Since the last decade of the twentieth century the number of international and transnational judges has burgeoned. There are now in excess of 100 international courts and tribunals, with thousands of international judges who sit on them. They come from all corners of the globe and bring with them the experience of many systems of justice.

There are many different ways to try to bring about an end to the harms involved in the production of consumer goods. In this article I will start at the bottom, with the individual whose ordinary choices about how to travel, what to eat, what to wear, where to shop, and which policies to support all cause her to confront the possibility of involvement in these harms to the environment, nonhuman animals, and persons.

Having dismissed the claim that an individual has a straightforward duty of justice not to consume unethically produced goods, in the second section I map out a few different approaches, all of which I take to be promising avenues for generating duties in individuals to consume ethically. I argue that the last approach is the most promising and spend the third section of this article developing it. Specifically, I argue that as a first step in collectivizing to act against unjust global labor practices, an individual ought to signal to others her commitments to ethical consumption. In section four I ask whether some signals are too cheap to function as a step toward collectivization, and defend the deliberate consumption of only ethically produced goods as a moderately costly and therefore reliable signal. In the last section I consider a challenge to the proposal in terms of whether it imposes unacceptable costs on consumers.

Throughout almost the entire history of democracy—from pre-Socratic Greece up to the second half of the twentieth century—its champions faced little difficulty in identifying its enemies. Critics of democracy consistently lined up to attack it on ideological and philosophical grounds. The litany of complaints was familiar: Democracy is an ignorant, unreliable, unstable form of rule; putting power in the hands of the people entrusts decision-making to those who are incapable of making the right decisions, either because of their natural incapacity or because social arrangements have denuded them of their ability to know what they are doing; democratic politicians pander to the masses, and the masses reward them for it; democracies choose short-term gratification over long-term solutions and eventually pay the price. These charges were invariably accompanied by the promise of something better, the assumption being that almost any alternative regime would be an improvement on the inadequacies of democracy.