Ethical Consumption

As people purchase and use products and resources, they may deliberate about what is good versus bad, and what is right versus wrong. They use their consumption practices as an arena for moral deliberation, a place to demonstrate and test out their values. Ethical consumption usually refers to one’s moral commitments regarding the means and the ends of consumption. This perhaps distinguishes ethical consumption from “the ethics of consumption”—the investigation of responses to consumption decisions and the moral valence of those responses.

Ethical consumption is approached both as an individual and as a broader social ethics issue. On the one hand, there is an individualistic manner of analysis: what each consumer decides to consume and how to formulate his or her consumption preferences in order to ...