"There is no such thing as ethical consumption" is a phrase you'll hear often particularly as a response to people trying to affect large systemic changes using their personal consumption habits. For example, Business Insider recently posted a piece about No Buy July which featured people trying to withhold money from the economy or undesirable companies in the wake of Roe v Wade being overturned. This is obviously ridiculous; we cannot bring back Roe v Wade or eliminate judicial review or pass a federal abortion bill by growing our own food or refusing to shop at Hobby Lobby.
The term has also transformed into a sort of annoying rhetorical crutch as well. Any insistence of changing consumptive habits will be met with comments about how individual consumption will hardly register as a blip compared to the scale of what corporations and the wealthy can accomplish with all of their power. This is annoying because even though the phrase is speaking to an innate powerlessness to consumption itself, there obviously is such a thing as ethical - if even just more ethical - consumption.
The phrase seems to enjoy the most airtime in debates about climate change. Addressing climate change and environmental degradation will require behavioral change. Yet at the recommendation of going vegetarian or buying an electric car, the response is a hostile reminder that corporations are destroying the planet at a pace and scale beyond our individual actions. This often ignores the fact that corporations often destroy the planet because of our behavior. Beef processors are responsible for a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions, some of the worst actually. Pointing to this fact without acknowledging the reason the emissions occur is our beef consumption habits seems to obfuscate the issue. While an individual being a vegetarian will not bring down global temperatures, it is in fact a more ethical way to eat as far as the planet is concerned. Not only that, but to meaningfully address climate change will necessarily mean people will have to consume meat differently, meaning they'll certainly have to eat less of it.
On one side of this debate, ethical consumerists will often point to the success of boycotts. On the other side, you have the ethical consumerism deniers who are clear that behavioral changes are not enough to make change. The flaws in both these arguments stem from a lack of context around organizational power.
Take the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott the ethical consumerists will often point to. This was a mass movement that had a component about ethical consumption but also required real organizational power to ask people to make the sacrifices necessary to stop consuming (using) a racist bus system. It's also worth noting that this was a local-level organizational effort. Ethical consumerism deniers are right to point out that consumption itself does not have power, but organizing does and can be paired with consumption behavior that can deliver on serious demands. Famous hunger strikes, the BDS movement, the Delano Grape Strike, boycotts of companies like Nike over their labor practices, all had a component in which an organized group made changes by, among other things, changing their consumption habits.
The real notion we need to abandon is that we can do anything as an individual. While giving up meat is an admirable life choice and is certainly an important one, encouraging friends, family, and co-workers with relational organizing, fighting for vegetarian meals in the workplace or school campus, hosting informational events with a local organization, or even just encouraging others to try your delicious vegetarian cooking is far more powerful that quietly engaging in the behavior alone.
Kate Aronoff when asked about the individual choice of electric vehicles had this to say in Lever New's Left Wondering column:
"Those looking to tell a positive story about the world that ambitious climate policy can build have mostly, until recently, had to tell a story about the future. But there’s no substitute for getting a taste of that yourself. A long holiday weekend is a glimpse of what a world with a four-day work week might feel like. Using an efficient metro system to breeze around a dense, pleasant city loaded with parks and other public amenities is a better sales pitch for ditching car culture and suburban sprawl than the best communications strategist could muster. If people can experience aspects of a lower-carbon world themselves, they may well be open to fighting for more of them."
