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Does Purchasing Make Consumers Complicit in Global Labour Injustice?

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Abstract

Do consumers’ ordinary actions of purchasing certain goods make them complicit in global labour injustice? To establish that they do, two things much be shown. First, it must be established that they are not more than complicit, for example that they are not the principal perpetrators. Second, it must be established that they meet the conditions for complicity on a plausible account. I argue that Kutz’s account faces an objection that makes Lepora and Goodin’s better suited, and defend the idea that consumers are complicit in at least two of the ways distinguished by the latter. In the final section of the paper, I consider whether consumers’ responsibility for complicity in global labour injustice is likely to be as strong as responsibility from another source, namely benefiting from that injustice.

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Notes

  1. Although I have just mentioned rights, I will actually remain neutral in this paper on the exact nature of the labour injustice, about which there is lively discussion elsewhere. It might be that a worker has rights against certain kinds of treatment; it might be that her work may not leave her below a certain baseline level of well-being. The injustices may be a matter of working conditions, working hours, pay, non-discrimination, respect, or otherwise. The novel focus in this paper is on what the moral implications are for consumers involved through purchases in those injustices, rather than on the specific nature of the injustices themselves. I will use 'injustice' rather than 'harm' deliberately throughout the paper, in order to respect the intuition that it's not possible to both harm someone and make her better off (although cf. Shiffrin 2012), while acknowledging that sometimes labour injustice makes a person better off—e.g. because it gives her a source of revenue when she would have otherwise had none.

  2. I accept that it is less bad for a person to have her labour exploited than for her to remain in extreme poverty. But only a view on which the worst case and nothing else counts as injustice will serve to dismiss the moral question of responsibility for exploitation. That is not to accept the converse, namely that only the best case counts for justice, but simply to say that among the many and varied more-and-less-ideal ways the world can be, questions about moral responsibility are not limited to the extremes. We can agree that the world could be worse, while simultaneously asking who is responsible (looking backwards) for the world not being better than it is, and who is responsible (looking forwards) for making it better than it is.

  3. It is conceptually possible for a large injustice by an aggregate to be caused by each of its many members, (1) if we take causation to be counterfactual dependence, and (2) when the injustice depends counterfactually on each of the many members. This is analogous to when a confluence of events and actions must all come together to produce a unique outcome. Global labour injustice does not have this structure (it does not depend counterfactually on any particular purchase).

  4. I'm departing from Kagan's terminology here in using 'triggering' only for cases where the cause is the last purchase in the sequence, and 'joint causation' for cases where the cause is all purchases in the sequence. Kagan himself discusses both kinds of case under the heading of 'triggering', and says that the main issue for second kind of cases is whether there is a cohort of the right size to hit the re-ordering threshold but not exceed it (if it is exceeded, then we have an over-determination case, and no purchase is a cause). So there is the expectation of being the sole trigger in what I am calling a triggering case, and there is the expectation of being a member of a cohort of the right size in what I am calling a joint causation case. Julia Nefsky has objected to Kagan's analysis of triggering cases on the grounds that contributions will not always be prohibited on consequentialist grounds, as Kagan thinks they will (Nefsky 2012). I agree with her on this point: whether they are prohibited depends on the probability of being a trigger or part of the joint cause, and on the disvalue of what is caused. But this does not imply that there are no cases where purchases are not prohibited on consequentialist grounds, so this particular objection does not affect my argument. For further discussion on thresholds, triggering, and difference-making see also (Lawford-Smith 2016).

  5. This is further complicated by the fact that (at least for those earning a salary rather than wages) some number of hours and some amount of money would suffice to labour justice, so that it is only after the worker has worked these hours and earned that amount of money that her labour will count as exploited and those who exploit it will count as authoring injustice. That means some purchases will cause work that is not yet an injustice, and some will cause work that is, and this further reduces the probability of any given purchase causing injustice in the way explained above.

  6. Here 'what collectives do' is not meant to imply a commitment to collective agency, only to outcomes that are brought about by the actions of multiple persons.

  7. It seems that there can be conniving in two different ways, and there might be a morally important distinction between the two. One can connive by omission, for example by failing to act as a good samaritan when confronted by an action on which one could easily intervene. But one can also connive by action, which is what consumers do when they actively buy clothing produced in sweatshops. Many people have the intuition that injustice by action is morally worse than injustice by omission, so the fact that this kind of conniving happens by action (purchasing) rather than omission (failing to taken an action that one could take) might help to generate a stronger kind of responsibility or obligation as a result.

  8. The idea here is that when it comes to non-ideal contexts requiring 'moral triage', it is permissible for an individual to neglect moral considerations in one domain for the reason that she does as much as she ought to do, just in another domain (i.e. she reaches the threshold on demandingness, which is not domain-specific).

  9. Notice that if the original model of consumers as the primary wrongdoer had been correct, then we would be comparing two kinds of expected involvement: there the expectation of causing harm, here the expectation of being complicit. Being a cause of harm is usually thought to be worse than being complicit in harm, so if the original model had been correct we would already have a more morally significant source of obligation for consumers. But that model was set aside earlier in the discussion, which is what makes complicity the best account of consumers' obligations.

  10. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this point.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to audiences at the Society for Applied Philosophy Conference, Edinburgh, 3–5th July 2015, and the Nuffield Political Theory Seminar at the University of Oxford, 7 March 2016; Dominic Roser and Stephanie Collins for their thoughtful comments on the written version of the paper; Dan Halliday for useful discussion; and two anonymous reviewers for Res Publica for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Holly Lawford-Smith.

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Lawford-Smith, H. Does Purchasing Make Consumers Complicit in Global Labour Injustice?. Res Publica 24, 319–338 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-017-9355-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-017-9355-4

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