Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption

TLDR

Geography debates moral responsibility highlight the challenges of distant caring and assume a human‑agency based moral selfhood, while ethical consumption is framed as governing both consumption and the consuming self. The study argues that current research on consumption overlooks the complex practices, motivations, and mechanisms that shape moral selves in consumption. The authors conceptualise ethical consumption as the re‑articulation of everyday moral dispositions by policies and campaigns that mobilise ordinary people, illustrated through a detailed case study of Traidcraft that shows how such practices combine ethical and political considerations. The case study demonstrates that ethical consumption opens new ethical and political combinations, underscoring its growing importance as a political terrain while highlighting grounds for normative critique.

Abstract

Geography's debates about how to maintain a sense of morally responsible action often emphasise the problematic nature of caring at a distance, and take for granted particular kinds of moral selfhood in which responsibility is bound into notions of human agency that emphasise knowledge and recognition. Taking commodity consumption as a field in which the ethics, morality, and politics of responsibility has been problematised, we argue that existing research on consumption fails to register the full complexity of the practices, motivations and mechanisms through which the working‐up of moral selves is undertaken in relation to consumption practices. Rather than assuming that ethical decision‐making works through the rational calculation of obligations, we conceptualise the emergence of ethical consumption as ways in which everyday practical moral dispositions are re‐articulated by policies, campaigns and practices that enlist ordinary people into broader projects of social change. Ethical consumption, then, involves both a governing of consumption and a governing of the consuming self. Using the example of Traidcraft , we present a detailed examination of one particular context in which self‐consciously ethical consumption is mediated, suggesting that ethical consumption can be understood as opening up ethical and political considerations in new combinations. We therefore argue for the importance of the growth of ethical consumption as a new terrain of political action, while also emphasising the grounds upon which ethical consumption can be opened up to normative critique.