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BOYCOTTS AND THE SOCIAL ENFORCEMENT OF JUSTICE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2017

Linda Radzik
Linda Radzik*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Texas A&M University
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Abstract:

This essay examines the ethics of boycotting as a social response to injustice or wrongdoing. The boycotts in question are collective actions in which private citizens withdraw from or avoid consumer or cultural interaction with parties perceived to be responsible for some transgression. Whether a particular boycott is justified depends, not only on the reasonableness of the underlying moral critique, but also on what the boycotters are doing in boycotting. The essay considers four possible interpretations of the kind of act in which boycotting consists: the avoidance of complicity, protest speech, social punishment, or social coercion. Each interpretation provides a plausible account of at least some cases of boycotting, yet each raises distinct challenges to justifying boycotting activities.

Keywords

Boycottsocial avoidanceprotestsocial punishmentsocial coercionaccountabilityholding responsibleethics
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Summer 2017 , pp. 102 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2017 

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Footnotes

*

This research was generously supported by the Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation, the Liberty Fund, Texas A&M’s Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Thanks are also due to Colleen M. Murphy, Clare Palmer, Robert R. Shandley, the other contributors to this volume, and, especially, David Schmidtz and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for their helpful comments.

References

1 The word “boycott” derives from “the name of Captain Charles C. Boycott (1832–97), a land agent in Ireland, who was a prominent early recipient of such treatment” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “boycott”).

2 Petrow, Steven, “If My Husband is Pro-LGBT But Indulges His Chick-fil-A Cravings, Is He Waffling?” The Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/can-my-husband-eat-his-chick-fil-a-and-keep-his-pro-lgbt-principles/2015/01/30/6a90be40-a8cc-11e4-a06b-9df2002b86a0_story.htmlGoogle Scholar.

3 Stoll, Mary Lyn, “Boycott Basics: Moral Guidelines for Corporate Decision Making,” Journal of Business Ethics 84, no. 1 (2009): 3–10, at 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Regan, Helen, “Cecil the Lion, Walter Palmer and the Psychology of Online Shaming,” Time, July 30, 2015, http://time.com/3978216/online-shaming-social-media-walter-palmer-cecil-lion/Google Scholar.

5 Rappeport, Alan, “Macy’s Drops Donald Trump’s Fashion Line Over Immigrant Remarks,” New York Times, July 1, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/07/01/macys-drops-donald-trumps-fashion-line-over-immigrant-remarks/Google Scholar.

6 A corporation has obligations to its stockholders and employees that would require consideration. Legal questions are also more complicated where the one refusing to interact is a business, as in the case of a florist who was fined for refusing service to a same-sex couple planning a wedding. The judge found that the florist had violated consumer protection laws (Lee, Kurtis, “Fundraiser for Washington Florist who Rejects Gay Marriage Raises $90,000,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-washington-florist-go-fund-20150405-story.htmlGoogle Scholar).

7 Koshy, Susan, “When You’re the Target of a Boycott You Support,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 23, 2015, p. 7Google Scholar.

8 Friedman, Monroe, “Ethical Dilemmas Associated with Consumer Boycotts,” Journal of Social Philosophy 32, no. 2 (2001): 232–40, at 239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Ibid., 236–37.

10 Reingold, Ruth N. and Lansing, Paul, “An Ethical Analysis of Japan’s Response to the Arab Boycott of Israel,” Business Ethics Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1994): 335–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 National Labor Relations Board v. Retail Store Employees Union, 447 U.S. 607 (1980).

12 Friedman, Monroe, Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change through the Marketplace and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. i-xii.Google Scholar

13 Examples of targeted figures include celebrity chef Paula Deen, the cast members on televisions’ “Duck Dynasty,” and Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

14 Koshy, “When You’re the Target of a Boycott You Support.”

15 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVIII, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), IV.6. (Citations to Mill are given by chapter and paragraph number.)

16 Ibid., IV.5.

17 Mill laments the fact that it is often considered rude directly to tell a person that you find his behavior morally lacking. Such frank talk could be useful (ibid., IV.5).

18 Bellafonte, Ginia, “Chick-fil-A and the Politics of Eating,” New York Times, Oct. 9, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/nyregion/chick-fil-a-and-the-politics-of-eating.htmlGoogle Scholar

19 Petrow, “If My Husband is Pro-LGBT But Indulges His Chick-fil-A Cravings, Is He Waffling?”

20 Martha Nussbaum, “Against Academic Boycott,” Dissent, Summer Edition (2007): 30–36.

21 Opponents of the academic boycott of Israel often claim that the boycotters’ true motivation is anti-Semitism (Berman, Paul, “A Sane Face on an Old Insanity: Parsing the Anti-Israel Boycott,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 31, 2014Google Scholar). For a defense of the boycott, see Mohammed Abed, “In Defense of Academic Boycotts: A Reply to Martha Nussbaum,” Dissent, Fall Edition (2007): 83–87.

22 Wallace, R. Jay, “Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 38, no. 4 (2010): 307–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 For the legal debate about boycotting, see Harper, Michael C., “The Consumer’s Emerging Right to Boycott: NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware and Its Implications for American Labor Law,” Yale Law Journal 93, no. 3 (1984): 409–454;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Elian Dashev, “Economic Boycotts as Harassment: The Threat to First Amendment Protected Speech in the Aftermath of Doe V. Reed,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 45, no. 1 (2011): 207–254; and Theresa J. Lee, “Democratizing The Economic Sphere: A Case for the Political Boycott,” West Virginia Law Review 115 (2012): 531–76.

24 Examples of such views in moral philosophy in particular include Feinberg, Joel, “The Expressive Function of Punishment,” in Doing and Deserving (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1970)Google Scholar; Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (New York: Cambridge, 1988); and Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

25 Duff, R. A., Trials and Punishments (New York: Cambridge, 1991), 47Google Scholar; and Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, p. 40–41, 256.

26 Shaw, William H., “Boycotting South Africa,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 3 (1986): 59–72, at 66–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Davis, Michael, “Academic Boycotts,” Perspectives on the Professions 15, no. 1 (1995): 1–2.Google Scholar

28 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), V.13.

29 Alan Ryan, “John Stuart Mill’s Art of Living,” in J.S. Mill on Liberty in Focus, ed. John Gray and G. W. Smith (New York: Routledge, 1991), 162–68, at 166.

30 Duff, Trials and Punishments, 39–71. One reason for viewing buycotts as morally distinct from boycotts is the absence of public moral condemnation in the former.

31 Ronson, Jon, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015)Google Scholar, chap. 4.

32 Albrecht, Carmen-Maria, Campbell, Colin, Heinrich, Daniel, and Lammel, Manuela, “Exploring Why Consumers Engage in Boycotts: Toward a Unified Model,” Journal of Public Affairs 13, no. 2, (2013): 180–89, at 183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Boonin, David, The Problem of Punishment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others, Vol. I, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (New York: Oxford, 1987), chap. 1.

35 Shoemaker, David, “Blame and Punishment,” in Blame: Its Nature and Norms, ed. Coates, D. J. and Tognazzini, N. A. (New York: Oxford, 2013), 100–118Google Scholar, at 115.

36 Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 14. Mill writes, “We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it; if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow-creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. . . . It is a part of the notion of Duty in every one of its forms, that a person may rightfully be compelled to fulfil it” (Mill, Utilitarianism, V.14).

37 Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 35.

38 Mill, Utilitarianism, V.13. While On Liberty demonstrates Mill’s concern about the overuse of social sanctioning, and its extension into purely self-regarding matters, he does acknowledge that social punishments can be appropriate responses to injustice.

39 Mills, Claudia, “Should We Boycott Boycotts?” Journal of Social Philosophy 27, no. 3 (1996): 136–48, at 139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Nussbaum, “Against Academic Boycott,” 31.

41 Boonin, The Problem of Punishment, 17–21.

42 Anderson, Scott, “Coercion,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Zalta, E. N. (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2011), 10Google Scholar; and Nozick, Robert, “Coercion,” in Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel, ed. Morgenbesser, S., Suppes, P., and White, M. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 441–45Google Scholar.

43 Duff, Trials and Punishments, 45–46.

44 Ibid., p. 46.

45 Mills, “Should We Boycott Boycotts?” 140.

46 An anonymous reviewer for this journal raised this point.

47 The recent success in reducing the prevalence of the Confederate flag demonstrates the significance of timing. Debates about the flag have taken place for many years, but within days of the 2015 massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, several major retailers, including WalMart and Amazon, agreed to stop selling products displaying the flag. Within weeks, the flag was removed from the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse.