Everything Flows: A Pragmatist Perspective of Trade-Offs and Value in Ethical Consumption

Abstract

The debate around ethical consumption is often characterised by discussion of its numerous failures arising from complexity in perceived trade-offs. In response, this paper advances a pragmatist understanding of the role and nature of trade-offs in ethical consumption. In doing so, it draws on the central roles of values and value in consumption and pragmatist philosophical thought, and proposes a critique of the ethical consumer as rational maximiser and the cognitive and utilitarian discourse of individual trade-offs to understand how sustainable consumption practices are established and maintained. An in-depth qualitative study is conducted employing phenomenological interviews and hermeneutic analysis to explore the consumption stories of a group of ethically minded consumers. The research uncovers the location of value within a fluid, yet habitual, plurality of patterns, preferences, morals, identities and relationships. Its contribution is to propose that consumer perception of value in moral judgements is represented by an overall form of aggregate personal advantage, which lacks conscious reflection and delivers a phenomenological form of value rooted in habits, reflecting a pragmatist representation of value unified as a 'consummatory experience'.

Sustainable clothing: perspectives from US and Chinese young Millennials

“…Empirical research has shown that values are related to a variety of attitudinal and behavioural outcomes (Grankvist et al, 2007;Thøgersen and Ölander, 2002). Several studies have linked sustainable or ethical behaviour to personal values (Chan, 2001;Dickson, 2000;Grankvist et al, 2007;Hiller and Woodall, 2019;Lundblad and Davies, 2016;Sharma and Jha, 2017). Ma and Lee (2012) provided support that consumers' personal values have positive effects on their formation of beliefs, attitudes and purchase intentions pertaining to fair trade non-food products.…”

Consumer ethics: A review and research agenda

“…Specifically, Magaudda's circuit of practice framework (2011) was applied to comprehend consumer ethics in fine jewellery purchasing (Moraes et al, 2017). Moreover, examinations of daily habits can help to figure out drivers of ethical behaviour (Hiller & Woodall, 2019).…”

Coarse ethics: how to ethically assess explainable artificial intelligence

“…The third solution is pragmatism, which argues that trade-offs can be dealt with only retrospectively; alternatively, trade-offs should not be interpreted as including rational, cognitive or utilitarian valuations, but they should be regarded as justification after the fact [23]. In this case, trying to set a lower bound on trade-offs in advance would be pointless.…”

“…In other words, accuracy could be relinquished in the quest for easier human understanding. This trade-off problem is an issue of ethics too [10,23]. Therefore, the conditions and degrees to which the accuracy of a prediction may be sacrificed in favour of human interpretability must be established.…”