance from questions about what consumers may do to questions about what they should do. Granting the conclusions of the previous chapters – viz. that consumers have very

120 broad permissions to boycott – a natural next question is to what extent they have obligations to boycott. That’s the prize in the distance.

But this chapter won’t get us all the way there. Our primary task will be the reconsideration of a claim I’ve heretofore taken for granted – and that is the sense in which we are taking a step back in our investigations. In previous chapters, I’ve simply assumed that consumers have lots of moral reasons telling for and against different consumption decisions and that, along the lines I just sketched, these reasons straightforwardly derive from our moral beliefs about the goodness or badness of various market outcomes, practices, products, and agents. My central aim in this chapter is to take a closer look at that derivation. (How exactly do our market participations involve us in market outcomes?) More precisely, the goal will be to investigate a common skeptical answer to that question. The answer is, essentially, that our participation doesn’t involve us in market outcomes because our participation doesn’t make a difference.

First, though, let me offer a few general remarks about consumer obligations, with an eye toward setting up and motivating this chapter’s primary line of inquiry.

On Consumer Obligations and Reasons

Consider this case.

Peanut Thief

You, a long-time Beanie Baby collector, have spent the last few years fruitlessly searching for a copy of Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant – the linchpin of your vast collection. One of your seedier friends suggests you try a new black market site he’s found on the dark web which rather brazenly bills itself as “Scamazon, the Amazon of contraband.” Logging in, you find a robust clearinghouse for stolen goods, with a large inventory of previously-owned products (at bargain prices!) as well as a bounty

121 service for rare or out-of-stock items. As best you can tell, the bounty service is a gig-economy market where would-be buyers are connected with freelance burglars. When you are unable to find what you’re looking for in the on-hand inventory catalog, you nervously post a bounty of your own:

Requesting a mint condition Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant. $1,000 on delivery. An unmarked package arrives in your mailbox a few weeks later containing the long-sought elephant.

I offer this as an easy case of consumer wrongdoing. It is easy because most of the important moral facts are plainly visible. We agree that stealing is presumptively wrong, that buying goods one knows to be stolen is presumptively wrong, that paying someone else to steal on one’s behalf is presumptively wrong, and that the satisfaction one may feel upon acquiring a long-sought bauble does not outweigh the badness of having it stolen. These facts together imply that you acted wrongly. You failed in your obligation not to make this purchase.

This case is not meant to be groundbreaking or challenging. It is meant only to demonstrate that consumers can and do have obligations to make particular market decisions. In addition to obligations not to hire Beanie Baby burglars, you have obligations not to buy votes, not to buy fissile uranium, not to buy humans, not to hire hitmen or kidnappers or child laborers, not to buy puppies you can’t care for, hire employees you can’t pay, acquire explosives you can’t secure. Hence, the question isn’t, Do consumers have obligations? but, Under what conditions do consumers have obligations?

Although this chapter takes an incremental step toward answering that question, our immediate focus won’t actually be on consumers’ obligations. Our focus is on their moral reasons.

There are two justifications for this. First, the skeptical challenge around which this chapter is structured is, fundamentally, a doubt about the existence of moral reasons in the marketplace. The skeptic observes that our individual purchasing decisions often seem ineffectual, having no discernible impacts on the good/bad things going on in the market. She then makes the point that if

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we’re helpless to change a thing, surely we don’t have moral reasons to change it. This is the

Helplessness Problem.1 Developing and rebutting this Problem will be our primary task. And

since the Problem is focused on our moral reasons, so shall we be.2

A second motivation for focusing on moral reasons rather than obligations is that obligation

determinations are, simply, harder. Whether or not you have a moral obligation to make a particular

purchasing decision is going to turn on a wider array of considerations than whether or not you have

a moral reason to make that purchase. And many of the considerations relevant to obligation

determinations lie far beyond the scope of this project. Your obligations depend, among other

things, on facts about how costly it would be for you to make (or not-make) particular purchases, on

facts about which market outcomes are good/bad and how relatively good/bad they are, on what

role(s) you play in the market, and on what alternatives are available. Those are all important facts,

but they are not ones we can take the time at present to unearth.

Even focusing on the simpler question about what reasons we have, we will have to set aside a

number of critical issues. We will be starting our inquiry at the point where we each already possess

some justified beliefs about the moral character of (various aspects of) the market and about the

causal connections between market goods/bads and certain patterns of consumption – i.e. beliefs of

the form these sorts of consumption decisions are causally responsible for those market goods/bads. By starting at

that point, we’ll be ignoring quite a lot of important ethical work – namely, all of the effort needed

on the front end to actually acquire justified beliefs like that.

We are, first of all, setting aside critical questions about which aspects of the market actually

are the good and bad ones. (People disagree! There are ongoing disputes about the badness of

1 Alternatively, we could state the Problem as an argument for skepticism about whether consumers really do have market powers – i.e. abilities to influence the market with their purchasing decisions. 2 Of course, since moral obligations are grounded in moral reasons, the Helplessness Problem will also have important implications for consumer obligations.

123 sweatshops, of unions, of hiring illegal immigrants, of carbon emissions, of sex work, of drug testing, of political donations.) We’re also setting aside critical questions about market information and consumer ignorance. It may often be the case that our purchases involve us in certain market bads – ones that by our own lights we ought not be promoting – but that we are ignorant of this fact. (It’s hard to say how often that’s true, but it might be very often!) Since ignorance is frequently taken to be a legitimate moral excuse, consumers may frequently be excused for making such purchases – for promoting evil but unknowingly. But ignorance isn’t always a good excuse.

Sometimes we hold people accountable for their ignorant bad behavior because we think they should have known better. That must also happen with ignorant consumption. But how often does it happen?

And under what circumstances ought consumers have known better?

These are all vital and challenging questions, but, again, they must lay beyond the scope of this chapter. We start our inquiry at the point where your ignorance has already been dispelled, where you already know that certain market outcomes are good/bad and that certain sorts of purchases are, in the aggregate, causally responsible for those outcomes.

The question is, Are your purchases responsible for those outcomes?

The Challenge

The Helplessness Problem, which is the topic of this chapter, arises when we combine a plausible moral principle with a plausible empirical claim. The plausible moral principle – call it the

‘Control Principle’ – describes a restriction on the conditions under which moral agents have moral reasons to act. It says, roughly, that we do not have moral reasons to act against (or for) outcomes unless we have the power to alter those outcomes, to push them in some desirable direction. Joining the Control Principle is a plausible empirical observation – call it the ‘Consumer Helplessness’

124 claim – that says individual consumers mostly do not have the power to alter market outcomes.

These together give us the Helplessness Problem: if individual consumers are mostly helpless to change the course of the market and if one’s helplessness to change a thing means one has no moral reason to try to change it, then consumers mostly lack moral reasons to try to change the course of the market. They mostly lack moral reasons to boycott, buycott, or otherwise attempt to influence the goings-on of the global marketplace.

There’s a lot more to be said in support of The Control Principle and the Consumer

Helplessness claim. The next three sections will expand, develop, and defend these claims.

On the Control Principle

The Control Principle is an account of moral relevance. Its role is to give a (partial) explanation of the conditions under which particular outcomes or states of affairs may be counted as morally relevant and reason giving for a particular agent making a particular decision.

This is an important normative task. There are innumerably many states of affairs with the potential to be morally relevant and morally motivating – by which I mean, states of affairs that moral agents could, in principle, have moral reasons to do something about (to promote, prevent, sustain, repair, avoid, pursue.) The universe includes, for instance, countless morally considerable entities whose experiences could include less suffering, whose agency could be better respected, whose rights could be less often violated, whose value and integrity could be better defended, or who could simply be treated more justly, more fairly, more compassionately. Indeed, whenever we count an entity as morally considerable, we are in effect acknowledging that its interests/rights/value have the potential to be morally relevant and reason-giving.

Among all of these potentially relevant states of affairs, only a handful will count as actually relevant to any particular moral agent at any particular moment. When I’m trying to make a decision

125 of any sort, I am allowed to ignore or screen out most of the moral universe as presently irrelevant. If, say, I'm standing on the street by my office deciding where to lock up my bike, I don’t need to give moral consideration to the interests of Ukrainian farmers, to the justness of the U.S. income tax system, or to the rights of the Salem women accused of witchcraft in 1692. These things do matter, morally speaking, but they don't matter to me right now – not when I’m only trying to decide where to lock up my bike. What matters right now is, perhaps, my city’s rules about proper bike storage (not chained to a fire hydrant nor left in the middle of the street) and considerations about other people’s property rights (not chained to some stranger’s bike nor set on top of someone’s car.)

These are the facts that the Control Principle is meant to explain: it seems true that moral agents may (and perhaps must) screen out most of the moral universe most of the time, and, furthermore, there seems to be broad agreement about which moral considerations may be screened out and under what circumstances. This strongly suggests the existence of some shared general criteria of moral relevance, some rules or principles that we all implicitly use to sort the morally relevant from the morally irrelevant.

The Control Principle is a rule like that. It says, essentially, that moral relevance requires control. Only outcomes over which we exert some influence, or to which we can make a morally relevant difference, can give us moral reasons to act. The Control Principle explains that most of the moral universe can be ignored as morally irrelevant most of the time because most of our acts have only a limited sphere of influence. I have, e.g., no moral reasons to oppose the Spanish Inquisition today nor to fix the broken Mars Opportunity Rover because there is nothing I can do about those things. In their remoteness, they don’t count in favor of my performing any actions in particular.

Obversely, I certainly can have a morally relevant effect on how well my mother’s day is going today; my ability to make a difference to her mood and happiness seems to explain why those things may be a source of moral reasons. (Notice, the implication in this case is not that they are a source of

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moral reasons. As I’ve formulated it, the Principle is silent about that. It offers just a single necessary

condition for moral relevance.)

While I’ll mostly be working with the Control Principle at this level of informality – i.e. using

natural English glosses on the basic idea – it’s worth looking at a more precise formulation. I

propose this one:

The Control Principle

For any moral agent, A, with a choice set, O, and for any state of affairs, S, A has a moral

reason to choose from O in virtue of S only if there are two distinct and non-empty subsets

of O, Om and On, such that the agent believes that S’s moral value in a world where she

selects from Om will be different in a morally relevant way from S’s moral value in a world

where she selects from On and also believes that that difference would mark a moral

improvement in the world where she selects from Om.

Let me make a few points of clarification about the Control Principle in light of this formal

gloss. First, notice that the Principle links our moral reasons to our ability to make a morally relevant

difference to S rather than simply a difference. We can imagine cases where those two come apart.

Suppose, e.g., that I become exercised about neighborhood light pollution and so swap out my 1600

lumen porch light bulb for a 1200 lumen bulb. That swap really does make a difference in the sense

that there are fewer photons bouncing around the neighborhood, but it plausibly doesn’t make a

morally relevant difference to the amount of light pollution in the area.3 The Control Principle says

3 At least, this seems true if we suppose that the disruption of natural cycles is the primary moral reason for wanting to stop light pollution. It is unlikely that your light bulb swap results in any organism’s natural cycles being noticeably less-disrupted. On the other hand, if your primary moral concern is that people standing in

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that since swapping these two bulbs has zero effect on the moral value of S (the neighborhood light

pollution), S provides me with no moral reason to perform the swap – even though I have quite

literally made a difference. This should seem plausible. The Control Principle is, after all, an attempt to

capture the intuitive idea that our moral reasons stem from our abilities to help or hurt. Since

swapping out these two lightbulbs isn’t helpful, I don’t have a moral reason to do it.4

A second point of clarification. The Control Principle appeals to the agent’s beliefs about

moral value in order to disambiguate between two different readings of reason-attribution claims.

On one reading, the claim that A has a moral reason to X is meant to indicate that there is in fact some

moral consideration that counts in favor of A’s X-ing, a reason that obtains irrespective of A’s

appreciation of it. On another reading, the claim that A has a moral reason to X is meant to indicate

that A takes it be the case that there is some moral consideration that counts in favor of A’s X-ing,

irrespective of whether A is correct about that. In this chapter, as in previous chapters, my focus is

on that latter reading. I mean for this discussion to be a preliminary to answering the question, Under

what circumstances, if any, should a consumer take herself to be obligated to make particular consumption decisions?

Accordingly, I want to focus on the moral reasons we take ourselves to have rather than on some

objective moral reasons that exist independently of our appreciation of them and which, for that

reason, will only be patchily action-guiding.5

your front yard can’t see the stars, then it’s more plausible that your bulb-swap makes a morally relevant difference. (Perhaps they can see the stars a little better after the change.) 4 In this case, my choice set is limited to using a 1600 lumen bulb or using a 1200 lumen bulb, and the Control Principle says light pollution is morally irrelevant to that particular choice. It might not say the same about other choices, where the options make a bigger difference – e.g. a choice between using a 1600 lumen bulb or doing without a porch light. 5 We may ultimately want the Control Principle to require not only that an agent believe herself helpless but that those beliefs be held sincerely. It may sometimes be possible to convince ourselves of our own helplessness, despite the evidence, in order to justify our own moral inaction and non-consideration. In such a case, we may truly believe ourselves helpless, but our belief is held in bad faith. We ought not take ourselves to be reasonless in such cases.

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Third, the formal version of the Control Principle lays bare an important point about the

scope of the Control Principle that will tend to get lost when we informally gloss it as being about

“making a difference.” That is that Control Principle isn’t strictly concerned about whether our

actions can have an effect; it’s concerned with our having options that have different effects. The

Control Principle says that I have no moral reason to act in virtue of S when all my options have the

same morally relevant effect on S. Usually that will be true because my options all have zero effect on S,

but there could be cases where my options all have the same non-zero effect on S instead. Those latter

cases do intuitively seem to be instances of helplessness, and the Control Principle gives us the

correct result in those cases. It tells us that those states don’t supply us with moral reasons.

Fourth and relatedly, the Control Principle requires that an agent’s choices should seem to

mark a moral improvement in S in order to correctly handle two other sorts of unusual circumstances.

First, there could be cases in which an agent is confident that her choice will make some moral

difference to S but is also ignorant about whether that difference will be positive or negative. In that

case, the agent does have control of a sort, but she seems not to have moral reasons in virtue of S.6

Second, there could be cases in which an agent believes that the morally relevant change she can

make to S would be value-comparable to what would happen with S should she act differently. That

is, the moral value of S if she does such-and-such may seem to be on a par, morally speaking, with

the value S would have were she to choose differently. Her choice will, as it were, move S laterally

6 To illustrate, one might think individual consumers bear this sort of relationship to the biogeochemical systems involved in bads like ocean acidification and global climate change. These systems are massive, chaotic, and butterfly-affected, and while we are not powerless to affect them, one might think that we are powerless to tell what sort of effects our individual decisions are likely to have – whether good or bad, large or small. On this view, I have as much reason to think that holding my breath for 5 seconds will help de- acidify the ocean as I do to think that not traveling in my private jet will help. Clearly, this is just another kind of helplessness. If none of my choices can be expected to mark an improvement in ocean acidification, then I am not really any more empowered than the person who expects all her actions to have no effect at all. The ability to have random effects is power of a sort, but it’s not the kind of power that moral agents need to responsibly navigate the world.

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on the value staircase, rather than up or down. This is also control of a sort but, again, apparently

not the right sort to ground moral reasons.7 Hence, we require that the agent believe one of her

choices would mark a moral improvement in S.

Fifth and finally, notice that I have articulated the Control Principle as an account of which

states of affairs count as morally relevant. This choice may exact a cost in terms of the Principle’s

elegance and articulability, but it gains us two more-than-offsetting benefits. One benefit is that

stating the principle this way – i.e. in terms of our ability to influence the moral value of states of

affairs – makes it easier to keep track of where exactly our moral reasons are coming from. There is,

after all, some sense in which I might have moral reasons to act in virtue of the Spanish Inquisition. I

might have moral reasons to adopt certain attitudes about it (e.g. disapproval of its occurrence,

sympathy with its victims), or I might have moral reasons to adopt certain beliefs about it (e.g. that it

was a terrible thing to have happened, that it would be bad for something similar to happen again.)

But notice, if I have these moral reasons, it’s not because my actions may alter the moral value of the

Inquisition itself. It’s because my actions may alter the moral value of my own character. (“Only a

vicious person would fail to hate the Inquisition!”) The “states-of-affairs” talk also helps us keep

clear on where our reasons are coming from in cases of temporary helplessness. There may be cases

where it’s right now true that I am helpless to affect some morally relevant state of affairs, X, but

where I nevertheless have moral reasons to put myself in a position where I can affect X in the

future. In such a case it seems that my moral reasons are grounded not in my control over X but in

my control over my ability to help with X in the future.

A second benefit of stating the Control Principle in terms of states of affairs rather than

outcomes is that it helps highlight the Principle’s normative catholicism. (A rather significant benefit,

7 I am grateful to my adviser David Boonin for pointing out these possibilities.

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by my lights, since the belief that the Control Principle is essentially Consequentialist seems to be the

most commonly cited reason for rejecting it.) It’s worth emphasizing: the Control Principle is not an

account of right and wrong, nor is it essentially aligned with any such account; it doesn’t say

anything about the nature and content of our moral reasons, nor anything about their relative

weights; it doesn’t even commit us to any particular views about which things count as potentially

morally relevant. (E.g. my virtue, your agency, X’s rights, Y’s pleasures and pains, all human desire

satisfactions, all organism-level flourishing.) Whatever things we include on our list of potentially

relevant considerations, the Control Principle says of those things that they are only actually relevant

if and when our choices can have some effect on their moral value. That claim can be accepted by

Non-Consequentialists of all different stripes without contradiction – or even serious tension.

To illustrate, suppose I convince myself that there are some morally considerable entities

somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy who are being held as slaves. I believe, in other words, that

Andromedan slavery is potentially morally relevant and reason giving. I take it as obvious that the

enslavement of Andromedan persons, that morally awful state of affairs itself, will never provide me with

moral reasons to act. And that seems true regardless of my normative subscriptions: there are no

choices I can make that will be sub-optimific vis-a-vis Andromedan interests or that will implicate me

in their mistreatment or that will sully my own agency or tarnish my virtue by association.8 We all

agree that Andromendan slavery is morally inert and non-reason-giving. And we all could agree with

the Control Principle’s proposed explanation: that Andromedan slavery is morally inert because

Andromedan slavery is beyond our ability to affect.9 That’s why our inaction is non-vicious, non-

8 Though, again, I might have moral reasons grounded in the moral value of my own virtue or agency to adopt certain attitudes or beliefs toward Andromedan slavery. 9 A potentially reason-giving state of affairs may fail to generate reasons for a particular agent for multiple reasons. The Control Principle offers only one necessary condition for a state of affairs’ being non-reason- giving for a particular agent and is therefore compatible with other partial accounts of moral relevance, other necessary conditions.

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agency-sullying, non-sub-optimific: because there’s no such thing as action when it comes to moral

catastrophes taking place more than 2.5 million light years from our planet.

The point is that despite the obvious affinities between the Control Principle and

Consequentialism, the Principle deserves to be assessed on its own merits. Whatever normative

theory we endorse, we should want some story about the conditions under which particular

considerations do (or don’t) count as reason-giving – i.e. an account of moral relevance – and we

could (but don’t have to) agree on why that is. We could all accept the explanation offered by the

Control Principle.

In Support of the Control Principle

Let me offer a few arguments for why we should accept the Control Principle.

I opened this chapter with a pencil-sketch story about the origins of consumer reasons.

(namely, We think that certain aspects of the market are good or bad; we think that by participating in the market,

we involve ourselves in those goods and bads; we think that it matters whether we involve ourselves in good or bad

things.) I left the second act of that story intentionally vague (by participating, we get involved…), but I

think most of the time we get by with an intuitive grasp of this relationship. Suppose I participate in

my neighbor’s illegal dog fighting ring. What am I involved in? Animal cruelty, certainly. Certainly

not strip mining. Tax evasion and illegal dumping? Maybe. That depends on whether my neighbor’s

dog fighting practice involves any illegal dumping or tax evasion.10 Notice how this intuitive process

looks like a series of appeals to the Control Principle. We determine what market outcomes our

10 Probably yes to tax evasion since the IRS insists that “income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income.” See, United States. Dept. of the Treasury. Internal Revenue Service. Publication 17: Tax Guide 2018 For Individuals. Internal Revenue Service, 2018. p.94.

132 decisions involve us in by thinking through what outcomes our decisions affect. This is a good reason to like the Control Principle. We apparently already hold the ability to affect as a decisive consideration in our intuitive sorting out of market involvement.

As a second argument, we can point out the strong family kinship between this principle and the better-known Ought Implies Can (OIC) principle. The OIC principle describes an important connection between our abilities and our obligations: it says that morality only demands that we do a thing when it’s in our power to do it. (e.g. if it’s true that you must sign the Farm Bill into law, that seems to imply that it’s in your power to sign it. On the other hand, if – not being the POTUS – you can’t sign the Farm Bill into law, then that seems to imply that you aren’t morally required to sign it.) The connection that the OIC posits between required-behavior and possible-behavior closely mirrors the connection that the Control Principle posits between reason-giving states of affairs and influence- able states of affairs. (Indeed, we might call it the ‘Ought-to-consider Implies Can-Influence Principle’.) If some state of affairs, S, does give you moral reasons to act, surely that implies that S stands to be impacted by your decision. On the other hand, if it is out of your power to impact S, then that seems to imply that you don’t need to consider S in making this decision. While the OIC principle is not without its detractors, many find it plausible. And insofar as one does find it plausible, that seems to be a good reason to find the Control Principle plausible, too.

Finally, we might support the Control Principle by pointing out its close relationship to a different attractive principle – this time one from rational choice theory rather than ethics. The principle I have in mind says that when making a choice over a set of exclusive alternatives, what matters (rationally speaking) are the ways in which the alternatives differ and not the ways in which they are the same. To illustrate, suppose I offer you a choice between the following birthday gift bundles.

Bundle 1: A package of Oreos, a pair of knee socks, a $50 gift card to Home Depot

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Bundle 2: A package of Oreos, a pair of knee socks, a $50 gift card to Starbucks

How do you decide between these bundles? What considerations affect your decision?

Presumably, your decision turns entirely on your gift card preferences. You will select Bundle 1 if

you prefer the Home Depot gift card. You will select Bundle 2 if you prefer the Starbucks gift card.

(And you will perhaps flip a coin if you are truly indifferent between the two.) Crucially, you don’t

make the decision by considering your preferences for knee socks and Oreos. Since you’ll be

receiving those things regardless, those preferences don’t give you any reasons for choosing one

bundle over the other. And, by the same reasoning, you don’t need to consider your preferences for

items omitted from the bundles. Of course you have preference rankings over all sorts of possible

birthday gifts – bath products, tech stocks, jewelry, vacation packages – but since you’ll be not-

receiving those things regardless, those preferences have no bearing on your choice, do not provide

you with any reasons for choosing one bundle over the other.11 According to our general choice

principle, only the differences among your alternatives give you reason to prefer one over the

other.12

11 In this particular case, your gift card preferences can be presumed to be independent from your Oreo and knee sock preferences – which is to say, the fact that you’ll be receiving Oreos and knee socks doesn’t make either of the gift cards more- or less-desirable. But that need not be the case. If I add a table-saw to both bundles, for example, you might then prefer the Home Depot gift card over the Starbucks gift card (“It’s lumber time!”) Since in that case your decision is affected by the presence of the table saw in both bundles, that might seem to throw into doubt my claim that only the differences between the bundles matter. But that’s a mistake. There is no principled difference between the new table saw case and a version of the original case where we specify that you already own a table saw (and so prefer the Home Depot card.) In both of those cases the point remains the same: your decision turns on your preferences between the two gift cards, and not on your preferences for anything else. What these two cases do illustrate is that your gift card preferences themselves may depend on all manner of other things, including the guaranteed contents of the bundle or your other possessions. But that’s no objection to the argument I’m making. 12 In the absence of any differences, you might still have a reason to choose one bundle over the other, even if you’ve no reason to prefer one. That’s because you, unlike Buridan’s ass, can recognize that making an arbitrary choice among equally-good alternatives is sometimes preferable to choice-paralysis. (Which preference is, according to our choice principle, grounded in the differences between those two options.)

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This is also what the Control Principle affirms about the connection between our moral reasons and our ability to make morally relevant differences. Consider an analogous moral decision: a choice between two charity-donation bundles, which I offer to make for your birthday.

Bundle 1: $500 to Oxfam, $500 to Charity:Water, $1,000 to Malaria Consortium

Bundle 2: $500 to Oxfam, $500 to Charity:Water, $1,000 to Kiva

Let’s say you want to choose the morally best bundle. How should you decide? What considerations should affect your decision? As before, it seems that your decision should turn on the respects in which the alternatives differ and not on the respects in which they are the same.

Regardless of which bundle you select, $500 will go to Oxfam, $500 will go to Charity:Water, $0 will go to the Salvation Army, and $0 will go to Doctors Without Borders. You might have extensive and justified moral beliefs about the relative moral goodness of donating to all those causes (e.g.

Malaria Consortium donations are better than Doctors Without Borders donations; both are better than Salvation

Army donations) but those facts seem not to bear on this particular decision. All that matters – we might say, in the interests of parallelism – is which of those two donations morality prefers. And even though morality itself must have extensive preferences over all sorts of different outcomes – better access to mental health services, greater traffic safety, an easing of your aunt’s bad case of gout – you’ll be not-achieving those things regardless of what you decide, so they seem not to provide you with reasons for choosing one bundle over another. Your choice, it seems and the Control Principle affirms, should turn on the relative moral goodness of Malaria Consortium donations vs. Kiva donations. As with the OIC, the plausibility of this rational choice principle lends plausibility to the

Control Principle.

I’ll assume from this point forward, that the Control Principle is both attractive and plausible as an account of moral relevance. (Any readers still unpersuaded of this may at least look forward to

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our discussion of alternatives!) In the next section, we shall set out and motivate the other central

claim that, together with the Control Principle, gives rise to the Helplessness Problem.

The Consumer Helplessness Claim

Let’s say that a consumer is in a No Difference Case when there is some pattern of

consumption decisions (e.g. cucumber purchases) and some market bad (e.g. exploited field

workers) such that (i) the consumer believes that these consumer decisions are causally responsible for

that market bad, but (ii) she also believes that her actions, when considered on their own, will not

make a morally relevant difference to that market bad.13

We can think of the Consumer Helplessness claim as the empirical assertion that consumers

often find themselves in No Difference Cases. It is often the case that we believe some pattern of

consumption decisions to be causally responsible for some market bads and believe that our own

contributions are ineffectual. This claim implies, when conjoined to the Control Principle, that

consumers often do not have moral reasons to act in virtue of recognized market bads. That strikes

most people as implausible – which is why I’ve dubbed that conclusion “The Helplessness

Problem.”

It is worth emphasizing that the Consumer Helplessness claim is not (and should not be

rejected for not being) categorically true – i.e. true of all consumers and of all consumption decisions.

Clearly, individual decisions do sometimes make a morally relevant difference. If, e.g., Esme thinks

the waitstaff at her favorite restaurant deserve better pay, then she has the power to affect that

outcome by tipping more generously. She doesn’t thereby secure better pay for all the waitstaff, but her tip

13 Consumers can also be in No Difference Cases with respect to market goods and non-consumers can be in No Difference Cases with respect to non-market goods and bads. (As in a large election.) For simplicity and for consistency with the literature, I’ll focus on market bads.

136 does have a morally relevant effect. Or suppose you become concerned about the disruptiveness of yard work in your neighborhood and so buy an engine-less reel mower to replace your noisy old power mower. Again, that seems to make a morally relevant difference; there is noticeably less mower noise in your neighborhood.

These cases show that the Consumer Helplessness claim can’t always be true. But it might nevertheless be often or even mostly true. That’s our primary question in assessing this claim: how often is the claim true? And in what remains of this section, I’ll present the case for thinking the answer is, Very Often.

The motivational center of the Consumer Helplessness claim is the observation that each individual consumer makes up only a miniscule part of the markets, mechanisms, and collectives that generate most of the market goods/bads of concern. Because the market comprises and coordinates billions of agents and trillions of transactions, even the smallest-seeming changes – a ten cent increase in flour prices, a few minor redesigns of the Uber app – tend to flow from millions of different individual decisions. It doesn’t take too much reflection to begin to feel as though our own decisions amount to little more than a rounding error.

As a standalone argument for the Consumer Helplessness claim, this is not especially persuasive. (*gestures at the bigness of the market;* *gestures at the smallness of the individual;*

*waggles eyebrows suggestively.*) But we can fill in this impressionistic sketch with some better and more persuasive causal details. What’s needed is some sufficiently detailed story about why individuals’ decisions tend not to matter, a conceptual model of the causal connection between consumption decisions and market bads that can explain individual helplessness.

There are two causal models that fit the bill – and, indeed, two models that together seem to cover nearly all market cases.

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The first is the threshold model, which adds into the gap between consumers and market bads

an extra layer of decision making that is only intermittently responsive to individual decisions.14 This

model emerges from the observation that market changes often happen in large, discrete steps: a

new worker is hired, a new store is opened, another order is placed with the manufactory. This is

how things work of necessity, both literal and pragmatic. One cannot open a third of a store, buy

half a tractor, or film a tenth of an advertisement. And where one is able to make fractional decisions

– perhaps with sophisticated algorithms and modular, as-needed resources – it isn’t always wise to

do so. Sometimes that’s because the costs of getting things right outweigh the benefits, and other

times that’s because the market is too chaotic to reliably get things right. We might note, for

instance, that forward-looking business decisions often turn on fallible predictions about the future

of the market (future demand, future supply, future economic shocks.) For such decisions, the

possibility for error can be high and the margins of error large. This disincentivizes fractional

decision making. If an estimate is only reliable to the nearest 10,000 units, the difference between

49,990 units and 50,010 is not worth fretting over. And even if fine-grained prediction is possible,

no business can perfectly anticipate the moment-to-moment and day-to-day variations in consumer

interest and transaction volume that result from, essentially, random statistical processes. For all of

these reasons, the agents in charge of market decisions are often not responsive to small changes.

They are better served by making coarse-grained adjustments to larger patterns of change.

14 See, e.g., Norcross (1997; 2004; 2012), Kagan (2011), Nefsky (2011; 2012), and Spiekermann (2014). Kagan, Shelly. 2011. “Do I Make a Difference?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39 (2): 105–41; Nefsky, Julia. 2011. “Consequentialism and the Problem of Collective Harm: A Reply to Kagan.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39 (4): 364–95; Nefsky, Julia. 2012. “The Morality of Collective Harm.” University of California, Berkeley; Norcross, Alastair. 1997. “Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 26 (2): 135–67; Norcross, Alastair. 2004. “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases.” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1): 229–45; Norcross, Alastair. 2012. “Puppies, Pigs, and Potency: A Response to Galvin and Harris.” Ethics, Policy and Environment 15 (3): 384–388; Spiekermann, Kai. 2014. “Small Impacts and Imperceptible Effects: Causing Harm with Others.” Midwest Studies In Philosophy 38 (1): 75–90.

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To illustrate, imagine the supply decisions of a simple clothes hanger manufacturer,

HangerCo. Because their hangers are sourced from a foreign plastics manufacturer and are produced in large batch quantities, HangerCo only periodically places orders for more units. The size and timing of those orders is based on their internal projected sales estimates, which are inferred indirectly from the rate and magnitude of re-orders that come in from the retail stores that stock

HangerCo hangers. Those stores, of course, don’t place a new order with HangerCo every time a hanger is sold. Each store waits until their inventory starts to run low and then some employee (or some algorithm) triggers an additional hanger order. Back at HangerCo, that order is aggregated with hundreds of others and, after some adjustments for medium-term demand trends, a decision is made about how many additional hangers to order from the plastics manufactory, rounded to the nearest

10,000 units. That rounding is necessary because 10,000 is the smallest increment the plastic manufacturer will accept on account of their own production capacity limits and supply chain decisions (employees, die presses, unrefined plastics, etc.) It’s not worth it for them to futz with fractional orders.

Even in this extremely simplified case, there are multiple layers of coarse-grained decision making between the individual consumer and the manufactured hangers. Each layer softens the causal connection between consumer and outcome and makes it less likely that any particular purchase will have an effect on the market. First, a single hanger purchase probably won’t affect the retail store’s decision to place another order for hangers. But even if it does, that extra order probably won’t affect the size of HangerCo’s next request to the manufactory. But even if it does, that larger request may not affect the manufacturer's next order of raw plastics… and so on.

This is the threshold model. It helps us make sense of consumer helplessness in threshold cases

– i.e. market situations where there is, interposed between the consumer and the market bad of concern, at least one of these coarse-grained decision procedures that is only intermittently sensitive

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to individual decisions. We might call this the, “Big changes, rarely made” model of consumer

helplessness. Most participants make no difference, but every so often a single participant (the

threshold crosser) makes a very big difference all by herself.

The threshold model seems to support the Consumer Helplessness claim. It is plausible that

consumers often find themselves in threshold cases, and insofar as one believes oneself to be in

such a case, it seems reasonable to believe oneself helpless. Whatever the interval is between the

thresholds – every hundredth, every thousandth, every ten-thousandth contribution – chances are

that my contribution won’t be the critical one. Chances are that I am helpless to make a difference;

chances are that you are helpless, too.

Not all market cases fit this mold, though. Sometimes consumers seem helpless not because

their contributions are effectively ignored by threshold-style decision procedures, but because their

contributions make differences that are too small to matter. This kind of case is better captured with

the imperceptible differences model – which we might think as the frequent changes, rarely noticeable model.15

This model turns on a distinction we encountered earlier in our discussion of the Control

Principle: between making a difference and making a morally relevant difference. These two can come apart

when the property of direct moral interest (e.g. toxicity, fairness, species endangeredness) is

grounded in some other properties that are not of direct moral interest (e.g. the number of pollutant

molecules present in a water source, the dollar value of X’s hourly wage, the number of acres of

habitat suitable for species Y), such that the only way to change the overlying moral property is by

manipulating the underlying property (by, e.g., filtering out pollution, raising wages, preserving land.)

15 See, e.g., Parfit (1984), Quinn (1990), Kagan (2011), Nefsky (2012), Spiekermann (2014), and Pinkert (2015). Kagan op. cit.; Nefsky 2011 op. cit.; Nefsky 2012 op. cit.; Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See p.80; Pinkert, Felix. 2015. “What If I Cannot Make a Difference (and Know It).” Ethics 125 (4): 971–98; Quinn, Warren S. 1990. “The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer.” Philosophical Studies 59 (1): 79–90; Spiekermann op. cit.

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In such a case, we may fail to make a moral difference whenever our manipulation is very minor.

Pulling 1,000 arsenic containing molecules out of a large, polluted aquifer makes a real difference but doesn’t make the water noticeably less toxic to humans; increasing a worker’s wages from $5.15 an hour to $5.17 an hour is a real difference but not one that makes his wages noticeably more fair; setting aside an additional acre of suitable habitat makes a real difference but doesn’t make an endangered species of moss noticeably less endangered.

This is the imperceptible difference model. It helps us make sense of consumer helplessness in imperceptible difference cases – situations where each consumer’s contribution makes a genuine difference to some non-moral properties that ground some market bad of concern, but the difference that’s made seems too minor to affect the overlying moral property.

This model, too, seems to support the Consumer Helplessness claim. It is plausible that consumers do sometimes find themselves in imperceptible difference cases. In particular, these cases seem to arise whenever consumers have un-mediated causal contact with a large market bad – as they seem to with climate change, waste management, certain sorts of pollution, non-threshold prices (e.g. stock prices), and tax revenues. Thus, insofar as one believes oneself to be in an imperceptible difference case, it seems reasonable to believe oneself helpless – to believe, that is, that whatever difference one might make will be too small to be morally relevant.

Taken together, these two models seem to cover a very wide range of market cases.

Consumers are in threshold cases whenever they are separated from a market bad by layers of threshold-style decision making (i.e. coarse-grained, intermittently sensitive.) And where consumers aren’t separated from a market bad by layers of decision making, they are probably in an imperceptible difference case; they are in unmediated causal contact with some underlying non- moral properties that ground an overlying market bad.

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There are, in summary, three plausible claims that together support the Consumer

Helplessness claim. The first claim is that consumers are very often in either a threshold case with respect to market bads or in an imperceptible difference case with respect to market bads. The second claim is that consumers in threshold cases are helpless. The third claim is that consumers in imperceptible difference cases are helpless. Together, these claims imply that consumers are very often helpless to affect market bads.

Responding to the Helplessness Problem

I’ve argued that the Control Principle and the Consumer Helplessness claim are both independently plausible. Together, though, they give rise to an implausible claim: that consumers very often do not have moral reasons to act in virtue of market bads. This is the Helplessness Problem.

This is a Problem, in the philosophical sense, because this is not what most of us think. Most of us accept the Default View. We think that consumers often do have moral reasons to act in virtue of market bads (and goods); we think that our consumption decisions matter, morally speaking. This is also a Problem in a more practical sense. Since No Difference Cases show every sign of proliferating as the world’s population grows and its economies integrate, rejecting the

Default View means accepting that, in the absence of political solutions, the world will increasingly be afflicted with harmful collective actions which can truly be said not to be the result of individual moral misbehavior. That may seem unpalatable. At the very least, the Helplessness Problem seems to leave us with an unsettling quietism about many of the world’s most pressing moral challenges and about the roles we play in generating them.

Very broadly, we appear to have three options for responding to this Problem. We can reject the Control Principle. We can reject the Consumer Helplessness claim. Or we can reject the Default

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View. Of these three I assume that rejecting the Default View is the least attractive.16 My goal for the

remainder of this chapter is to consider the other two options. What are our options for rejecting

the Control Principle and for rejecting the Consumer Helplessness claim? And are any of those

options really better than rejecting the Default View?

Rejecting the Control Principle and Involvement Explosion

At this point, one might feel uncertain about which strategy is the most promising. One way

we might answer this question is by looking for cases where the Consumer Helplessness claim is

clearly true and considering whether the participants in those cases still have moral reasons to act in

virtue of the outcomes they are helpless to affect. If they seemingly don’t have reasons, that suggests

we should aim to reject the Consumer Helplessness claim. (If the clearly-helpless do clearly lack

moral reasons, then it’s likely that we accept the Default View because we do not think ourselves

clearly helpless.) Obversely, if we do think that the clearly helpless participants have moral reasons to

act, that suggests the root problem is a misalignment between our intuitions about moral relevance

and the Control Principle. And that would direct us toward anti-Control Principle strategies.

Derek Parfit (1984) suggests a case of this sort. He asks us to imagine an overdetermined

murder where two people, X and Y, simultaneously shoot and kill him even though either shot

would have killed on its own.17 Since neither X’s decision nor Y’s decision affects whether or not

Parfit is killed, the Control Principle seems to imply that Parfit’s imminent death at X’s and Y’s

16 While the overwhelming majority of authors adopt either the first or second strategy, the third is not without its defenders. Most prominent are Glover and Scott-Taggart (1975) and Sinnott-Armstrong (2005). Glover, Jonathan, and M. J. Scott-Taggart. 1975. “It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 49: 171–209; Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. 2005. “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations.” In Perspectives on Climate Change, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 221–253. 17 Parfit op. cit., p.70.

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hands provided neither X nor Y with a moral reason not to shoot him. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

(2005) offers another case like this, imagining himself coming upon a group of five people all trying

to kill a person locked inside a car by pushing that car off a cliff.18 Knowing it only takes three

people to push a car, he concludes that his decision to push or not-push will have no morally

relevant effect on the outcome, and so according to the Control Principle, that means the interests

of the person in the car provide him with no reason to act. Stanley Bates (1971) offers yet another

case in this vein, asking us to imagine a cockfight whose organizers advertise that at least 100

attendees are needed for the event to occur.19 If every attendee, in deciding whether to attend,

already believes that more than 100 other people are planning to go, then every attendee could

truthfully claim that they believed the cockfight would occur regardless of their decision. Assuming

the badness of cockfighting is not otherwise sensitive to the size of the audience, the Control

Principle seems to imply that the badness of the fight does not give any of them a reason to stay

home.

These cases all share the same essential features. There is some collection of individuals that

cause a bad outcome together even though, by stipulation, no particular member has control of the

collective outcome – i.e. the outcome is no worse for any individual’s participation and no better for

any individual’s refusal. The authors expect us to judge that the individual members of the collective,

despite their helplessness, really do have a moral reason to act in virtue to the collectively

accomplished bad outcome.20 If we do share these judgments, that strongly suggests that the

18 Sinnott-Armstrong op. cit., p.297. 19 Bates op. cit., 347. 20 Although none of these authors explicitly conclude that the individuals in their cases have moral reasons to act in virtue of the collective bad outcome, we may with reasonable safety infer this from what each does conclude. Parfit concludes that X and Y both act wrongly by shooting him; Bates concludes that each individual participant is morally responsible for the cockfight; Sinnott-Armstrong concludes that joining in the car-push makes him a cause of the man’s death, from which he explicitly infers that he is morally responsible. Presumably, in Parfit’s case, we can infer the existence of moral reasons because we need them to ground the wrongness of X’s and Y’s actions. We would not say, for instance, “You have no moral reason

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Helplessness Problem amounts to a conflict between the Control Principle and our intuitions about

moral relevance. Our intuitions suggest that the Control Principle is too strong. It rules out too many

states of affairs as morally irrelevant.

Our goal must therefore be to find a more plausible principle of moral relevance. And since

the primary flaw in the Control Principle seems to be that it’s too strong, we are looking more

particularly for replacement principles that are weaker, that rule out fewer states of affairs as morally

irrelevant. (Especially in the sorts of collective action cases we’re concerned about.) Balancing this

need for a principle that’s not too strong, though, is a need to avoid one that’s too weak. Any

replacement for the Control Principle needs to avoid a problem we might call, ‘involvement

explosion’ – where too many states of affairs are left on the table as having possible moral

relevance.

To illustrate the problem, consider how the Control Principle handles the Peanut Thief case

from a few sections back. In that case, recall, you use a stolen goods website to hire an anonymous

burglar to steal a Beanie Baby for you – an act of larceny that would not otherwise have occurred

and that was not needed to accomplish any offsetting moral good. Intuitively in that case, your

participation in the stolen goods website does involve you in one particular market bad (larceny) but

doesn’t involve you in a number of others (e.g. wage theft.) The Control Principle corroborates these

judgments. It explains that since you do affect the amount of larceny in the world and don’t affect

the amount of wage theft, your purchase may involve you in larceny but not in wage theft. What

goes for wage theft also goes for countless other goods and bads. Your purchase does not involve

you in elephant poaching, in lead pollution, or in deceptive advertising because your purchase does

not to shoot ar Derek, but it would be morally wrong to.” Similarly in Bates’ and Sinnott-Armstrong’s cases, we can infer the existence of moral reasons from their judgments about moral responsibility. We would not say, “The imminent death of the man in the car doesn’t give you a moral reason to refrain, but you will be morally responsible for his death if you don’t.”

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not affect those bads. In this case, as in indefinitely many others, the Control Principle is doing a lot

of work for us. It is screening out – all by itself! – nearly all market goods and bads as irrelevant.

This is a thing to like about the Control Principle. And, more to the point, this is a thing we may

lose by rejecting it. Rejecting the Control Principle means taking down that screen and potentially

opening ourselves to an explosion of involvings.

Suppose we want to explain, without the Control Principle, why it is that your Beanie Baby

purchase does not involve you in the ivory trade. We can’t simply insist that Beanie Babies have

nothing to do with the ivory trade. The sense in which the two have nothing to do with each other

seems essentially causal. Buying a fake, fuzzy elephant seems not to contribute to the killing of actual

elephants, seems not to increase the demand for literal chunks of elephant. But your purchase does

symbolically relate to the ivory trade. To purchase ivory is to purchase part of an elephant, and you

have just symbolically purchased part of an elephant – the whole part. So, sans Control Principle, it’s

not clear how we explain your non-involvement in the ivory trade.

We encounter the same difficulty when we try to explain why your purchase doesn’t involve

you in wage theft. There is no causal connection, of course. You haven’t prompted any additional

acts of wage theft. But you are supporting theft. There’s an obvious connection between supporting

property theft and supporting other kinds of theft. So sans Control Principle again, it’s not clear how

we explain your non-involvement. The point generalizes. Without the Control Principle to helpfully

screen out the vast majority of market bads as irrelevant, we don’t have a ready explanation for why

our purchases don’t involve us in all manner of causally-remote bads.21

21 Indeed, it’s not even clear that we have grounds for disqualifying really causally remote market bads like deforestation or The Great Depression. You don’t affect them, but so what? Sans Control Principle, all we know is that causal inefficacy is not disqualifying.

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This is what an involvement explosion looks like. The worry is that without the Control

Principle (or a suitably strong alternative), we leave it open that our purchases may involve us in any

(or every) market good or bad. That result is deeply implausible – even more so than the Helplessness

Problem. This is because, first, I feel far more confident that my purchases don’t involve me in far- flung, causally-isolated market bads (e.g. the Great Depression) than that they do involve me in bads to which I’m weakly causally connected (e.g. ocean acidification.) And it’s implausible, second, because involvement explosion just looks like another and worse form of helplessness. If all of my options potentially involve me in indefinitely many market outcomes, then it’s hard to see why I should care about what my purchases involve me in; it’s hard to see why I should take possible involvings into consideration when deciding how to consume. That’s a new sort of helplessness.

(Whatever I choose, I’m involved in everything.) And it’s a sort of helplessness that seems far worse than the sort that the Control Principle gives rise to. At least with the Control Principle we have the assurance that it may sometimes matter how we consume. At least some of our purchases clearly do make a difference.

The lesson in this is that any adequate solution to the Helplessness Problem that targets the

Control Principle needs not only to offer a replacement account of moral relevance but also needs to be a sufficient guard against involvement explosion. An adequate solution must be highly restrictive – just like the Control Principle.

Suggestions for Control Principle replacements generally fall into three groups: complicity approaches, virtue approaches, and collective action approaches. We consider each of these in turn.

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Control Principle Alternatives: Complicity Approaches. Some authors have suggested that we

might replace the Control Principle with a complicity account of moral relevance.22 This view says,

first, that some of our purchases make us complicit in market bads – or, as it’s sometimes put, dirties

our hands in them – and, second, that the moral reasons we have to avoid complicity are not

reducible to the moral reasons we have not to worsen whatever market bad we are counted as

complicit in. In fleshing out the first part of the view, the proponent will offer some account of the

truth conditions for complicity claims (e.g. A’s purchase of X made her complicit in market bad Y), and

we’ll get different versions of the complicity approach depending on what those conditions look

like.

An adequate complicity account – i.e. one that solves the Helplessness Problem – needs to

juggle three competing criteria. It needs to give us a way to explain why consumers have moral

reasons in No Difference Cases; it needs to avoid involvement explosion; and it needs to be

straightforwardly plausible as an account of complicity. (So, for instance, an account that says, X is

complicit in any market bad that her purchase doesn’t stamp out of existence, fails this final criterion for being

an implausible gloss on what’s involved in complicity.)

The most forceful proponent of the complicity approach is Jordan Curnutt (1997), who

develops this view in response to worries about the helplessness of meat consumers, in particular.

He writes,

A person who eats animals, or buys and uses lamps from Auschwitz or cotton clothing from the antebellum South... is profiting from, benefiting from a morally nefarious practice. Doing so, and especially doing so when morally innocuous alternatives are readily available,

22 This strategy is endorsed by Curnutt (1997) and at least entertained by Hudson (1993), Shafer-Landau (1994), Hussain (2012), Radzik (2017). Curnutt, Jordan. 1997. “A New Argument for Vegetarianism.” Journal of Social Philosophy 28 (3): 153–72; Hudson, Hud. 1993. “Collective Responsibility and Moral Vegetarianism.” Journal of Social Philosophy 24 (2): 89–104. See p.101; Hussain, Waheed. 2012. “Is Ethical Consumerism an Impermissible Form of Vigilantism?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40 (2): 111–43. See p.113; Radzik, Linda. 2017. “Boycotts and the Social Enforcement of Justice.” Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (1): 102–22. See p.109-10. Shafer-Landau, Russ. 1994. “Vegetarianism, Causation and Ethical Theory.” Public Affairs Quarterly 8 (1): 85–100. See p.95.

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not only indicates support for and the endorsement of moral evil, it is also to participate in that evil. It is an act of complicity, partaking in condemnable exploitation, reaping personal advantages at a significant cost to others. This is so whether or not an individual's abstinence from the practice has any effect whatsoever on its perpetuation. It strikes me as quite uncontroversial to say that one who concurs and cooperates with wrongdoing, who garners benefits through the defeat of the basic welfare interests of others, is himself doing something which is seriously morally wrong.23

On Curnutt’s view, the critical component for complicity is the benefitting-from relationship.

Our purchases make us complicit in whatever market bads we benefit from, regardless of whether

we have “any effect whatsoever” on that bad. And since on Curnutt’s view a helpless individual can

act wrongly merely by benefitting from evil, the moral reasons she has to avoid complicity must not

be reducible to the moral reasons she has not to cause evil.24

As with most of the proposals we’ll consider, Curnutt is suggesting a non-causal sufficient

condition for moral relevance. Since the Control Principle is stated as a necessary condition for moral

relevance, accepting Curnutt’s proposal really does require us to reject the Control Principle – if non-

causal complicity is enough for moral relevance, then causal control is not required for moral relevance.

However, we do need to be careful in how we state the alternative principle implicitly being

proposed here. Curnutt is surely not proposing that complicity is both sufficient and necessary for

moral relevance. That would be absurd. It would not benefit me to hire a hitman to take out my best

friend, but that doesn’t mean her death is morally irrelevant to my decision about whether to have

23 Curnutt op. cit., p.166. 24 While Curnutt is emphatic that his view applies even in cases of helplessness, he sometimes lapses into causation-like descriptions of the connection between the individual and the market bad. In the quoted passage, for instance, he says that an individual counts as complicit when he “reap[s] personal advantages at a significant cost to others” and when he “garners benefits through the defeat of the basic welfare interests of others.” Both of these descriptions have a causal flavor and may suggest that the badness of complicity is bound up with the badness of making things worse. That cannot be the view. To offer a genuine alternative to the Control Principle, the view must be that the reasons we have to avoid complicity do not reduce to the reasons we have not to make things worse. In a case of genuine helplessness, after all, the advantages I reap do not impose a significant cost on others, nor do they in any way contribute to the defeat of the basic welfare interests of others. Those significant costs will be paid and those basic welfare interests defeated to exactly the same extent, regardless of what I do.

149 her assassinated. Rather than read Curnutt’s complicity principle as a full-on replacement for the

Control Principle, we should read it as an amendment: as offering a jointly-necessary condition on moral irrelevance. That gives us,

Control Principle + Benefitting-from Complicity

A has a moral reason to act in virtue of S only if A believes either that her act will have a

morally relevant effect on S or that in acting, she will derive benefits from some evil aspect of S.

The problem with this view is that it runs us headlong into an involvement explosion. The modern world is positively teeming with things that wouldn’t exist but for the defeat of the basic welfare interests of persons past or present. That is not a thing to celebrate, of course, but it does mean our actions very often place us in the benefitting from relation to an indefinite number of evils.

Imagine resting in the shade of the U.S. Capitol Building on a hot summer day. On the complicity account, there is potentially a long, long list of moral reasons why it’s morally bad for you to do this.

The shade you are enjoying is cast by a building made by slaves; the suffering of each may be a moral reason not to rest here. The state who built this building and continues to use and support it only exists because of the displacement (and killing) of millions of indigenous Americans; the defeat of each one’s basic welfare interests may be a moral reason not to rest here. The laws of this society

(and the architecture of this building) would not be possible but for the innovations of the Romans, who were themselves slaveholders, colonizers, and imperialists. However many untold thousands of lives were lost or marred in order to secure these goods, each one may supply you with a moral

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reason to keep walking. True, many of these evils may be things I get involved in regardless of where

I go in D.C.25 But some of them, at least, I may be able to avoid by seeking shade elsewhere.

I think it’s implausible simply to assert that there are so many moral reasons littered about

our world – i.e. grounded in all the evils that have ever been. But even supposing there were such

reasons, they don’t seem to support Curnutt’s intended position. Suppose, for instance, I were facing

a choice between eating a salad in the shade of the Capitol and eating a burger in the sun. (The meat,

we may suppose, will simply be thrown away if I don’t eat it.) The least bad of these two options,

and by a long shot, is eating the burger. That makes me complicit in only one evil whereas sitting in

the shade makes me complicit in many orders of magnitude more.26 Indeed given how many evils

are at issue, it might be morally better for me to stand in the sun and kill a cow myself – one who

would not otherwise have been killed – than to enjoy that tainted Capitol shade.

The core point is that it’s deeply implausible that every single evil of the past might generate

in perpetuity strong moral reasons for all future agents every time they benefit from them. That’s a

terribly implausible involvement explosion. And that is why we should reject Curnutt’s version of

the complicity approach.

There are two other proposals for complicity accounts that we might consider – ones which

Radzik helpfully names the “material complicity” and “symbolic complicity” accounts.27 The

material complicity account closely resembles the Control Principle but with a more expansive

25 Pointing this out actually seems more inimical to the complicity approach than helpful. One of the things we’re trying to avoid in our efforts to evade involvement explosion is the kind of helplessness where all of our choices involve us in every bad thing. (“I might as well do as I like since every choice makes me complicit in countless evils anyway.”) 26 One might resist this move by insisting that each burger eaten actually makes the consumer complicit in each and every defeated interest caused by the factory farming system. (Though, we should ask: just cows or all factory farmed animals? Just the recent ones or all of them ever?) But that wins the battle only to lose the war. My complaint about the complicity approach is that it leads to a great big involvement explosion. This reply effectively insists that the real explosion is actually quite a bit bigger than I’ve made out. 27 Radzik op. cit., p.110.

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notion of causal involvement. For me to be materially complicit in a market outcome, there need only

be some through-line of causal interactions linking me to the outcome. By patronizing a shop owner

who donates to racist organizations, I may be materially complicit in those organizations’ activities.

By buying a microwave dinner from Stouffer’s, I may be materially complicit in child labor –

because Stouffer’s parent company is Nestlé, who makes chocolate from cocoa beans sourced from

plantations that rely on child labor.28 Even if my patronage of the racist shop owner does not

worsen racism nor my microwave dinner purchase worsen child labor, I am complicit in these bads

because of my causal involvement with parties who are themselves causally involved with these

bads. This is where our moral reasons come from in No Difference Cases on the material complicity

approach: through the chains of causal contact our purchases forge between ourselves and market

bads.

The problem with this account, as with the previous one, is that it runs us into an

involvement explosion.29 In the global market, fuzzy causation chains abound. The hundreds of

people I’ve had market interactions with have themselves interacted with hundreds of others, as

have those people, and so on through the entire market system. Do all of these relationships support

complicity attributions? If so, there are too many. If not, which ones do – and why?

Consider what’s involved in avoiding complicity in the Nestlé/child labor case. If buying

non-chocolate Nestlé products counts as supporting child labor, then what about buying from

companies that themselves buy chocolate from Nestlé? Those acts seem to be the same number of

links away from child labor in the fuzzy causal chain. Is that where complicity stops? What about

28 Whoriskey, Peter, and Rachel Siegel. 2019. “Hershey, Nestle and Mars Won’t Promise Their Chocolate Is Free of Child Labor.” Washington Post. June 5, 2019. 29 Radzik makes this point, too, noting that “by [this account’s] logic, the number of things I am responsible for expands exponentially.” Radzik op. cit.

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buying from a store who buys from the store who buys Nestlé chocolate? What about buying from a

store that employs people who buy from Nestlé – or who buy from stores that buy from Nestlé?

Given that Amazon.com sells Nestlé chocolates and that the preponderance of people in my

country use Amazon, few of my purchases are going to be more than two degrees separated from

Nestlé chocolate – so do basically all of my purchases involve me in child labor, then?

There’s an obvious risk of involvement explosion here. To avoid it, we’ll need to draw a

hard line somewhere not too far down the causal chain (“This is where complicity stops.”) Suppose we

draw the line at doing business with people who do business with Nestlé – such that those business

decisions do make us complicit, but business decisions one more step removed do not. That might

prevent an involvement explosion, but it is very implausible as an account of complicity. It is very

implausible that our moral involvements just stop right there, dead in their tracks at the second

degree of causal separation. Even worse, this hard-line view is highly susceptible to “avoision”

strategies. If I can’t go out and buy a Stouffer’s dinner without dirtying my hands, I may still be able

buy them second-hand from you – because adding you to the causal chain makes it too long to

support complicity. In which case, I should be able to keep my hands clean so long as I can afford

to launder all my purchases through multiple agents. That view is, I take it, patently not how

complicity works. And, notice, both of these problems – arbitrariness and moral avoision – crop up

wherever we try to draw a hard line.30 These are good reasons to reject the material complicity account.

The other complicity approach that Radzik mentions – the symbolic complicity account –

does not fare any better. This account attempts to limn our complicity in terms of the expressive

and symbolic content of our purchases, explaining that we are complicit in outcomes when we

30 Or, rather, there is one hard line that doesn’t seem arbitrary or game-able, and that’s the one drawn by the Control Principle: you are materially complicit in child labor only when you have a morally relevant affect on child labor.

153 condone, endorse, or express support for them with our consumption decisions. The moral reasons we have not to condone evils, we then claim, are not reducible to the moral reasons we have not to worsen evils. By buying a “BURN THE RAINFORESTS” t-shirt, I am clearly expressing support for that evil and so, on this view, am complicit in it. And if I “Like” Nestlé on Facebook, I seem to be symbolically approving of their business and so on this view am complicit in their bad practices.

But the symbolic complicity approach faces a grave dilemma. The root of the problem is that purchasing decisions are both weakly symbolic and expressively ambiguous. Not many acts of consumption come pre-packed with clear symbolic meaning. (What is the symbolic significance of a bottle of dishwasher detergent or an electricity bill? An ATM fee? An auto-renewing Netflix subscription?) Nor do consumption decisions tend to express by public convention any clear meaning qua speech act. (“Ah, Carl has a new iPhone. By convention, that means he’s an insufferable elitist.”) As for the speaker meaning of a purchase – i.e. that which an individual consumer is using her purchase to mean – it is mostly not the case that we use our purchases to mean things, and when we do, we do not use them to mean, I endorse this evil. (And for those purchases which threaten to involve us evil, we are quite good at assuring ourselves that we are not thereby endorsing or supporting that evil.)

The symbolic complicity approach could try to sidestep this concern by adopting a liberal view of what is required for a purchase to count as expressing support for some evil. Perhaps I am complicit in any evil that my purchase could be understood as – or, could reasonably or defensibly be understood as – expressing approval of. The trouble is that that’s both an implausible understanding of complicity and an invitation to involvement explosion. It is implausible that I count as complicit in a bad outcome merely because someone could reasonably defend an interpretation of my behavior whereby I have endorsed it. And even were that true, I’d be complicit in too many things.

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Consider flag flying. The act of flag flying is strongly symbolic – i.e. is widely regarded as

having symbolic meaning – but expressively ambiguous. Lots of people find some clear, expressive

meaning in the flown flag, but they do not all find the same, clear meaning. Suppose I know that you

find my flag flying hurtful and that you reasonably read it as a symbolic approval for some evil X. I

reasonably disagree with you (and in good faith) about the flag’s symbolic significance. (Which is to

say, I don’t dispute your reading of my act as unreasonable, but I (i) deny that I mean what you read

me as meaning and (ii) affirm that my alternative meaning is itself reasonable.) While I clearly do

have a moral reason to put my flag away – whatever the flag means, it’s bad to hurt you – it is

implausible that your disputed symbolic reading of my flag flying is by itself sufficient to force me

into a complicity relationship with evil X.31

This liberal version of the symbolic complicity approach also threatens an involvement

explosion. The list of possible involvings for any given purchase is as long as the list of defensible

interpretations of my act. In the Peanut Thief case, for instance, it’s not hard to imagine that someone

could read your act as expressing approval for elephant poaching and for wage theft. (Though, I’m

not sure that I can assess how reasonable those readings are without some concrete justifications to

look at.) On this view, that possibility may be enough to involve you in those market bads – and in

any others to which you may be defensibly connected.

For these reasons, the symbolic complicity approach is best served by sticking to a more

conservative view of what is required for a purchase to count as expressing support for some evil –

perhaps only when a purchase either clearly does endorse some evil or when a purchaser clearly does

intend her purchase to express that sort of support (as with my “BURN THE RAINFORESTS” t-

31 In this case, I probably should realize that other people who agree with your symbolic reading will take me to be complicit in evil X, and that might be motivating. But the basic point stands: the existence of this disputed meaning does not seem to demand that I regard myself as complicit.

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shirt.) This version of the view manages to be plausible as an account of complicity and to avoid

involvement explosion, but it doesn’t seem to solve the Helplessness Problem. That’s because, again,

very few of our purchases have clear expressive or symbolic content and very, very few are intended

by the purchaser as an expression of support for evil. The man who opts for the cheaper, non-Fair

Trade coffee is not thereby clearly expressing support for unfair wages for coffee farmers (nor does

he think of himself as doing so.) The woman who goes on frivolous joyrides doesn’t clearly express

support for climate change. Indeed, we might imagine a consumer who simply accepts the

conclusion of the Helplessness Problem and reasons, It’s not that I support all these terrible market

outcomes – far from it! But since I can’t do anything about them, I see no moral reason to act differently. A

consumer like that may embrace the symbolic complicity approach and fail to have moral reasons to

act in virtue of the market bads she takes herself to be helpless to affect.

The symbolic complicity approach, like the other two complicity approaches, seems to fail as

a solution to the Helplessness Problem.

Control Principle Alternatives: Virtue Approaches. A number of authors have suggested a virtue

ethics approach to resolving the Helplessness Problem.32 This strategy, like the complicity approach,

turns on two claims. First, they claim that certain purchasing decisions are incompatible with virtue

– which is to say, any truly virtuous agent would recognize that she has decisive moral reasons not

32 Hursthouse (2011) develops a virtue ethical approach to consumer ethics but does not explain how the view would handle cases of helplessness. Abbate (2014) extends the view to cover No Difference Cases. Nobis (2002), Jamieson (2007), and Kutz (2000) consider a Consequentialized version of this strategy. (“We should be virtuous because virtue is optimific.”) Kutz expresses skepticism about the view while Nobis and Jamieson think it shows promise. Abbate, Cheryl. 2014. “Virtues and Animals: A Minimally Decent Ethic for Practical Living in a Non-Ideal World.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27 (6): 909–29; Hursthouse, Rosalind. 2011. “Virtue Ethics and the Treatment of Animals.” Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey. The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, 119–43; Jamieson, Dale. 2007. “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists.” Utilitas 19 (2): 160–83; Nobis, Nathan. 2002. “Vegetarianism and Virtue: Does Consequentialism Demand Too Little?” Social Theory and Practice 28 (1): 135–156.

156 make those decisions and would act appropriately. Second, they claim that those moral reasons exist even in No Difference Cases and, thus, are not reducible to or interchangeable with the reasons the truly virtuous consumer has to avoid worsening bad outcomes. Taken together, these claims entail that agents can have moral reasons to act grounded in market bads that they’re helpless to affect. So this strategy too involves rejecting the Control Principle.

Before launching into the details, a word about virtue ethics is in order. Characteristically, what distinguishes a theory of virtue ethics from other normative theories (Consequentialisms,

Deontologies) is its focus on and prioritization of the moral character of agents – to wit, their virtue.

Where other normative theories first identify rules of right action and then analyze virtuous character in terms of rule-following, a virtue ethicist reverses the order of investigation and explanation; her primary focus is on the nature of virtue itself, on the traits and dispositions that together constitute good moral character (things like courage, temperance, compassion, generosity, and honesty) with moral evaluations of actions deprioritized – regarded as secondary and derivative. A virtue ethicist may simply analyze right action as that which a truly virtuous agent would do.

From even this quick sketch, one might anticipate that a virtue ethical approach to resolving the Helplessness Problem (and to consumer ethics more generally) will focus on the truly virtuous consumer: on the ideal market agent, on her character traits, on her consumption decisions, and on her reasons for making them. So, what would this consumer be like? Among other things, she would be ever mindful of how her purchases could affect others. Being generous and compassionate, she would probably tip well – when she can and when appropriate. Being loving, honest, and practically wise, she would refrain from adopting a dog until she’s confident she can care for it properly. Being conscientious and sedulous, she would return unwanted frozen grocery items to the freezer section whence she first retrieved them. Etc.

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While the truly virtuous consumer is clearly a useful heuristic, one might naturally wonder

whether she’s more than that. What explanatory role is she playing? Does the fact that the truly

virtuous consumer would do these things explain why you should do them too?

Yes and no. That the truly virtuous consumer would tip in such-and-such a situation surely

does count as a reason for you to tip in the same situation. But it’s a reason only indirectly. Since the

truly virtuous consumer is a perfect bellwether for right action, the fact that should would do a thing

must count in favor of your doing it too. But at the same time, that will never be the best (nor most

virtuous) explanation for why you ought to follow her lead. After all, the truly virtuous consumer

herself would never reason like that. Her reason for tipping is that, being compassionate and

generous and practically-wise, she sees and feels that it’s an appropriate action to take vis-a-vis the

interests of all involved. It would be a mistake – both moral and conceptual – for her to reason out

what to do by considering what the truly virtuous consumer would do. (“I should tip because that’s

what I would do in circumstances like this one.”) Similarly, it would be a mistake for her to regard

her own moral sentiments and impulses as their own best justification. (“The fact that I feel that X-

ing is right is the deepest and truest explanation for why X-ing is right.”) The truly virtuous

consumer walks the fine line between acting impetuously and committing the so-called “one-

thought-too-many” mistake – an error that moral agents are said to make when they over-

intellectualize their own good behavior, thinking too hard and clinically about what they ought to

do.33 If, e.g., you decide to visit a friend in the hospital only after reasoning, X is my friend. This fact

imposes on me a duty to visit her. So I must visit her, then you’ve had one thought too many (namely, the

middle one.) You seem like a bad friend – and your decision seems defective – for having to

methodically work through what duties you have to X in light of your friendship. Insofar as this is a

33 c.f. Hursthouse op. cit., p.127.

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genuine mistake, the truly virtuous agent would surely not make it. However – and this is the point

of mentioning the one-thought-too-many mistake – to say that the truly virtuous consumer never

over-intellectualizes her purchases is not to say that she lacks reasons for purchasing as she does.

While many of her actions – like many of everyone’s actions – will largely stem from habit and

impulse, the virtuous agent is still reason-responsive and is still fully competent to explain her

decisions.34

Here’s the upshot. While a virtue ethicist might glibly treat, Act as the truly virtuous agent would,

as the one true rule of right action, she is not going to treat that agent’s actions as any sort of

fundamental source of moral reasons. The truly virtuous agent is not virtuous because she acts in

accordance with her own actions but because she correctly perceives and responds to the moral

universe. That’s what virtue looks like for the rest of us, too: correctly perceiving and responding to

the moral universe. And that means that in responding the Helplessness Problem, the virtue

approach must be trying to answer exactly the same question as the other approaches. That question

is not, How does the truly virtuous consumer act in a No Difference Case? The question is, What moves her to act

as she does? And whatever her reasons are, those can be our reasons too.

What are her reasons? Hursthouse (2011) and Abbate (2014) both argue that the truly

virtuous consumer would refuse to participate in No Difference Cases (specifically those involving

animal products) because she realizes that “the compassionate are not willingly party to cruelty” –

that, indeed, she realizes she “cannot be compassionate while being a party to cruel practices.”35 This

refusal is not about making a difference. She would refuse, “regardless of whether [she] can do

anything about” the cruel practices or market bads her purchase would make her party to.36

34 Indeed, being morally articulate seems like a plausible component of the Full Virtue Package. 35 Hursthouse op.cit., p.129; Abbate op. cit., p.924. (emphasis added) 36 Abbate op. cit.

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As stated, this argument looks viciously circular. We’re told that we should refuse to participate in No Difference Cases because the truly virtuous consumer would refuse. But since the truly virtuous consumer is not a source of fundamental moral reasons, that means we still need some explanation of what drives her to refuse. We’re told: it’s because she knows that one cannot be compassionate while being (non-causally) party to cruelty. How does she know that, though? What’s her evidence? Maybe she knows that she would never choose to be non-causally party to cruelty – or perhaps she’s simply reflected on the nature of her own perfect compassion and intuited that it’s incompatible with non-causal participation. Either way, we know that neither the perfectly virtuous agent nor her perfectly compassionate nature are in-themselves a fundamental source of moral reasons, so we can ask again: Why does the agent of perfect virtue know that her perfect compassion is incompatible with non-causal participation? Additional appeals to perfect agents and pure virtue will run us along the same round track.

We could also put the complaint this way. Imagine a truly virtuous consumer caught in a No

Difference Case. We might picture her simply accepting the conclusion of the Helplessness

Problem, reasoning since I cannot make a morally relevant difference here, it is neither more- nor less- compassionate for me to participate in the No Difference Case. Presumably, the virtue ethicist thinks that’s the wrong picture. But, if so, she owes us a story about why it’s the wrong picture. It won’t do to say

“that’s the wrong picture because it’s incoherent; we’re imagining a truly virtuous agent doing an unvirtuous thing.” That’s explanatorily empty. It’s analytically true that if it’s the wrong picture, then we’re imagining a virtuous agent doing an unvirtuous thing. But that’s not a reason to think it is the wrong picture. Again, we ask: What motivates the truly virtuous consumer to act as she does in No Difference

Cases?

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Since Hursthouse’s account of consumer virtue ethics is not really addressed to the

possibility of consumer helpless, it’s unclear what path she might take out of this circle. Abbate is

very much concerned about this possibility, though, and she does offer a route out. She says,

A minimally decent animal ethic would require moral agents to refuse to indulge in a trivial pleasure that is made possible only by massive animal suffering… Since, factory farm flesh is available to us only because nonhuman animals have been subjected to a considerable amount of pain and suffering, we can conclude that someone who derives enjoyment from consuming such meat does not feel appropriately: she does not feel how the compassionate person should. The central point is that, as compassionate individuals, the suffering of animals should compel us to feel that it is inappropriate to receive trivial benefits from the suffering, regardless of whether we can do anything about it.37

On her view, the truly virtuous consumer, being compassionate, would simply feel that it is

inappropriate for her to enjoy the consumption of meat when that meat “is made possible only by

massive... suffering” – and she would refuse to consume meat even if she expected to have zero

effect on the amount of suffering. Stated that way, though, it’s clear that Abbate’s path out of the

circle is via Currnutt’s complicity account. The virtuous agent refuses to participate in No Difference

Cases because she feels (or knows) the truth of Curnutt’s view: that it’s bad to benefit from evil, even if

by benefitting we don’t make that evil any worse. Since the truly virtuous consumer’s reasons for not

participating in a No Difference Case amounts to Curnutt’s complicity account, that account is

fundamentally what’s on offer as our way out of the Helplessness Problem. If we want to be

virtuous, we must accept his account – as the truly virtuous consumer does.

I’m not going to offer any new reasons for rejecting this old view. I assume that it fails in the

virtue ethical context for exactly the same reasons that it failed on its own. It runs us into a great big

involvement explosion and one that’s even more implausible than the Helplessness Problem that the

view was supposed to solve.

37 Abbate op. cit. (emphasis in original)

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Still, that’s just one path out of the circle. The virtue ethicist could appeal to the material or

symbolic complicity accounts instead, insisting that the truly virtuous consumer knows that these

accounts are correct and that they explain her refusal to participate in a No Difference Case. But

clearly those accounts would have the same defects as virtue approaches that they had as

straightforward complicity approaches.

Here’s a better alternative: the virtue ethicist might ground the truly virtuous consumer’s

reasons for acting in some morally bad effects that occur outside the market. Perhaps she reasons,

although my participation won’t make this market bad any worse, it may worsen my own character. By

participating, I debase my own virtue and make it less likely that I’ll have the right moral sentiments and responses in

the future. If she’s right about that, then the rest of us, striving toward virtue, should reason similarly.

Let’s call this the ‘Future Virtue Approach’.

One good reason to like this approach is that it seems quite compatible with the Control

Principle. Recall that the Helplessness Problem amounts to the implausible observation that market

bads appear not to be sources of moral reasons for consumers, since we seem helpless to affect them

and since the ability to affect S seems like a necessary condition for S’s being reason-giving. This

solution gives us a way to accept that conclusion while lessening the degree to which it’s a problem.

If participating in No Difference Cases really does have morally relevant effects on our character –

weakening or perverting the dispositional character traits that constitute virtue – then we can both

keep the Control Principle and explain where consumers’ moral reasons come from. We can say: it

matters, morally speaking, how we consume because practicing ethical consumption – even

ineffectively – helps keep our virtue muscles toned and ready for big lifts in other domains of our

lives, domains where our decisions really do make morally relevant differences.38

38 It’s worth noting that the explanation we give here cannot make any appeal to future No Difference Cases. That would be viciously circular. (“You should avoid participating in this No Difference Case or else you’ll

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The trouble is that it’s not immediately obvious that participating in No Difference Cases

really does debase our virtue. Why not think that precisely because it’s a No Difference Case (and

we’ve already reasoned out that our participation will be ineffectual) that it will be virtue-neutral to

allow ourselves to participate? That is, if we don’t make the world any worse by participating, then

why would we be making ourselves worse?

Let me suggest three mechanisms or routes along which participation might debase our

virtue. The first is that individuals may sometimes find their own participation to be psychologically

disturbing. Consider how disquieting it would be to get involved in Sinnott-Armstrong’s car-pushing

case – to feel the strain of pushing on a car, to hear the man inside screaming and pounding on the

window, to hear the crunch when it hits the bottom. I doubt I would come out of that experience

psychically unscathed. And were I to start doing that sort of thing frequently (weekend car-pushes

with the boys!), it seems overwhelmingly likely that my new hobby would make me a worse person.

Even if I never made a difference and only ever acted out of non-malign intentions (wishing,

perhaps, for some light exercise, or the warm feelings of teamwork), it seems very likely that I would

emerge from those experiences more inured to violence, more self-deceived about my motives, and

less compassionate toward others.

Unfortunately, consumption decisions mostly don’t look like this. There’s no scream or

crunch at the end of a Sunday joyride to let us know we’ve helped push the climate off a cliff. We

don’t hear any exasperated groans from the local fauna when we leave our porch light on for

another night. Since we mostly don’t viscerally see and feel our consumption decisions as connecting

have a greater chance of participating in future No Difference Cases. And that would be terrible because if you participated in future Cases, you’d be even more likely to participate in future-future Cases…”) That sort of story would never actually get around to explaining why we should care about participating in No Difference Cases.

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us to market bads, the psychological disturbance mechanism seems only sporadically helpful as a

story about why participating in No Difference Cases might affect our virtue.39

A second and more helpful mechanism is suggested by the symbolic complicity approach.

Insofar as we think of our own purchasing decisions as expressive, we might find it virtue positive in

the long run to practice expressing our moral sentiments in No Difference Cases. Perhaps when I

refuse to buy bottled water, I can think to myself, I hate this industry and I worry about our planet, and

that’s why I am not going to buy these.40 Even if I fully expect to make zero moral difference to the

market bads I associate with bottled water, I may consider my act virtue positive in that I am

practicing sincerity and compassion and principled sacrifice. It is very plausible that someone who

routinely practices these virtues will, in the long run, have a better character than someone who does

not.

As a third and final mechanism, we might appeal to the psychological desirability of what

Jamieson calls “non-contingency.”41 The basic idea is that there seems to be something distasteful

about the character of a person who hems-and-haws about what to do in each and every No

Difference Case, closely scrutinizing markets to figure out what difference she might make, thinking

carefully about what other consumers are likely to do, and remaining vigilant for loopholes and

excuses that would allow her to buy as she prudentially prefers. Even if this consumer always gets it

39 Sometimes there actually is a crunch-and-scream to remind us of the connection between our action and a market bad, but we are already too inured to the sound for it to register (And, thus, too inured for it to be very plausible that additional exposures will (further) degrade our virtue.) In the case of meat consumption, for instance, there is literally the taste of blood and the sight of bone to remind us of animal suffering, and yet by the time most of us hit adulthood, we’ve been so often exposed to these signifiers as to find them wholly unremarkable and non-disturbing. We might note, though, that many long-term vegans report that their feelings of psychological disturbance are eventually restored to them, and that fact could supply the rest of us with a reason why meat-refusal could in the long-run be better for our virtue along this dimension – i.e. by resensitizing us to suffering. 40 C.f. Nobis op. cit., p.154; Singer, Peter. 1980. "Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism," Philosophy and Public Affairs 9: 325-37. See p.337. 41 Jamieson op. cit., p.167.

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right – i.e. correctly assesses in every case whether she’ll make a difference and then acts accordingly

– we might think that her practice is not virtue positive. There is something defective-seeming about

a person who’s overly judicious about exercising virtue, who’s overly concerned about avoiding the

mistake of doing something well-intentioned that fizzles. There are a few ways we might explain this

judgment. Jamieson suggests that these sorts of calculations are simply time costly and so a

distraction from other virtuous activity.42 Nobis worries that agents who are selectively caring – even

if they start by selecting well – may eventually slide down a slippery slope toward the vice of self-

deception.43 Or we might simply think that this person is vicious for focusing on the wrong mistake.

She’s trying to avoid well-meant failures to help when what she should be trying to avoid is self-interested

failures to not-hurt.

Do these mechanisms taken together show that participation in No Difference Cases is bad

for our character? Not decisively and not categorically. One very serious worry is that we’ve pulled

ourselves out of one No Difference Case only to wind up in another. Even if certain action patterns

promote greater virtue in the long run, each particular action may fail to have a morally relevant effect

on it’s own. We may be trapped in a No Difference Case with our own future selves – at every

moment in time justifiably believing that such-and-such actions tend to promote virtues and

justifiably believing that our present-tense actions have zero relevant effects on our virtue. If so, the

Control Principle would seem to imply, once again, that our own virtue is not morally relevant and

reason-giving. We’d be confronting the same problem as before, a few paces away from where we

started.

We will return to the topic of intrapersonal No Differences Cases when we consider

arguments against the Consumer Helplessness claim later in this chapter. As we’ll see, the most

42 Jamieson op. cit. 43 Nobis op. cit., p.154.

165 plausible way of dealing with these cases seems to be denying-the-description – which is to say, rejecting the claim that we actually are helpless. That may also be the best way forward for the

Future Virtue Solution – i.e to insist that each of our individual decisions really does have some morally relevant effect on our virtue. If so, this approach will not succeed as a standalone response to the Helplessness Problem but only in conjunction with a solution that lets us reject the Consumer

Helplessness claim. That does not make the Future Virtue Solution a failure, but it does mean we have to keep looking.

For now, let me conclude our discussion of virtue ethical solutions to the Helplessness

Problem by warding off one other concern that might be raised against the Future Virtue Solution.

Namely, some philosophers sympathetic with virtue ethicists might accuse the Future Virtue

Approach of being a false-flag operation on behalf of Consequentialists – a consequence-first solution to the Helplessness Problem hiding under a patina of virtue talk.

This complaint is fair to a point, but only to a point. It’s true that this solution grounds consumers’ reasons in the future consequences of debased virtue – and not, as one might have hoped, in some more “pure” notion of the intrinsic value of having good character. However, I don’t think this solution is in any way antithetical to virtue ethics. I assume every virtue ethicist already agrees that one of the things that’s good about virtue is that people who possess it tend to be better behaved than those who don’t, tend to leave the world a better place than they found it. And surely we can like that virtue has good consequences and still think (a) that there’s something fundamentally good about being virtuous, a good wholly independent of virtue’s good consequences, and (b) that the goodness of our character is normatively more basic than the rightness of our actions. Neither of those principles are challenged by this solution. All the Future

Virtue Approach says is that in No Difference Cases, what moral reasons we have are forward-looking, being focused on practicing and honing our virtue in the present for more virtuous behavior in the future. It says nothing

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about how pervasive those sorts of reasons are, how fundamental they are, or about what the true

value of virtue is. In fact, I would submit that the form of the Future Virtue Solution is ultimately

more encouraging than not. Since the Helplessness Problem is in the first instance a problem about

consequences, we might have expected from the start that plausible solutions would themselves be

stories about the consequences of our actions.

Control Principle Alternatives: Collective Action Approaches. I want to consider one more

proposal for how we might reject and replace the Control Principle – which I’ll call the ‘Collective

Action approach’. It says that the best explanation for why the Control Principle fails to yield

plausible results in No Difference Cases is that the Control Principle understands control too

narrowly.44 As before, the essence of the suggestion is that the Control Principle is too strong and

needs to be amended to provide another route by which outcomes may count as morally relevant.

Unlike the other suggestions we’ve considered, however, the Collective Action approach does not

offer up a strange and disjoint moral claim (focusing, e.g., mostly on what we can affect but also

sometimes on what benefits we accept from evil), but something more unified: a principle still

fundamentally focused on control. On this view, there are simply two morally relevant kinds of

control. There is the control we have on our own, and there is the control we have together. Only

when neither sort of control is available may an outcome be counted as morally irrelevant.

44 The direct version of this view is defended by Vance (2017) and entertained by Parfit (1984). A more complicated version appealing to underived collective responsibility is defended Kutz (2000), Cullity (2000), and Schwartz (2010) and entertained by Hudson (1993) and Stephens (1994.) Cullity, Garrett. 2000. “Pooled Beneficence.” In Imperceptible Harms and Benefits, edited by Michael Almeida: 9– 42. Dordrecht: Kluwer; Hudson, Hud. 1993. “Collective Responsibility and Moral Vegetarianism.” Journal of Social Philosophy 24 (2): 89–104; Kutz, Christopher. 2000. Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press; Schwartz, David T. 2010. Consuming Choices: Ethics in a Global Consumer Age. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Stephens, William O. 1994. “Five Arguments for Vegetarianism.” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 1 (4): 25–39; Parfit op. cit.; Vance, Chad. 2017. “Climate Change, Individual Emissions, and Foreseeing Harm.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (5): 562– 584.

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Parfit suggests this view as a response to his case of overdetermined killing. Since in that

case X’s act and Y’s act taken together control whether Parfit is killed, and since it’s clearly wrong for

both X and Y to act as they do – individually firing a fatal shot at Parfit – he surmises that individual

control must not be the whole story. The lesson is that it’s “not enough to ask, ‘Will my act harm

other people?’ Even if the answer is No… I should [also] ask, ‘Will my act be one of a set of acts

that will together harm other people?’ The answer may be Yes.”45 So this is his gloss on the

Collective Action approach, as applied to market cases in particular: a market bad I am helpless to

affect may still count as morally relevant to my decision making so long as my act would be one of a

set of acts that together make a morally relevant difference.

As stated, this principle drives us into a major involvement explosion.46 The problem is that

we lack any principled way of restricting which acts may be taken together to count as a controlling

collective. After I sell a share of stock, for instance, there is a collective C consisting of me + the people

who sold stock on Black Tuesday whose actions, taken together, caused the stock market to crash that

day (and, to a lesser extent, caused the Great Depression.) But the badness of Black Tuesday is

clearly morally irrelevant to my decision to sell stock in the present day.47 And this is just the

periphery of the explosion. It’s true of every single one of my actions that the set consisting of {that

action + the actions of stock owners on Black Tuesday}, taken together, caused the Black Tuesday crash.

And mutatis mutandis with other No Difference Cases past and present. (e.g. the set consisting of {my

45 Parfit op. cit. 46 Parfit does foresee this problem and takes a number of steps toward resolving it. However, it’s unclear whether the position he ultimately arrives at is still a version of the Collective Action approach. See, Parfit op. cit., p.71-86. 47 As in other cases, the badness of Black Tuesday could be morally relevant in other, indirect ways. I may, e.g., have moral reasons not to downplay its badness to my students or moral reasons not to sell stock in a market panic, based on lessons learned. But I don’t have those reasons in virtue of any control I exert over the badness of Black Tuesday itself. Those reasons are grounded in contemporary bad things, over which I do have some control.

168 act of adjusting my belt after dinner + all acts of Pacific Ocean plastic dumping}, taken together, control the size of the Great Pacific garbage patch.)

The natural diagnosis for this particular explosion is that the collectives we’re drawing are illegitimate, in some sense. But it requires a bit of subtlety to articulate why they are illegitimate. It’s not simply because we’ve included causally inert acts in our collective. In a No Difference Case, after all, most of the collected actions are thought to be causally inert. It’s also not because the collective we’ve chosen is too large. While we could remove my stock sale from C and still have a collection of actions sufficient for Black Tuesday, the same is true of that collection (call it ‘C-’.) We could remove a single individual’s Black Tuesday stock sales from C- and seemingly still have a stock market crash that is not relevantly different from the one that actually occurred. Nor will it help to appeal to the kinds of acts involved – at least not directly. We could try to claim that since my belt loosenings are of an act-type that would never contribute to plastic pollution, no matter how many more we imagine adding to the world, they don’t belong in a controlling collection with acts of the type plastic dumpings into the Pacific (which would contribute to plastic pollution were we to add many, many more to the world.)

But that would still catch us in an involvement explosion. Consider the set consisting of

{your act of conceiving a child + all acts of dumping plastic into the Pacific.} Under the present proposal, we’d have no reason to exclude your act from the controlling collective since, when we consider a world with many, many more child conceivings, we very much are imagining a world with worse plastic pollution. Indeed, since adding tons of children to the world would make things worse in all sorts of ways, this view would have it that all sorts of market bads might provide you with a moral reason not to conceive. (Some anti-natalist environmentalists might welcome this conclusion – and think the justification basically right – but I suspect most people would find it deeply implausible.) And the involvement explosion doesn’t stop at having children. A single plastic purchase – of any plastic-

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containing item, and even with the intention of recycling – leads to a similar conclusion. A world

with many, many more such purchases demands more plastic, and thus supplies more plastic, and

thus ultimately pushes more plastic into the ocean. Any act of exhaling stands in this same

relationship to climate change: a world with many, many more acts of exhaling is one where climate

change is worse. Thus, I have no way to exclude my sigh of frustration from the controlling collective

that includes all acts of burning fossil fuels. But surely climate change doesn’t provide me with a

moral reason to terminally hold my breath. And any view that says otherwise – that leaves climate

change on the table as a morally relevant for my breathing decisions – seems to have endorsed a

very strange notion of control.

A better way to resolve the issue is by appealing to what individual agents believe to be the

case. Since it is baked into our definition of a No Difference Case that the individual consumer believes

that such-and-such consumption decisions are causally responsible for some particular market bad,

we can simply appeal to the consumer’s presumptive co-belief that her consumption decision will

join her to the collection of consumer decisions that together control the market bad. This gives us,

Control Principle + Collective Participation (CPCP)

A has a moral reason to act in virtue of S only if either A believes that her act will have a

morally relevant effect on S or A believes that her act will be a member of a collection of acts that

together have a morally relevant effect on S.48

48 Were we simply to replace the Control Principle with a Collective Action Principle – one which states that A has moral reasons in virtue of S only if she believes that her act will make her a member of a collective that controls S – we would be left with a choice between two radical views. Since most of our actions seem to be non-collective in nature, we’d have to say either that we mostly don’t have moral reasons (which seems implausible) or that most of our actions actually are collective actions (which seems less implausible, but is still radically revisionary.)

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The CPCP weakens the Control Principle with a jointly necessary condition for moral

irrelevance: a state of affairs can’t be ruled out as morally irrelevant unless the consumer believes

herself helpless individually and collectively.49 On its face, the CPCP is a very promising solution. It

apparently does get us the desired result in No Difference Cases, allowing us to have moral reasons

to oppose market bads so long as we believe ourselves at least collectively in control. Since,

essentially by definition, we do believe ourselves to be collectively in control any time we believe

ourselves to be in a No Difference Case, the CPCP neatly resolves the Helplessness Problem. Not

only that, it also successfully avoids an involvement explosion. In this case, the consumer’s own

beliefs do the work for us: so long as she doesn’t believe that her purchasing decisions involve her in

causally-far-flung collectives, she won’t have to worry about becoming involved in whatever market

bads those collectives control. All told, then, the CPCP does excellently by both of the metrics that

have tripped up previous proposals.

But therein lies the problem. The reason the CPCP provides such a neat solution to the

Helplessness Problem is that it effectively revises the Control Principle to include an exception for

No Difference Cases. A No Difference Case is defined as a choice situation in which a consumer

believes, first, that there is some collection of consumer acts that are causally responsible for some

market bad and, second, that her own performance of acts like that, when considered on their own,

will not make a morally relevant difference to the market bad. And those are precisely the

circumstances covered by our new addition to the Control Principle. The CPCP says, in effect, the

49 Couldn’t a consumer simply refuse to believe that her act of consumption would join her to a controlling collective and precisely because she doesn’t expect to make a difference? Not with any consistency. If her act fails to count as a member of the collection due to its inefficacy, then every other ineffective act must also be exempt for the same reason. But then, her belief that those consumer decisions are responsible for that market bad is incoherent. No consumer decisions actually count as one of “those,” and thus, what she seems to believe is that the null set is going around messing up the world.

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Control Principle is true, except not in No Difference Cases. This makes the CPCP seem ad hoc and under-

motivated.

We could put the point this way. Our present endeavor is, essentially, to find the mistake in

the argument, to identify where we went wrong in reasoning our way to the Helplessness Problem.

By accepting the CPCP, we seem to be settling for the diagnosis, the main mistake that led to the

Helplessness Problem was our neglecting to formulate the Control Principle so as to block the Helplessness Problem.

Which is, as explanations go, both odd and unsatisfying. The trouble is that we seem not to have any

reason to accept the CPCP other than that it solves the Helplessness Problem. It’s true that the

Helplessness Problem will be dissolved only if we can find a solution, but we can’t very well defend

any particular solution merely by pointing at it and saying, “This would solve our problem!” – as if

that weren’t equally true of every other solution. We require some independent reasons for thinking

that that particular solution actually is the correct one. We seem justified in demanding some deeper

explanation for why the Helplessness Problem is mistaken.

As it happens, many of those who defend the Collective Action solution (and the CPCP) do

offer an independent reason for accepting it. They think that the original Control Principle is

defective not because it leads to the Helplessness Problem but because it embodies a confused

(though very common) understanding of how moral responsibility works.50 While we typically think

of moral responsibility as being fundamentally about individual moral agents, they argue that

responsibility is sometimes fundamentally collective. This gives them an independent motivation for

the CPCP: the extra clause is needed to correct this common misunderstanding of moral

responsibility. Call this the ‘Underived Collective Responsibility’ approach.

50 This is the view defended by Kutz, Cullity, and Schwartz and entertained by Hudson and Stephens. Cullity op. cit; Hudson op. cit.; Kutz op. cit.; Schwartz op. cit.; Stephens op. cit..

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Since this approach is pitched as a response to a particular received view about moral responsibility, let’s start there. The received view says that moral responsibility is always and fundamentally about individual moral agents; it is about holding them accountable for their actions and about assigning them praise and blame in proportion to their merits. To ascribe moral responsibility to someone is, after all, to say something about her actions, her agency, and her mental states – her beliefs, reasons, intentions, and will. (“You are responsible for Enrico’s broken nose; you set out to hurt him – even if not that badly – and you knew about his delicate bone structure.”) If all moral responsibility is grounded in individual actions and mental states, it follows that any ascriptions of group responsibility must also be so grounded. Although we may sometimes speak as though collectives themselves bear responsibility (“We couldn’t keep the museum open without our generous donors!”), such utterances shouldn’t be read as literally implying that there’s some extra or non-derivative responsibility that rests with the group itself – over-and-above the responsibility of its individual members. In that sense, attributing responsibility to a collective is like attributing purpleness to an outfit. If my outfit is looking rather purple today, that’s because the items of clothing that together constitute that outfit are looking purple – and not because there’s some extra purpleness borne by the outfit itself.

Proponents of the Underived Collective Responsibility solution reject this view. They defend the existence of a kind of moral responsibility that does attach to collectives directly and that is something over-and-above the moral responsibilities of the collective’s individual members. On their view, individuals are sometimes responsible because of their membership in a collective, and not the other way around. As one might expect, the primary challenge for such a view is to make sense of group mental content. In the individual case, moral responsibility seems unproblematically to stem from the beliefs, intentions, desires, and wills of particular agents. But that’s a hard sell for groups. Groups seem not to have minds in the way that you and I do – they don’t believe like you

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and I believe, intend like you and I intend, or have wills like you and I have wills. Rather than defend

the existence of bona fide group minds, most collective responsibility proponents look for group-

level analogues to individual mental content. They argue that collective responsibility requires only

the right sort of group agreement – some common beliefs, goals, and intentions that are possessed by

each of the group members and non-accidentally.

Perhaps the best-developed version of this view comes from Christopher Kutz (2000), who

argues that collective responsibility stems in particular from shared group intentions.51 To count as

having a group intention, he argues, groups need only (a) some end that group members think of

themselves as acting toward, (b) some method for forming, changing, and sticking-to group goals

(e.g. voting, obeying a leader, following an action plan), and (c) some sensitivity on the part of group

members to opportunities for participation, coordination, and cooperation in pursuit of group

aims.52 Any such group, Kutz argues, is sufficiently unified to count as having group intentions and,

on that basis, can be held non-derivatively morally responsible. To illustrate, he points to the Allied

military personnel who conducted the 1945 Dresden bombing campaign – a group of 8,000+

crewman and many thousands of military planners and auxiliaries who destroyed huge swathes of

the city’s residential areas in a multi-day incendiary bombing campaign and killed an estimated

35,000 civilians. This collective clearly does satisfy Kutz’s three jointly-sufficient conditions: as

members of an organized military, the individuals in the group must have thought of themselves as

acting toward some common goals; those goals were clearly determined and managed by the military

command hierarchy; and the group’s actions were obviously intricately coordinated and massively

collaborative. Thus, on Kutz’s view, this collective may be ascribed a group intention (to firebomb

Dresden) and, on that basis, may itself be held morally responsible for all the bads associated with the

51 Kutz op. cit. 52 Kutz op. cit., p.108.

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Dresden bombings.53 Crucially, this collective responsibility licenses us to hold the individual

members of the collective inclusively and non-causally responsible. Even though “no individual bomber

made a difference to the death and suffering that all produced,” each is nevertheless inclusively

responsible.54 For, Kutz concludes, “when we act together, we are each accountable for what we all

do.”55

If we agree with Kutz that collectives can bear non-derivative responsibility, then we

apparently do have an independent justification for the CPCP. The collective membership clause –

that which distinguishes the CPCP from the Control Principle – is needed to capture the possibility

that our purchases might make us inclusively responsible for market bads. In such cases, we can

have moral reasons to avoid inclusive responsibility, even if we our helpless to make a difference.

However, this reply only works if market collectives can aptly be ascribed group intentions.

Without that, we won’t be able to assign them non-derivative responsibility, nor will we be able to

hold individual members of those collectives inclusively responsible. And upon reflection, it doesn’t

seem that we can ascribe group intentions to market collectives. Suppose, for instance, that I buy an

ivory figurine and so join the collection of ivory consumers who, in the aggregate, exert control over

elephant and rhino poaching. That group doesn’t satisfy any of Kutz’s three conditions. There is

nothing toward which the ivory consumers are collectively striving; they are not individually sensitive to

opportunities for cooperation; they do not possess any decision procedure (formal or otherwise) for

instating, enforcing, or revising shared collective goals. Simply put, they don’t intend as a group to do

anything at all; all that unites them is the fact that each member has previously instantiated a

particular pattern of economic transaction (an ivory purchase.)

53 Kutz op. cit., p.141. 54 Kutz op. cit. 55 Kutz op. cit,. p.165.

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This is nothing special about the ivory market. Most market collectives are like this: a loose grouping of consumers who are individually doing their own thing, neither possessed of group goals nor sensitive to opportunities for group collaboration. Whatever we think about the plausibility of underived collective responsibility in cases like the Dresden firebombing campaign (where there really was some shared purpose and cohesion!) it doesn’t seem plausible in the marketplace. There doesn’t seem to be any common mental content for which the Underived Collective Responsibility proponent might hold these collectives morally responsible. There is nothing remotely analogous to an individual will. There doesn’t seem to be any relevant and non-accidentally-shared beliefs, desires, or intentions.

What consumer groups do have in common is that their members, taken together, are causally responsible for market bads. But trying to use this as our grounds for moral responsibility will force us to confront again (a more complicated version of) the original complaint about the

CPCP. We have a choice: does moral responsibility for market bads fundamentally reside with the individual members or with the collective itself? If it resides with the individual members, the CPCP looks ad hoc. We’ve simply added a clause to the Control Principle specifying that it’s suspended in

No Difference Cases. On the other hand, if it resides with the collective itself, we must think market collectives have whatever it is that collectives need to count as non-derivatively responsible (e.g. a group mind or some shared intentions, beliefs, goals.) Given the extreme disorganization of most market collectives, seemingly the only reason we’d have for insisting that these groups have minds or intentions – or whatever is that we need to insist on – is so that we can solve the Helplessness

Problem. But that makes the Underived Collective Responsibility approach look just as ad hoc as the CPCP. And, thus, this approach doesn’t help with the original problem. If it works at all, it does so only by reintroducing ad hoc-ness at another level.

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Kutz himself is not blind to this problem and has a different solution on hand.56 He suggests

that consumer collectives might count as sufficiently unified for collective responsibility on account

of the “concrete social context of interdependence, institutional cooperation, and shared norms”

that the individual consumers in a collective all hold in common.57 Speaking specifically to

consumer-driven climate bads like ozone depletion and global warming, he argues,

The agent of the harm is the set of drivers of… cars, or perhaps more generally the inhabitants of Western nations. These drivers and inhabitants depend upon one another for the maintenance of the infrastructure that allows their way of life. More generally, they abide by and reinforce in one another a sense of accountability that treats collective and distant harms as off the moral map, so to speak.58

The suggestion seems to be that all car drivers (or simply all Westerners) are acting from

within a car culture – some interlocking set of norms, practices, values, and relationships that explain,

enable, and perpetuate car use behaviors and that tell us we are excused for car use related market

bads. And it is in virtue of our membership in this culture that we consumers count as “participants

in a collective venture.”59 This is why the collective of car culture subscribers (or even Westerners) counts

as unified. This is why we may ascribe moral responsibility to the collective and why individual

members of that collective may be held inclusively responsible for any bad outcomes the collective

causes.

Unfortunately, this suggestion runs us into a very large involvement explosion. If I am

inclusively responsible for climate bads merely by dint of residing in a Western nation, then it

follows that climate considerations will be morally relevant to nearly all my doings. Any act that

abides by, reinforces, or perpetuates Western culture is one that I may have a moral reason not to do

in virtue of climate change. Even narrowing the problem down to car drivers gives us a staggering

56 He actually proposes two, but the other one is just the symbolic complicity approach. 57 Kutz op. cit., p.203. 58 Kutz op. cit., p.186. 59 Kutz op. cit., p.189.

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list of involvements. Climate bads could give me moral reasons not to read a news article about

Tesla Motors, moral reasons not to pay taxes that might fund roads, and moral reasons to jaywalk.60

And that’s just one consumer culture and one market bad. What about, say, alcohol culture – which

combines with car culture to give rise to drunk driving? Do drunk driving deaths also give me a moral

reason to jaywalk? Do they give me moral reasons not to tour a brewery, not to sit through an

alcohol advert, not to attend an event at which alcohol will be present? This is a grievous

involvement explosion.

In sum, the Underived Collective Responsibility solution seems like a dead-end. At best, it

resolves the original concern about the ad hoc-ness of the CPCP only to raise a new concern about

the ad hoc-ness of assigning moral responsibility to disorganized market collectives. At worst, it

generates an involvement explosion. And so we are back where we started. We still have in the

CPCP an apparently successful solution to the Helplessness Problem, but one that raises serious

doubts about ad hoc-ness and under-motivation.

Let me close this section – and our discussion of Control Principle solutions more generally

– by sketching a possible line of defense on behalf of the CPCP. It may be that the proponent of the

Collective Action approach can partially diffuse these concerns by arguing that the features that

generally make ad hoc principles bad are absent or minimized in the CFCF.

60 Anti-jaywalking laws are actually a relatively recent invention, dating from the early 20th century (see Stromberg, 2015.) Although turn of the century pedestrian norms had it that individuals could walk in and across public roads more-or-less at will, this was a threat to the burgeoning car culture. It forced drivers to go slowly on public roads and thereby made car-based transportation less attractive. Anti-jaywalking laws were championed by car manufacturers to pump demand for their products. Thus, abiding by anti-jaywalking laws is very much an act of supporting car culture. Stromberg, Joseph. 2015. “The Forgotten History of How Automakers Invented the Crime of ‘Jaywalking.’” Vox. 2015. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history.

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Consider a prototypical case of ad hoc rescue. Suppose you and I are doing a bit of ethics over dinner and I wind up defending the claim, All acts of killing are morally wrong. Thinking this implausible, you cast around for a good counterexample. The best you can come up with in the moment is the killing of Ursula by Prince Eric at the end of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. So you point out that my principle implies that Eric did something wrong in killing Ursula which, you remark, seems a bit odd given that he was trying to protect himself and those he cared for from a mortal threat. Disliking this implication, I revise my position. The true moral principle, I claim, is that all acts of killing are morally wrong, unless you’re Prince Eric at the end of The Little Mermaid.

This is clearly an ad hoc rescue. Seemingly, the only reason I have for accepting this new principle is that it helps me out of my present predicament. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be any justification for adopting this particular revision over any of the other principles that would accomplish my goals just as well (e.g. “Killing is always wrong unless you are a prince named ‘Eric’.”)

But what precisely is defective about my ad hoc principle? Plausibly, that depends on what I take myself to be doing in asserting it. One thing I might be doing is proposing a true general principle about the connection between morality and killing. In that case, the defect seems to be that my general principle isn’t actually generic. What makes a general principle general, after all, is that it describes relationships among broad categories of things (e.g. killings, wrong actions) and thereby implies things about countless specific cases without actually delving into species-level specifics. Thus, if my principle is meant as a general moral truth, the complaint about ad hoc-ness may amount to the complaint that it’s not actually general.

On the other hand, maybe I’m not asserting a general moral principle so much as I’m making an abductive argument. I’m saying, “this principle best explains all the data we have about killings and wrongness.” If so, the complaint about my ad hoc rescue would look a little different. A good abductive argument should identify, for a given set of observations, an explanation that is both

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simple and likely – at least as simple and likely as any alternative explanation. If, for instance, my

newspaper is wet when I go to pick it up in the morning, a good abductive inference would be that it

rained – and not that some aliens temporarily abducted it to mop up a spaceship water spill.

In the case of my Prince Eric principle, the abductive defect seems to be that my proposed

explanation is overwhelmingly unlikely. For my explanation to be correct, I require that the Prince

Eric case be the one and only counterexample to my original claim. And that is very unlikely.

Experience suggests that concrete counterexamples like this one are not sui generis anomalies. Rather,

they tend to be single instances of larger patterns of problem cases. Thus, if my principle is meant as

an abductive explanation, the complaint about ad hoc-ness may amount to the complaint that my

principle is implausible for being unlikely; it’s a narrow solution to what we expect is a broad

problem.

By these two metrics, at least, the ad hoc-ness of the CPCP appears relatively benign. As a

general principle, the CPCP doesn’t seem inappropriately specific. (It is no less general than the

Control Principle, of which it is a modification.) And as an abductive argument, the CPCP doesn’t

seem worryingly narrow and therefore unlikely. (The fact that the Control Principle fails in No

Difference Cases, we might think, just is the broader pattern of problem cases!) On these points, the

CPCP may not seem especially objectionable.

There is a larger lesson to be drawn here about ad hoc rescues. The lesson is that at some

point, as we shift from imagining general principles undergoing single revisions in response to

specific counterexamples to imagining general principles undergoing multiple revisions in response

to more general patterns of problem cases, the bad-and-unjustified ad hoc rescue starts to look more

like the good-and-justified method of reflective equilibrium.61 Accordingly, one might defend the

61 This is the name commonly given to a nearly ubiquitous philosophical methodology that we employ to systematize our judgments about particular cases into general principles. It works like this. We start with some

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CPCP from charges of ad hoc-ness by pointing out that it has its origins in the very same reflective

equilibrium process as the Control Principle – namely, the one we’ve been running to identify

general principles of moral relevance. The relationship between the Control Principle and the CPCP

might accordingly be compared to the relationship between the 2nd and 3rd drafts of a manuscript.

(Although neither is likely to be the final output, they are both iterative steps in the same process.)

And as products of the same process, it seems bizarre to reject the CPCP for being ad hoc while

remaining content with the Control Principle.62

That just leaves the concern about the CPCP’s being under-motivated – in the sense that our

primary reason for accepting it seems to be that it solves the Helplessness Problem. I’m less certain

what can be said to allay this concern, but here’s one tentative suggestion.

Back at the start of our investigation into reject the Control Principle strategies, we considered a

handful of cases where it seemed clear that individuals had moral reasons to act despite their

helplessness – to wit, Parfit’s overdetermined killing case, Sinnott-Armstrong’s car pushing case, and

Bates’ cockfighting case. Those cases seemed to tell in favor of rejecting the Control Principle:

apparently, our intuitions about moral relevance diverge from the Control Principle in certain

collective action cases. What those cases didn’t tell us is how we should revise the Control Principle,

nor did they tell us how we should decide between different adequate revisions – that is, insofar as

clear cases of the target phenomenon (e.g. cases of wrongful killing), and we propose a general principle to explain our clear judgments about those cases. We then identify some counterexamples to that principle – i.e. some cases where it seems to give the wrong results. We attempt to revise our principle to accommodate those counterexamples then look for more counterexamples to that principle – and so on. The process stops when we’ve done the best we can to balance our interest in accommodating our pre-theoretical judgments with our interest in having a plausible and theoretically-virtuous general principle. 62 We might note in favor of this proposal that Parfit (1984) and Vance (2017), both of whom defend the direct CPCP (without appealing to collective responsibility), arrive at this principle via some very explicit applications of reflective equilibrium. Parfit op. cit.; Vance op. cit.

181 there are multiple approaches that could successfully explain our intuitions about those cases, the cases themselves don’t offer much guidance in how to select among those approaches.

Here at the end of our investigation, though, we might simply note that we haven’t encountered any adequate revisions to the Control Principle other than the CPCP. The closest we’ve come is the Future Virtue Approach and that solution (a) didn’t actually demand any revisions of the

Control Principle and (b) appeared to run into a problem with intrapersonal No Difference Cases. If the CPCP is the only adequate solution left standing, the complaint at issue may have much less force. The fact that the CPCP successfully revises the Control Principle really does count in its favor if there are no other solutions in the offing.

Admittedly, this is an unstable place to rest the CPCP. That justification can only stand until another adequate solution comes along. But, I suppose, this is how things always are with reflective equilibrium. Each stopping point is only as stable as our assurance that we’ve canvassed all the options and inspected all the counterexamples.

So ends our investigation of Control Principle alternatives. What’s left to consider are the arguments for rejecting the Consumer Helplessness claim. In the next section and for the remainder of this chapter, we turn our attention to those.

Rejecting the Consumer Helplessness Claim

As we did in the earlier discussion of reject the Control Principle strategies, let’s start by considering what reasons we might have for wanting to reject the Consumer Helplessness claim.

Perhaps the most powerful reason comes from an analogy that may be drawn between moral helplessness and prudential helplessness. In parallel to the Control Principle – a principle of moral relevance – we can posit a principle of prudential relevance, the Prudential Control Principle

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(PCP). The PCP says that an agent has a prudential reason to act in virtue of some state of affairs, S,

only if she believes that the prudential value of S (i.e. the goodness of S for her) will be relevantly

different depending on which of her available actions she selects. This claim is plausible. I’ll refrain

from defending it in any detail, but suffice to say, the PCP should seem attractive for all the same

reasons that the Control Principle does. (e.g. surely I should attend to ways in which my options

differ in their effects on my interests rather than the ways in which they are the same.)

Like the Control Principle, the PCP seems to run into trouble in “collective action” cases.63

More particularly, it creates problems in Personal No Difference Cases – i.e. cases where I believe that

some pattern of personal decisions is causally responsible for some prudential outcome but also

believe that my present tense decision makes no difference to that outcome. Consider smoking.

Smoking causes lung cancer, and I seem to have prudential reasons to not smoke in virtue of the

prudential value of my being cancer-free. On the other hand, it’s not clear that any particular decision of

mine makes a difference to my risk of getting cancer. In the present moment, I can decide whether

to smoke this cigarette, but I can’t push through any other decisions, past or future.64 And while I

know that acts of smoking in the aggregate are causally responsible for lung cancer, that doesn’t entail

that every single smoking decision has a relevant effect on my health. Indeed, given how many

cigarettes the average smoker will smoke before getting lung cancer (if she does!), it is not

unreasonable to think that my present choice won’t make a difference. And so I seem to be in a

Personal No Difference Case. I am one member of a group of time slice selves – present, past, and

future – who are collectively powerful and individually helpless.

63 I use scare quotes because the collective is really just me, at many different points in time. 64 Barring the availability of a Ulysses pact, that is. The attractiveness of such a pact just is, it seems, that it allows a present-tense person, believing herself more competent or reliable than certain of her future selves, to reach into the future and force favorable decisions by eliminating her own future options or changing her own future incentives. A Ulysses pact allows a present-tense self to exert a greater degree of control over her own life than she normally could. And, more importantly, the fact that we often take ourselves to have strong prudential reasons to make these pacts is some evidence in favor of the PCP.

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A little reflection suggests such cases are rather common. Many important prudential goods are such that I can only control them by making lots of individual decisions across time. Whether I take the stairs, whether I eat some cake, whether I floss my teeth, whether I practice the tuba – all of these decisions in the aggregate are causally connected to important prudential goods. But it’s not always easy to tell whether individual behavior tokens make a difference. Does one flight of stairs make me noticeably more fit? Does one round of flossing make me noticeably more healthy? Does one hour of tuba practice make me noticeably more excellent? Plausibly not! We might call this the

‘Personal Helplessness’ claim: it says that we often find ourselves in Personal No Difference

Cases, justifiably believing that our present-tense decisions won’t make a prudential difference. This, together with the PCP, gives rise to a Personal Helplessness Problem: since we often lack control over important prudential goods (e.g. health, excellence) and since we can only have prudential reasons where we have control, we often lack prudential reasons to pursue important prudential goods.

I assume we all reject this conclusion. We do have prudential reasons to floss our teeth, to exercise our bodies, and to practice our tubas. I expect that most of us reject the Personal

Helplessness Problem more vigorously than we reject the original Helplessness Problem. So the big question: Is that because the Personal Control Principle is false or because the Personal Helplessness claim is false?

That is, should we reject the Personal Helplessness Problem on the grounds that prudential reasons don’t require control or on the grounds that we do actually have control?

The latter is more plausible, I think. We should reject the Personal Helplessness claim. First, we might note that the PCP is in certain crucial respects even more plausible than the Control

Principle. Most of the complaints we’ve raised about the Control Principle amount to the worry that it lets us off too easy. It allows us to shrug off collective bads (and goods) as not-our-problem. And there is therefore a lingering worry that our attraction to the Control Principle is inappropriately self-

184 interested. (Morality would ask less of me if the Control Principle were true!) This is not a worry for the PCP.

If the PCP is true, then I am simultaneously the one who stands to gain (short-term: no reason to floss!) and also the one who stands to lose (long-term: cavities.) And if the PCP is false, I simultaneously stand to lose (short-term: tedious daily flossing) and stand to gain (long-term: mouth health!) There is no reason to be suspicious that our attraction to the PCP is inappropriately self- interested.

Second, in cases of clear prudential helplessness, our intuitions seem to realign with the PCP.

Intuitively, for a person with complete dentures, the threat of gingivitis is no reason to floss; for a prisoner slated for execution next month, the threat of lung cancer is no reason to refuse a cigarette; for a student with a 125% in my class, the badness of failing is no reason to study for the final.

These judgments support the PCP. Apparently in cases of obvious helplessness, we agree that we lack prudential reasons. That suggests that the mistake in the Personal Helplessness Problem rests with the Personal Helplessness claim. We don’t actually believe ourselves helpless in Personal No

Difference Cases. The prisoner doesn’t have prudential reasons to refuse a cigarette, but we do. We, unlike him, aren’t helpless.

This has two important implications. First, the fact that we’re inclined to reject the Personal

Helplessness claim should favorably incline us toward rejecting the Consumer Helplessness claim. It seems we’re less ready to believe ourselves helpless than we might have originally thought. Second, given the parallels between these two Problems, we may expect to find parallel solutions. That is, we might expect that the best explanation for why one of the Helplessness claims is false can also explain why the other Helplessness claim is false. Perhaps we can use the Personal Helplessness

Problem to verify or corroborate solutions to the Helplessness Problem.

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The Expected Value Solution. While there were many strategies for rejecting the Control

Principle, there is really only one strategy for rejecting the Consumer Helplessness claim.

Proponents of this strategy argue that consumers should never (or should rarely) believe themselves

helpless. More specifically, the argument is that the inference from I am unlikely to make a difference to I

am helpless to make a difference is problematic. What matters on this view is the expected value of unlikely

outcomes, not the unlikelihood per se. Accordingly, let’s call this the ‘Expected Value Solution’ or

‘EVS’.65

Parfit supports this view with a pair of cases.66 In the first, we’re to imagine an action that

carries a one micromort – i.e. one-chance-in-a-million – risk of accidentally killing another person.

(To help anchor our intuitions: this is roughly the mortality risk of a day of skiing or a 15 mile bike

ride.) Despite these well-known risks, thousands of people perform this action every day and, very

occasionally, a person is accidentally killed as a result.

The question arises: How do we judge an agent who kills someone in this way?

Certainly, a very bad thing has happened because of her risky decision. That may justify our

holding her at least legally or financially accountable. But it’s not clear that we should hold her

morally accountable; it’s not clear that she’s guilty of any serious moral mistakes. It does seem morally

bad to expose other people to lethal risks, but it’s also very plausible that, at some point, the risks of

harming others with our actions become so small as to be effectively ignorable. More importantly,

there’s nothing particularly bad about this person in particular; the only thing that distinguishes her

from the hundreds of thousands of others who acted in exactly the same way is that she was

65 This solution is endorsed by Singer (1980), Parfit (1984), Norcross (1997; 2004; 2012), Arntzenius and McCarthy (1997), and Kagan (2011). Arntzenius, Frank, and David McCarthy. 1997. “Self Torture and Group Beneficence.” Erkenntnis 47 (1): 129–44; Kagan op. cit.; Norcross 1997 op. cit.; Norcross 2004 op. cit.; Norcross 2012 op. cit.; Parfit op. cit., p.74; Singer op. cit., p.35-6. 66 Parfit op. cit., p.75

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unlucky. She happened to be, through no fault of her own, the one person in a million whose

decision caused a death. So long as we judge that the other, luckier agents behaved permissibly – as I

suspect most of us do – we should also think that the unlucky agents behaved permissibly.

Now consider a second case. Imagine some other act that carries a one micromort risk of

killing a million people. As before, imagine this choice being made thousands of times a day, every

day, for years. In such a world, Parfit notes, “there would fairly soon be a catastrophe.”67 Someday

and unexpectedly, one unlucky soul would find herself the cause of a million deaths.

How do we judge this killer? There is, I think, a strong temptation to judge her harshly.

Surely any person who kills a million people and who acted with the full knowledge that she might,

bears some serious moral blame for that outcome. And yet, this person too is really just unlucky – no

more callous, cruel, or wicked than the hundreds of thousands of others who acted in exactly the

same way – and so surely everyone who acted as she did bears similar blame and had similarly strong

moral reasons to abstain from acting as they did.

The apparent lesson from these cases is that unlikelihood per se is not what matters.

Although these two acts carry an equally low chance of causing a terrible outcome, one seems far

worse than the other. Indeed, by dint of a similar argument, we can also convince ourselves that the

magnitude of a terrible outcome is also not what matters. Consider two more acts: one that carries a

one-in-a-thousand chance of killing a thousand people and another that carries a one-in-a-billion

chance of killing a thousand people. Surely the higher-risk act is morally worse, despite the

threatened outcomes being equally terrible.

The lesson, according to Parfit and the other proponents of the Expected Value Solution, is

that both the chance and magnitude of unlikely outcomes, considered together, are what matter. We

67 Parfit op. cit.

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should focus on the expected value of our actions, the risk-weighted magnitude of possible bad

outcomes. And, indeed, this does seem to be the critical moral difference between Parfit’s two cases.

Whereas an act of the first sort can be expected on average to kill one-millionth of a person (.000001

* 1 person), an act of the second sort can be expected to kill one person, on average (.000001 * 1

million people.) This is a satisfying explanation for our divergent judgements in the two cases: one

of these acts is a million times more dangerous than the other.

This is the insight that undergirds the Expected Value solution. Its proponents argue that we

should not dismiss bad outcomes merely because they are unlikely; we must also attend to how bad

their occurrence would be. Only when the expected value is negligible are we justified in believing

ourselves helpless.68

The import for threshold-style No Difference Cases is clear. Recall that in a threshold-style

No Difference Case, there is some market bad that gets worse in big, discrete steps (e.g. a new

factory is opened, another order is placed, another competitor is put out of business.) Though most

consumers make literally no difference to the market bad, occasionally, when a threshold is hit, a

single consumer will make a big difference all by herself. A threshold case therefore has the same

formal structure as Parfit’s two cases. Most people have the good fortune not to be the cause of a

bad thing, but a few people get unlucky and cause a very bad thing all by themselves. Since we can’t

68 One might protest, No so! All non-zero values are morally relevant. For while it’s true that some expected values are very, very small and that nearly every other moral consideration can outweigh them, that doesn’t make them irrelevant! But this reply misses the point of the Control Principle. It is not an account of which outcomes actually generate moral reasons for agents, irrespective of their appreciation of those reasons. It is an account of what moral reasons we should take ourselves to have. The Control Principle is supposed to be action-guiding, and the guidance we most desperately need from it is some strategy for sorting out which states of affairs may be ignored when making decisions. We simply cannot calculate the expected value of our action across every one of the indefinitely many potentially morally relevant states of affairs that could, with some non-zero probability, be affected by our decision. (And if per impossible we could do that, it would still not be a praiseworthy use of our time.) Thus, we need something like the Control Principle to tell us what we can safely ignore. Even on the EVS – i.e. even if we accept that the expected value of our actions is what matters – there must be some point at which we are justified in dismissing possible outcomes as too minor (i.e. too low in expected value) to be worth considering and calculating over.

188 tell in advance which group we’ll belong to, we should focus on the expected value of our act. If, e.g., Wicked Ys are produced in batches of 10,000, then we’d expect approximately 1 consumer in

10,000 to be the cause of a new batch. Thus, each consumer could expect that, on average, each Y purchase is the cause of one more Y’s being brought into existence. (And notice, that math works out the same regardless of how far apart we imagine the thresholds to be.) Since being the threshold- crosser means making a big difference, the expected value of any one purchase in a threshold case will tend to be non-negligible. The EVS proponent concludes: we should reject the Consumer

Helplessness claim in threshold cases. We should not believe ourselves helpless when we know that there’s a chance we’ll make a big difference.

But this is only a partial solution to the Helplessness Problem. Our original account of consumer helplessness included both threshold cases and imperceptible difference cases. In the latter cases, recall, consumers seem helpless not because their actions probably don’t make a difference but because each difference that’s made seems not to be a morally relevant difference. This will be the case when the consumer has a small amount of influence over some non-moral properties that ground a market bad (e.g. the number of pollutant molecules in a stream) but not enough influence to affect the actual, perceptible badness of the market bad (e.g. the toxicity of the water.) The consumer’s efforts may genuinely make a difference, but the difference is too small to be morally relevant.

Upon reflection, the EVS seems ill-equipped to explain away the appearance of consumer helplessness in imperceptible difference cases. If each person makes no morally relevant difference, it follows that the difference that I expect to make, on average, is also zero. So by the lights of the

Expected Value Solution, I may go ahead and believe myself helpless in an imperceptible difference case.

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To avoid this implication, proponents of the EVS have argued that there are no imperceptible difference cases. More precisely, they have argued that all the cases that appear to be imperceptible difference cases are actually just threshold cases in disguise.

To see how this argument works, consider a prototypical imperceptible difference case.

Imagine a public pond in a region where rock-skipping is a popular pastime but where all the best skipping rocks have a high arsenic content. Over the years, rock skipping has made the pond progressively more polluted, and the locals have experienced ever-worsening cases of arsenic poisoning. (Everyone is already sick, and they’re getting sicker!) Let’s label a series of pond states ranging from an initial pristine condition where zero arsenic molecules are detectable (S0) to a condition of severe pollution where the pond contains a very detectable and very dangerous number of arsenic molecules (SN). Let’s suppose that every rock skipped across this pond contributes to the overall pollution, increasing the number of arsenic molecules present in the water and shifting the pond from a lower-pollution state, Sx, to a slightly higher pollution state, Sx+1. Lastly, suppose that the difference between any two adjacent states is imperceptible – which is to say, the difference is not enough to make things worse in a morally relevant way for any particular individual. (Everyone is already sick, and no one rock makes anyone noticeably sicker.) The pond is too big and the rocks too small for a single stone to matter.

The proponent of the EVS argues that in describing this case – as in describing every other imperceptible difference case – we have asserted something subtly incoherent. The argument goes like this. Moving step-wise from S0, we reason: since the arsenic pollution is by definition absent and undetectable at S0 and since the arsenic pollution is never perceptibly worse between any two adjacent states, the arsenic pollution is also imperceptible as S1. Since it’s imperceptible at S1 and since no two adjacent states are perceptibly different, the pollution is also imperceptible at S2. Since it’s undetectable at S2 and since… etc. Following this line of reasoning to its terminus, we infer that the pollution in SN must be imperceptible because the

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pollution at SN-1 is imperceptible. But ex hypothesi SN is a state of very severe and very detectable

pollution. Hence, the case is incoherently described. It cannot both be true that S0 and SN are

perceptibly different in their pollution level and the case that all adjacent states are imperceptibly

different from one another. One of these assumptions must be rejected. And since the first

assumption is unimpeachable (ponds clearly can become noticeably more polluted over time!), we

must reject the second assumption. It’s not the case that all adjacent states are imperceptibly

different. Which is to say, there is at least one pair of adjacent states where the pollution difference is

perceptible. And that pair – or pairs, if there’s more than one – counts as a threshold. After some

series of changes that don’t make a morally relevant difference (S8… S9… S10... ), suddenly there’s a

small change that crosses some threshold and does make a morally relevant difference. Thus, there

are no imperceptible difference cases, only threshold cases. And, as has already been shown, the

Consumer Helplessness claim fails in threshold cases.

This is how the EVS dissolves the Helplessness Problem. On this view, the mistake in the

argument is the move from we are unlikely to make a difference to we are helpless to make a difference.69 Even

where we seem powerless, there will often be some chance, however slight, that we really will make a

difference, and we may not justifiably ignore that possibility unless the expected value of the difference

69 Strictly speaking, the Expected Value Solution may also necessitate a revision of the Control Principle. This is because the Control Principle is stated in terms of what individuals believe to be the case about the effects of their actions, and as this solution points out, things aren’t always so neat and binary. In Parfit’s two cases, for instance, the individual agents could be said to “believe” that their actions won’t kill anyone, but that description papers over another very important data point: that each person also believes there to be a one-in- a-million chance that their act will kill someone. The point generalizes. In many market cases, our “beliefs” about future outcomes seem really to be complex credence assignments across partitions of possible consequences (e.g. 1% chance that W happens; 37% chance that X happens; 17% chance that Y happens; 45% chance that Z happens.) And by accepting the Expected Value Solution, we may also be demanding a re- formulation of the Control Principle in terms of relationships among moral irrelevance, credence functions, and expected values. However, the resulting, post-revision principle would still be, in some fundamental sense, the Control Principle. It would still claim that moral relevance is essentially bound up with our abilities to influence the world. This is why I have classified the Expected Value Solution as primarily an attack on the Consumer Helplessness claim.

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we’d make is truly negligible. And since when it comes to the very worst market bads, the expected

value of our consumption decisions will tend to be rather large, in those cases at least our purchases

will carry a non-negligible expected value and will therefore ground our moral reasons.

As we observed in the previous section, there is in addition to the Helplessness Problem a

parallel concern about prudential reasons: the Personal Helplessness Problem. Given the deep

similarities between the two Problems, we might anticipate a deep similarity between their solutions.

And, indeed, we do find this in the EVS.

Consider the application to smoking. Given the huge number of cigarettes consumed by the

average lifetime smoker, it should seem very unlikely that any particular cigarette will be the cause of

my early demise. (Indeed, some back-of-the-envelope math puts the risk at about 2 micromorts per

cigarette.)70 But on the assumption that our prudential reasons work the same way that our moral

reasons do, the size of the risk is not all that matters; we also need to consider the magnitude of the

threatened catastrophe. In this case, what threatens is an early death – seven to eight years on

average – as well as some serious quality of life losses. This makes the expected value of smoking

seem non-negligible. Each cigarette carries a very small risk, but the thing risked is a very bad thing.

This seems like a satisfying explanation for why we have prudential reasons not to smoke each

cigarette.

70 This is based on some recent estimates (see Banks et. al. 2015) that put the risk of dying from cigarette- related illness for a lifetime smoker at ~67%, along with other estimates that put the median number of cigarettes consumed by a lifetime smoker at a little more than 300,000 (see Shaw, Mitchell, and Dorling 2000). Thus, we can very roughly estimate that for a lifetime smoker, smoking a single cigarette carries a 2 micromort risk. (A 670,000 micromort risk spread over 300,000 cigarettes.) Banks, Emily, Grace Joshy, Marianne F. Weber, Bette Liu, Robert Grenfell, Sam Egger, Ellie Paige, Alan D. Lopez, Freddy Sitas, and Valerie Beral. 2015. “Tobacco Smoking and All-Cause Mortality in a Large Australian Cohort Study: Findings from a Mature Epidemic with Current Low Smoking Prevalence.” BMC Medicine 13 (1): 38; Shaw, Mary, Richard Mitchell, and Danny Dorling. 2000. “Time for a Smoke? One Cigarette Reduces Your Life by 11 Minutes.” BMJ : British Medical Journal 320 (7226): 53.

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The EVS, in other words, is a satisfying solution to the Personal Helplessness Problem. (We

might even note: there is an implicit appeal to the EVS in the oft-cited statistic that a single cigarette

takes 11 minutes off your life.71) It tells us that what goes for moral helplessness also goes for prudential

helplessness: what matters is not the risk per se but the expected value of our decision. The fact that

the EVS offers a plausible solution to both Helplessness Problems is a strong point in its favor.

However, there is a more important reason to highlight this feature of the EVS. Keeping

the EVS in mind as a potential solution to both Helplessness Problems can help us in assessing

objections to the EVS. The aim of any cogent objection to the EVS must be to undermine the appeal

to expected value and to show that, for whatever reason, it’s not a mistake to think ourselves

helpless. When confronted with such an account, we should consider how plausible it is both as a

story about moral helplessness and as a story about prudential helplessness. It may be that an

argument which seems reasonable in one case will seem absurd in the other. And that, at least,

should raise our suspicions about the adequacy of the objection in question.

In what remains of this chapter, we consider two lines of objection to the EVS. The first

aims to show that the EVS fails for making unreliable and unjustified assumptions about the causal

structure of the market. The second aims to show that the EVS fails for ignoring the possibility of

vagueness.

The Objection from Ignorance. One way we might challenge the EVS would be by arguing that

the expected value calculations it depends upon are somehow defective or unjustified. This is the

strategy defended by Chartier (2006), Harris and Galvin (2012), and, to a lesser extent, Nefsky

71 Shaw op. cit.

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(2012.)72 The gist of the worry is that the EVS only appears to solve the Helplessness Problem

because of its proponents’ tendentiously chosen numbers and implausible assumptions about the

market. In Harris and Galvin’s version of the objection, the primary concern is about the EVS’

treatment of threshold intervals and individual likelihoods. There is no guarantee, they point out,

that markets will adhere to rigid thresholds.73 (e.g. We shall place another order each and every time 10,000

more units are sold.) And, in fact, we might expect to see rather wide variation in threshold intervals

since, first, business decisions need to be responsive to more than just consumer purchase volume

and, second, most markets involve multiple layers of threshold-style decision making. Harris and

Galvin also express doubts about the idea that our individual chance of making a difference is just

the inverse of the distance between thresholds – i.e. a 1-in-X chance when thresholds are X

purchases apart.74 75 In any particular case, that chance could be far higher or far lower, depending

on a range of other relevant circumstances. That means that if we want to “have any confidence that

our abstention… will have [a] causal impact, we need to know [the circumstantial particulars.]”76 We

need to know, for instance, what other consumers are going to do and where those consumers are

geographically located, how the business is going to react to our purchase, and what will happen to

the product we’re considering purchasing if we decide not to purchase it.77 Since we don’t have

access to any of these critical facts, Harris and Galvin conclude, the EVS must be rejected. We can’t

72 Chartier, Gary. 2006. “On the Threshold Argument against Consumer Meat Purchases.” Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (2): 233–49; Harris, John Richard, and Richard Galvin. 2012. “‘Pass the Cocoamone, Please’: Causal Impotence, Opportunistic Vegetarianism and Act-Utilitarianism.” Ethics, Policy and Environment 15 (3): 368–383; Nefsky op. cit., p.43. 73 Harris and Galvin op. cit., p.374. 74 Harris and Galvin op. cit., p. 375. 75 See also, Nefsky 2012 op. cit., p.43. 76 Harris and Galvin op. cit., p.374. 77 Harris and Galvin op. cit., p.374-6.

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ever really know that our purchase will make a difference. The EVS fails “because it vastly

oversimplifies the world in which we find ourselves.”78

Chartier’s argument against the EVS hits similar points. He notes that consumer purchases

are only one among many important causal influences on market bads – a list that also includes

“pricing strategies, subsidies,... labor costs, supply expenses, logistical expenses, legal constraints,

[and] producers’ tax strategies.”79 80 The fact that market bads are responsive to these other market

features means there’s less room for consumers to make a difference. Plus, the unknowable-ness of

these features seems to undermine the reasonableness of our expected values estimates. For any

particular consumption decision, Chartier argues, “it is completely unclear how to [make the

calculation], how to obtain the needed information, or what any of the underlying values might

be.”81 The functions relating our purchases to market bads are “completely unknowable.”82 He notes

that we could try to make some rough calculations anyway, relying on crude guesses and fudged

estimates, but the resulting numbers would start to look concerningly arbitrary.83 And if that’s the

best the EVS can offer us (“Hey, look! The Helplessness Problem goes away if we fill in this

equation with made-up numbers!”), it’s not much of a solution.

Although Harris and Galvin, Chartier, and Nefsky are all at pains to emphasize how deeply

ignorant we are about the causal complexities of the market, this fact alone does not seem to

threaten the EVS. After all, the EVS is being offered as an explanation for why we have moral

reasons even when we are ignorant about the causal facts and even when we are quite confident that our chance of

making a difference is small. Emphasizing our ignorance about the inner-workings of the market does

78 Harris and Galvin op. cit., p.368. 79 Chartier op. cit., p.242. 80 See also, Nefsky 2012 op. cit. 81 Chartier op. cit., p.243. 82 Chartier op. cit. 83 Chartier op. cit.

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not, by itself, give us reasons to doubt the existence of particular cause/effect relationships between

purchases and market bads, nor does it show that we are helpless to estimate the market’s macro-

level outcomes.84

Consider an American roulette wheel. We know some very general things about the macro-

level behavior of this system. We know, for instance, that there are 38 possible outcomes. We also

know that the mean outcome of a roulette bet, averaged over millions of games, is a small profit for

the house. But we are also deeply ignorant of the causal details of particular roulette spins. (What

role does the mass, shape, and material of the ball play? What are the coefficients of friction between

ball and wheel, between wheel and pivot? How widely does the starting angular momentum of the

ball and the wheel vary? Does ambient air temperature affect the outcome?) We could imagine

someone arguing in parallel to the EVS objection: The causal structures at work here too complex, too

unknowable to support expected value calculation. We don’t even know how to do that calculation – neither what

values we’d need nor how to acquire them nor what to do with them if we somehow got ahold of them. And it’s not as

though we can simply appeal to averages; they can’t tell us anything about the circumstantial particulars of this very spin. All we have are arbitrary guesses.

I take it, this is a silly and unpersuasive response. My near-total ignorance about the causal

mechanics of roulette wheels does not prevent me from making expected utility calculations, nor

does it make those calculations arbitrary and unjustified.

Of course, one might complain that roulette wheels are actually relatively well-behaved – far

more so than markets. Our expected value calculations about roulette spins seem to be grounded in

84 In addition to the objections I’m raising here, Norcross (2012) argues that Harris and Galvin simply beg- the-question against the EVS by equating very small chances with zero chances, and Almassi (2011) argues that Chartier’s objection can be surmounted with an appeal to consumers’ subjective credence functions. Almassi, Ben. 2011. “The Consequences of Individual Consumption: A Defence of Threshold Arguments for Vegetarianism and Consumer Ethics.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (4): 396–411; Norcross 2012 op. cit., p.386-7.

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well-established objective probabilities (viz. the ones calculated by past observations of roulette

outcome frequencies.) But this misses the point. While it’s true that roulette wheels have statistically

well-behaved output, it is not obviously the case that they have well-behaved causal structures. For all

we know, different roulette wheels might be achieving similar and consistent output by rather

different mechanisms. (e.g. Wheel A is more affected by ambient temperature than Wheel B; the

pins on Wheel C give rise to uncommonly inelastic collisions.)85 The point of the analogy is that

even from a position of deep ignorance about the inner-workings of a particular causal system, we

may still make reasonable predictions about the output of that system on the basis of whatever

reliable input/output patterns we believe the system to exhibit. This is as true of roulette wheels as it

is of cars, of computers, and of markets.86

The absurdity in this objection is perhaps even more apparent in a prudential No Difference

Case. Imagine someone arguing that we needn’t bother flossing our teeth tonight because gingivitis

and cavity formation are actually way more complicated than we’ve been led to believe; it’s true that

flossing-in-the-aggregate matters, but there’s just no telling about tonight’s efforts. The problem is, again,

that the objection is talking past the EVS. So long as it’s reasonable to believe that there is a reliable

causal connection between certain actions and certain outcomes, it is no objection to the EVS that

we don’t understand the details.

85 If those systems don’t seem sufficiently different, we might simply imagine a row of slot machines, each of which uses a different RNG algorithm to achieve very similar output. 86 To this last point, we might note that introductory economics courses largely consist in teaching students about precisely these sorts of broad-brush causal patterns. Students are taught to expect, for instance, that increases in interest rates will cause decreases in inflation rates. And this crude belief about the market seems sufficient for supporting reasonable expected value calculations! An intro economics student who observes the Fed raising interest rates and so adjusts her expectations concerning the future value of her cash holdings is not doing anything unjustified and arbitrary. She is deeply ignorant about the causal structure of the market and about the myriad factors that will collectively determine what happens to the inflation rate in coming years, but that’s no reason to think her unable to calculate responsibly.

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The Objection from Vagueness. As we’ve seen, the EVS’ success as a solution to the

Helplessness Problem is wholly dependent on the threshold model. The existence of discrete

thresholds is what that supports our (non-negligible) expected value calculations and, ultimately, our

moral reasons. The imperceptible difference model in contrast doesn’t seem to support expected

value calculations; that’s why the EVS proponent made it a point to argue that there are no such

cases. This is the part of the Expected Value Solution to which Nefsky primarily objects.87 More

particularly, she argues that the proponents of the EVS have mistakenly ignored the possibility of

vagueness, and, in so doing, have failed to show that all cases really are threshold cases. Nefsky’s

argument has two parts.

First, she argues that the threshold model itself may be infected with vagueness.88 The

model typically depicts all thresholds as working like binary switches – either ON or OFF, crossed or

not-crossed. But it’s conceivable at least that some thresholds don’t work like that. There could be

cases where the position of a particular threshold is genuinely vague (which is to say, metaphysically

indeterminate) such that there is some region over which small changes are neither clearly threshold-

crossing nor clearly not threshold-crossing. Within such a region, it would be genuinely indeterminate

whether each additional contribution counts as making a morally relevant difference. In illustration,

Nefsky suggests a case of over-fishing. Imagine a large town whose members each individually pull a

few fish out of a local lake, with the collective consequence of pushing the fish population past the

point where it can successfully self-replenish. At the extremes, if the pond is otherwise either full or

empty of fish, the removal of one fish clearly won’t be the cause of the self-replenishing threshold’s

being crossed. But in between, “it could be that there is no precise triggering point – no sharp

87 Nefsky 2011 op. cit; Nefsky 2012 op. cit. 88 Nefsky 2012 op. cit., p.49.

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boundary between the population having a healthy ability to replenish and not having it.”89 It may be

genuinely vague for some range of cases whether the removal of one more fish makes the difference

and crosses the threshold. Call any case like this a ‘vague difference case’. Nefky argues that the

proponents of the EVS has erred in ignoring the possibility of such cases. For all they’ve shown,

many of the cases that appear to be threshold cases may actually be vague difference cases in

disguise.

The second move in Nefsky’s argument is to point out that the argument against

imperceptible difference cases may also be susceptible to vagueness. Such cases paradigmatically

involve acts of perceptual comparison. (Is this freeway louder than it was before? Is the light pollution

in our neighborhood any less disruptive? Is your arsenic poisoning making you feel worse than last

week?) Since perceptual comparisons seem to admit of vagueness, some of the cases that we

originally assumed to involve imperceptible differences, may turn out to involve vague differences

instead.

Here’s a case. Imagine a man being hooked up to a device that causes pain sensations at

many different intensities.90 The device is controlled by a dial with 1,001 settings, each of which

marks a tiny increase in the amount of current flowing from the device and an imperceptible change

in the resulting pain experience for the user. The EVS proponent, of course, thinks this case is

incoherent. Kagan argues that “at least one state must feel different from the one that came before.

At some point the answer given to the question “are you in pain?” must differ from the answer

given immediately before—otherwise the victim would still be answering “no” at state 1,000.”91

89 Nefsky 2012 op. cit., p.49. 90 The case adapted from Parfit op. cit., p.80. 91 Kagan op. cit., p.132. (emphasis added)

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Nefsky disagrees. She identifies two cracks through which vagueness might seep into the

case. First, it might be vague to the device-wearer whether some particular state feels different than an

adjacent one. He might think, for instance, S0 is clearly non-painful and S10 is clearly slightly painful, but I

can’t seem to pin down the point where the pain starts. S5? S6? But those two states feel so similar to each other that

surely if one of them counts as slightly painful, the other does too.92 Unless there’s some reason for thinking the

boundary between no-pain and slight-pain must be clear and determinate, we can’t be sure whether the

man is in a traditional threshold case or a vague difference case.

And there seems to be another possible source of vagueness. If I’m the one hooked up to

the device, it might be vague to some observers whether my responses to the question “Are you in

93 pain?” count as genuinely different in content. Between S0 where I say “no pain” and S10 where I

say “slight pain” for the first time, there may be intermediate no pain reports whose contents are hard

to judge. What are you to make of my slight re-wordings in asserting that I’m not in pain? Of my

small variations in tone? Of my increasingly lengthy hesitations? It’s not obvious that the words

“slight pain” are required for the content of my report to be that I’m in a slight amount of pain. It

might be instead that there’s a region of cases over which it is genuinely vague whether my

responses count as different in content. And so, again, unless we can rule out this possibility, we

can’t be sure whether we’re in a traditional threshold case or a vague difference case.

Here’s the worry. If Nefsky is right that there can be genuine vagueness about whether a

threshold has been crossed, then the EVS proponent may succeed at demonstrating the incoherence

of imperceptible difference cases but still fail at demonstrating that all cases are threshold cases.

That’s bad for the EVS because it’s not obvious how to calculate – or even whether one can sensibly

calculate – the expected value of an action in a vague difference case. For each contribution in a

92 Nefsky 2012 op. cit., p.54 93 Nefsky 2012 op. cit., p.60

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vague difference case, it’s either clear that no difference is made or genuinely vague whether a

difference is made. How do we estimate the badness of vague differences? What is the expected

value of a one-in-X chance of making a difference of indeterminate morally relevance?94

Ideally, the EVS proponent would like to argue that either (i) vague difference cases are

impossible, or (2) vague difference cases do support expected value calculations. The first option

would seem to require a defense of epistemicism – the disputed metaphysical view that reality is

always determinate and sharp-edged and that all vagueness is ignorance. If epistemicism is true, then

the EVS proponent could offer the same reply to the objection from vagueness as she did to the objection

from ignorance. Ignorance per se is no barrier to the EVS. So long as we know there’s a causal

connection between these consumption decisions and that market bad and so long as we know the

world contains sharp-edged thresholds, we also know there’s a chance that our consumption

decision could be the threshold-crosser. While this is a possible reply to the objection from

vagueness, I myself am not sure what to make of epistemicism and am certainly not prepared to

defend it here.

The second option seems like an easier hill to climb. Since vague difference cases are a

problem for the EVS primarily because they resist expected value calculations, the EVS proponent

could presumably ward off the objection from vagueness by arguing that we can perform these

calculations (and that the results of those calculations support our having moral reasons to act in

vague difference cases.) I am not confident about the prospects for this sort of reply either.

Nevertheless, let me offer a sketch for how such a reply might productively proceed. Here, too, I

think the comparison between Consumer Helplessness and Personal Helplessness can be instructive.

94 This is not idle skepticism. Schiffer (2003), for instance, has argued that beliefs about vagueness positively cannot “under any idealization be identified with subjective probability” and that they resist applications of classical probability rules. Schiffer, Stephen R. 2003. The Things We Mean, Oxford University Press. See p.201.

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Consider a twist on the pain device case suggested by Quinn (1990.)95 As before, we imagine

a person hooked up to a device that delivers pain sensations of many different intensities. At the

zero setting, the device causes no pain. At the max setting of 1000, the device delivers excruciating

pain. Each non-zero setting produces a little more current than the last but is – let’s suppose for

now – only imperceptibly more painful. In this case, the man has control over the pain device’s dial

and may freely compare the different feelings of the different settings. This is useful because he

faces the following standing offer: once a week he may decide to permanently turn up the device by a single

setting in exchange for $10,000.

So long as we imagine the man to be in a genuine imperceptible difference case, he appears

to be headed for trouble. Since ex hypothesi he can’t feel the difference between S0 and S1, he is sure

to prefer S1-and-$10,000 to S0-and-$0. That’s a powerful reason to accept the first permanent

increase. And since he cannot feel the difference between S1 and S2, he is sure to prefer S2-and-

$20,000 to S1-and-$10,000. That’s a powerful reason to accept the second permanent increase. And

since all other pairs of adjacent states are also imperceptibly different, the natural end of this

progression finds the man cranking the dial to S1000, having willingly adopted a life of excruciating

pain in exchange for $10 million. But, let’s suppose, he knows in advance that he doesn’t want that.

He’s tested S1000, and he’s confident that S0-and-no-money is far preferable to S1000-and-$10-million.

96 Thus, he knows that it’s in his best interests to find some way to stop himself from getting to S1000.

95 Quinn, Warren S. 1990. “The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer.” Philosophical Studies 59 (1): 79–90. 96 This case is often cited as an illustration of what problems come along with having a set of intransitive preferences. In this case, as in others like it, the essential concern is that a person with intransitive preferences may find himself following a trail of small wins only to arrive at a giant loss. The self-torturer racks up an unbroken string of 1,000 tiny wins – each decision to crank the dial moving him to a state he likes better than the one before – but his destination is far, far worse than his starting point.

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That’s how the case goes if all differences are imperceptible. But suppose the man agrees

with the EVS proponent that there are no imperceptible difference cases. There are threshold cases

and, perhaps, vague differences cases. What should the man do under those circumstances?

Suppose first that the man is a staunch epistemicist. He firmly believes that all cases are

threshold cases and that all vagueness is ignorance. If so, the man’s optimal strategy will depend

primarily on whether he can discern where the thresholds are. If he can discern them, his strategy

should be to find the threshold between the pain-level that maximizes his pain/money preferences,

PL, and the next highest pain-level, PH, and crank to dial up to (but not across) that threshold.

Obversely, if he can’t discern exactly where the thresholds are, his best strategy seems to be

estimating a region of settings between PL and PH (i.e. a region over which it’s unclear to him

whether he’s at PL or PH and where, for that reason, he knows the threshold between the two must

reside) and then making decisions based on the likelihood of crossing the PL/PH threshold given that

he’s in that region.

As before, the details depend on whether the man can clearly discern some threshold

boundaries. (e.g. “At S15 I can tell that I’m in PL, but it’s clearly not clear at S16 whether I’m in PL or

PH. That continues through S21. Once I get to S22, it’s clear that I’m in PH.”) If he can discern the

clear boundaries of the region of vagueness, then he can calculate the expected disvalue of each

increase through that region as the badness of crossing the PL/PH threshold multiplied by the likelihood of

97 the next adjustment’s being the threshold-crosser. At each step, if the disvalue of crossing the PL/PH

boundary is greater than the value of an extra $10,000 – with appropriate adjustments for the

97 For a region of vagueness comprising X settings, the chance that any particular increase will cross the threshold is 1/X, weighted by the man’s confidence that the threshold resides in the center of the region and not at the periphery. The badness of crossing the PL/PH threshold would be calculated as the difference between the prudential disvalue of PH and the prudential disvalue of PL (i.e the losses suffered in a life of PH- level pain that wouldn’t be suffered in a life of PL-level pain.)

203 diminishing marginal utility of money and the man’s risk preferences – then he should not increase his pain another step; otherwise, he should. On the other hand, if the man can’t discern where the boundaries of the unclear region are, then what he should do depends on whether he can discern the boundaries of the boundaries of that unclear region. (e.g. “At S12 I can tell that I’m in PL and that

I’m not in a region of unclarity, but at S13 I’m no longer sure whether it’s unclear. That continues up through S16, where it’s definitely unclear whether I’m in PL or PH.”) If he can discern the boundaries of the boundaries, then he should, again, simply calculate some expected utilities for the regions on either side of the 2nd-order boundaries and then push toward whichever side seems best, given his preferences.

But suppose there’s no clarity at any level. The man knows he’s in a threshold case and knows therefore that there’s a sharp cut-off somewhere between PL and PH, but he can’t tell where. He cannot pin down any boundaries for the region of possible-thresholds, nor can he pin down boundaries for the region of possible-regions-of-possible-thresholds, nor the boundaries for any higher-order regions. The man can tell the difference between a paradigm PL setting and a paradigm

PH setting, but there are no sharp cut-offs between the two. There is no pair of adjacent settings where he recognizes the change as marking an important epistemic difference. (“Now it’s clearly the case that I’m experiencing…”)

Does this leave the man helpless to make expected value calculations?

Seemingly not. He is confident that there is a threshold and he knows very roughly where it resides. He knows that PH is worse for him than PL and, thus, he knows that he has a prudential reason to avoid crossing the PL/PH threshold. His best bet is to estimate a region of uncertainty that he can be assured – to some degree of confidence – contains the threshold. If the man is risk-averse and/or if he strongly disprefers PH to PL, he may want to conservatively estimate the region of uncertainty as starting earlier and ending sooner than he otherwise might. (That way, his estimate

204 includes a safety region where he’s actually pretty confident that there’s no threshold case.)

Obversely, if the man is risk-seeking and/or if he only weakly disprefers PH to PL, he might aggressively estimate the region of uncertainty as both starting and ending later than he otherwise might. Either way, he can then set as a stopping point some setting, SX, where the disvalue of crossing seems to him to outweigh the value of another $10,000.

Whatever setting he chooses, he is unlikely to feel confident that SX is the best or most reasonable place to stop. The neighboring settings (SX-1 and SX+1) will probably seem just as good and reasonable. But, then, that’s true at every setting. Since the man can’t discriminate any clear thresholds, there won’t be any settings that stand out from their immediate neighbors as better or worse options. What this strategy does get him is a way to avoid the clearly-worse options of remaining at S0 and getting stuck at S1000. With some rough value estimates and enough resolve to pick a setting and stick with it, the man can get to a state he clearly prefers to either extreme. Insofar as this strategy seems sensible, we apparently accept that the epistimicist is competent to make crude expected value estimates and that he’s justified in using those estimates in making his decision.

But suppose the man is not an epistemicist. Suppose he positively believes himself to be in a vague difference case. In that case, the man’s situation looks like this. He knows that PH is worse for him that PL. He firmly believes that the PL/PH threshold itself is genuinely indeterminate and spread out over a region of settings – such that, as he moves toward the middle of that region from the periphery, he becomes increasingly ambivalent about whether his pain is PL-like or PH-like. He also knows very roughly where the PL/PH threshold region is. (Namely, somewhere between a paradigm

PL setting and a paradigm PH setting.) But like the man in the deep-uncertainty threshold case, he cannot pin down any clear boundaries, cannot find any settings that perceptibly stand out from their immediate neighbors. What should the man do?

205

It seems to me that his best strategy is the same as the maximally ignorant epistemicist’s. The

man in the vague difference case should consider his risk preferences and the degree to which he

disprefers PH to PL. Then he should roughly estimate a region of uncertainty within which, he feels

confident, the vague PL/PH threshold is contained. Then he should resolve to stop at some

particular setting in the uncertain region where the disvalue of his increasing ambivalence (if he’s on

the PL-side of the vague region) or decreasing ambivalence (if he’s on the PH-side of the vague

region) seems to him to outweigh the value of another $10,000.98

Of course, there is one critical difference between the two cases. The epistemicist believes

that there is one particular transition that makes the difference between PL and PH; the non-

epistemicist believes that there are a handful of consecutive transitions that each indeterminately

make a difference between PL and PH. But it doesn’t seem to me that this difference prevents the

non-epistemicist from employing our strategy. Both men want to avoid crossing the threshold. Both

men are ignorant about where the threshold resides. Both men can do better for themselves by

finding a setting between S0 and S1000 where the disvalue of the pain they suffer is more than offset

by the value of the money they acquire. Seemingly, for both men, this is best achieved by making

some rough value estimates and then resolving to pick a setting and stick with it. The man in the

vague difference case, like the epistemicist, doesn’t seem to be blocked from making rough value

estimates, nor does he seem unreasonable for relying on them to guide his decision.

98 Suppose I prefer being hirsute to being bald. Starting from a position of clear hirsuteness, the removal of additional hairs from my scalp makes people increasingly more ambivalent about whether I count as hirsute or bald, and this is dispreferred. The less ambivalence, the better. (“I wish it was more obvious that I am not- bald.”) At some (vague) point, as even more hairs are removed, that relationship flips. The removal of more hairs decreases people’s ambivalence about my baldness, and this is dispreferred. (“I wish it was less clear that I am bald.”) I assume that the self-torturer would feel this way about his pain states in the vague boundary region between PL and PH. On one side, he wishes it were more clear to him that he’s in PL; on the other side he wishes it were less clear to him that he’s in PH.

206

If that’s right, then the EVS proponent has a promising route out of Nefsky’s objection from vagueness. Supposing that it is sensible to make and rely on expected value calculations in this prudential vague difference case and supposing we accept that what goes for prudential cases should also go for moral cases, the EVS proponent can argue that vague difference cases are no barrier to expected value calculations and, thus, no reason to think ourselves helpless. In Nefsky’s original overfishing case, for instance, it may be that the local townsfolk can make some rough expected value calculations about the badness of removing one more fish from the pond, even granting the genuine vagueness of the self-replenishing/not self-replenishing threshold. Perhaps the locals should roughly estimate some region of uncertainty within which, they feel confident, the vague boundary is contained. Then each individual should take herself to have moral reasons not to remove additional fish while the pond is in that region and in virtue of the moral badness of the resulting increasing ambivalence (if on the self-replenishing side) or decreasing ambivalence (if on the no-replenishment side) that results from the removals.

Whether this reply ultimately succeeds or fails, it is worth noting what the stakes are for the

EVS (and therefore for the Helplessness Problem.) If it turns out that vague difference cases are possible and that they do prevent expected value calculations, the EVS may be counted only a partial solution to the Helplessness Problem – weakened but not defeated. Nefsky has not shown that vague difference cases are pervasive nor even shown us exactly where we will find them. That seems to imply that in any given case, we will have to discount the likelihood that our purchase will be the difference-maker by the chance that we’re actually in a vague difference case. Applying that discount will reduce our expected value calculations across the board – and so diminish the extent to which the EVS has shown that we shouldn’t believe ourselves helpless in No Difference Cases – but it won’t drive them to zero. That leaves the EVS functional but injured. The expected value of our

207 purchases will surely sometimes give us moral reasons to act, but less often than we might originally have thought.

Conclusions

The Helplessness Problem arises from the combination of two plausible ideas: the Control

Principle, which tells us that moral reasons require control, and the Consumer Helplessness claim, which tells us that consumers often lack control over market goods/bads. Together, these two ideas seem to conflict with another very plausible idea, which I earlier called ‘the Default View’. The

Default View says that consumers do often have moral reasons to act in the marketplace and in virtue of particular market goods/bads. This is the View that most people seem to hold, and it is a view that we should very much want to preserve from the Helplessness Problem.

While there is broad agreement among philosophers that the Default View can be preserved, there is little consensus about why. At this point, having taken a census of our options, we may reach two conclusions. First, none of the options are free of problems, and, second, two of them stand out as the most promising and least problematic. One of these was the Collective Action approach, which advises us to revise the Control Principle and allow that we may sometimes have moral reasons to act in virtue of what we can control together. The Collective Action approach appeared vulnerable to complaints of ad hoc-ness and under-motivation. I argued, however, that such challenges may be surmountable.

The other promising approach was the Expected Value Solution, which advises us to reject the Consumer Helplessness claim and accept that we’re not often justified in believing ourselves helpless. What matters on this view is the expected values of our actions, and the expected values mostly do not support beliefs about our own helplessness. Although the Expected Value Solution

208 appears vulnerable to concerns about vagueness, again I argued that these challenges may be surmountable.

This is not the full-throated vindication of consumer reasons we might have hoped for at the outset of this chapter. But neither is it a sound defeat. We should feel optimistic about the prospects for the Default View. Moreover, we should feel optimistic about the prospects for the larger project of which the Default View is but a single part. The prize in the distance is some action-guiding account of consumer obligations – What must we buy and not-buy? When must we boycott?

We’re not there yet, of course, but a satisfying defense of the Default View is a significant step in the right direction.

209

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