Abstract
Some people feel that they should boycott Israel or their local anti-LGBTQ bakery, despite it being difficult to establish these obligations based on standard consequentialist or deontic considerations. I develop a framework on which such self-reports are accurate: I propose that we see some boycotting as akin to a public mourning practice, such as the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. Mourning practices are complex and socially recognized ways of honoring the dead, as well as expressing and directing the range of emotions we have in the face of loss. Likewise, I suggest that some boycotts are a way of standing in solidarity with victims, as well as expressing and giving direction to our reactive attitudes in the face of injustice. And just as your obligations to mourn are grounded in community membership and your relationships with others, I say the same about your obligations to participate in those boycotts.
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Notes
Solomon, Stephen. 1981. ‘The Controversy over Infant Formula’. The New York Times, December 6, 1981. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/06/magazine/the-controversy-over-infant-formula.html.
In part, this is simply an expression of methodological conservatism. When we set out to explain an apparent obligation, we have reason to look for explanations that aren’t revisionary. To see this, consider two explanations of being obligated to x—one that does, and one that doesn’t, imply that we’re wrong about being obligated to y. The one that doesn’t imply that we’re wrong about y has a significant advantage: namely, that it doesn’t conflict with a belief that we previously took to be justified (that we should y), and so fares better relative to our total evidence. We could, of course, offer a theory that would explain why we wrongly believed that we ought to y, but it’s tricky to offer an error theory that doesn’t generalize, applying equally well either (a) to our belief that we ought to x or (b) to those beliefs that motivate the revisionary explanation. Given this difficulty, we should accept a strong presumption in favor of accommodating our existing moral judgments, revising only when pressed. This isn’t an argument for stubbornness. When the evidence piles up in favor of the error-positing explanation, we should judge it to be superior. Rather, this is an argument for the due caution we already take when confronted with an argument for a revisionary conclusion. Admittedly, this doesn’t show that our practices are justified, but it does help us stave off skepticism about our practices while we look for an account that might make sense of them.
The literature on boycotting is surprisingly small. Discussions of particular boycotts tend to assume a consequentialist framework—see, e.g., Garrett (1986), Friedman (2001), Frey (2004), Dain and Calder (2007), Rodin and Yudkin (2011), Beck (forthcoming) and Peled (forthcoming). There is, however, one notable exception—Primoratz (1996)—which explicitly defends a deontic approach to boycotting, building on Hill (1979). For a discussion of the difficulty of reconciling these two approaches, see Mills (1996). There are also a handful of papers that take up issues only tangentially related to when (if ever) we have a moral obligation to boycott—e.g., Jansen et al. (2018) and Weinstock (forthcoming)—but they’re of less interest here. For a debunking story about felt individual obligations to boycott, see Maniates (2001).
In the case of boycotting, of course, I’m suggesting that emotions like anger tend to be primary. That is, of course, an empirical claim that could be mistaken. One (weak) reason for thinking that boycotts channel emotions like anger stems from our reactions to companies even after boycotts are successful. For instance, even after Nestlé revised its marketing campaign, Mills (1996) observes that she felt uncomfortable buying their products, as Nestlé didn’t publicly acknowledge its wrongdoing. The idea that an apology was necessary suggests that boycotts aren't just about getting certain results, but it also hints that they give direction to emotions that require a particular response from the offending party. Anger, of course, is one such emotion, where without an apology, it can linger long after the end of the actions that initially prompted it.
I suspect that this is partially why animal advocates feel that they ought to strictly boycott animal products even when it seems counterproductive to do so. Let’s suppose that the individual consumer choices do matter. Still, most vegans think they ought to eat vegan even when abstaining from animal products will support more harm. Consider, for example, my decision not to eat the turkey sandwiches that are left in the fridge after a departmental event. I know that they’re going to be thrown out if they aren’t consumed, since that’s what always happens. I know that if I eat a salad instead, I’ll be supporting industrial plant production, which harms some animals—e.g., the field mice that are crushed by combines. So if eating makes a difference, and I want to boycott harm to animals, then I should eat the turkey sandwiches. But I don’t—and don’t think I should.
Whatever story we tell here, it needs to be one with the resources to stave off objections to the effect that, if the public mourning view is correct, then identifying with the KKK gives you a moral obligation to boycott restaurants owned by the people they despise. On the care ethics approach, the strategy might be to argue that identifying with the KKK is to fail to care enough about black and brown people (among others). On the agent neutral reasons and imperfect duty approaches, the strategy will probably be to appeal to certain agent neutral constraints: if you shouldn’t share the KKK's values in the first place, then we have a way to block these kinds of challenges.
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Acknowledgements
This paper began as a conversation with Audrey McKinney, and I’m grateful to her for encouraging me to pursue the idea. I received valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper from audiences at Lynchburg College and the 2016 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress. And I received remarkably charitable, detailed, and probing feedback from an anonymous reviewer for this journal—indeed, the most constructive and challenging set of comments that I’ve ever gotten on any submission. If I knew who you were, I’d buy you a drink.
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Fischer, B. Boycotting and Public Mourning. Res Publica 26, 89–102 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-019-09419-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-019-09419-2