I am planning to post a series of observations on environmental ethics. I hope you respond with comments. Click on my name and a Google version of my blog comes up. Here you can make comments.

Living Ethically in a Consumerist Society

The Problem of Abundance

In looking at the features that characterize the United States in the early part of the twenty-first century, nothing stands out more than the abundance of material goods that we consume. While many are still poor in spite of the wealth of our society, and many working people are falling behind, consumption of material goods is the most significant feature of our society. Whether we judge this as a compliment to our economic success or an indictment of our spiritual and cultural shallowness, the fact remains that we consume prodigiously and most of us enjoy the abundance and would not have it otherwise. Given the reality that we are consumers in a consumerist society, how do we approach this reality ethically? As in all ethical issues, we need to distinguish the merely desired from the desirable and to find ways to promote personal integrity and social integration. Let’s look first at our ethical duty as consumers and how our consumption affects ourselves and others.

The Ethical Duty of Consumers

The ethical duty of consumers rests on the fact that when we make a purchase we vote for that product. Our dollars constitute votes and the things on which most of us spend our dollars are the things that producers will manufacture and sell. In a market economy, business decision-makers, large and small, try to anticipate what we will buy and how much we are willing to pay. If they judge correctly, we buy the products that they produce and their business thrives. While our motive for buying a product consists primarily of our wanting it, our purchases also affect our natural and cultural environment by rewarding the decision to produce and sell the product and thereby motivating the company as well as its competitors to produce more. So if we collectively buy, for example, a lot of SUVs, garden supplies, tennis rackets, and diet colas, a lot of these items will be on the market; if we quit buying them they would disappear. The purchasers of each of these products presumably judge them as economic goods. The study of ethics calls for us to ask in what sense purchased items are good. While it seems that a single purchase does not make an appreciable difference, we have an ethical duty to treat our purchases as important. We can draw a parallel with political voting. Very rarely does an election come down to one vote, and so it would seem that if you stay home on Election Day nothing changes. A character in B. F Skinner’s novel, Walden II, observed that in a national election, there is a greater chance that you will be in an automobile accident on your way to the polling place than there is that your vote will make a difference. But if we take the election process seriously, we go to vote, trusting that enough other people who share our values will do the same, and collectively we make a difference. It might seem that an election is a “zero sum game,” one candidate wins and the other loses. For each candidate it is “all or nothing.” But as we see in the 2016 elections, presidential and congressional, those who voted for Trump and Republican members of Congress presumably would have preferred a landslide so that their candidates would have a mandate to enact the legislation or programs that they voted for. Those who voted for Clinton may find comfort in the fact that it was a close election and their candidate actually received more popular votes. This will hopefully motivate the Republicans to respect the opposing positions. So, in a sense, every vote does count. Likewise, in voting with our purchases, we, and those who think like us, make a difference.

In the market place even more so than in the polling place, every “vote” counts; every purchase rewards the seller. Therefore, we need to ask whether what we desire is really desirable. In an economic sense, spending is good, since every dollar that we spend becomes someone else’s income. But like most good things, more is not necessarily better. Failure to save a portion of our income leads to serious problems both for the individual and the society. We generally promote good by spending in moderation. However, our specific spending has a good or bad impact on ourselves and on the producer. For example if we buy locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables, we obtain nutritious food and support local growers. By contrast, if we buy pornographic material, we need to question the impact on ourselves and ask what kind of industry we are supporting.  Even in industries that produce good products, a full ethical analysis must take account of the conditions of the labor that produces them, whether the labor consists of immigrant farm workers or “sweat shops” in developing countries.         

            In making any purchase, we should first ask how the product or service will affect us as human beings who are mortal, social, rational, free, creative, and have the potential to be something more.  A good purchase enhances our growth in at least one of these dimensions and does not detract significantly from any of them. We can easily make a list of purchases that do this, from food to athletic equipment, from books to musical instruments and hobby supplies. The question may come up as to whether we can really call this an issue. Why would people buy products that they did not think will enhance their lives? Several reasons stand out, especially addiction. People succumb to obvious culprits such as drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. Other items for purchase, which may or may not be addictions in a clinical sense, entail irrational consumption and futile attempts to meet some acquired need. For example while food is one of our most important goods, more and more people are succumbing to overeating, making obesity a national health crisis.  Others have a need to shop and buy things whether they need them or not. And people who buy things as a means of social competition need to ask themselves if the purchase really enhances their life. Consumption as a kind of competition seems to be fiercest among adolescents, but some people never outgrow it. In the years leading up to the recession of 2007, many people bought homes by taking out loans that they could not repay. This over-reaching led to extreme hardship both for the individual borrower and for the whole economy.

            In addition to asking about the impact of our purchase on us, we need to ask about its impact on those around us when we use the product, and we need to be aware of the conditions necessary for the availability of the product. For instance, while we cannot eat meat without killing animals, how much unnecessary animal suffering are we willing to permit? Is our desire for cheap oil worth our entanglements in the Middle East? Would we pay more for electricity in order to reduce greenhouse gasses or to improve the safety of miners and coal haulers?