PMB observes a variety of consumer boycotting behaviors, almost always practiced by people who have good intentions and a strong commitment to cause. Boycotts range from the short-term and particular (as when someone avoids purchasing Dior products until they can the guy who made anti-Semitic remarks) to the long-term and sweeping (as when someone makes her own clothing to avoid patronizing companies that use sweatshop labor). Even food choices, like vegetarianism or veganism, are sometimes (but not always) made based upon the principles of the boycott (as when someone refuses to eat meat in order to attenuate and ultimately overturn the animal-rights-unfriendly agro-business model).
Indeed, keeping with the vegetarianism/veganism example, the best book PMB has come across on animal rights, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, takes a utilitarian ethical position, ultimately encouraging readers to address the problem of animal mistreatment by becoming vegetarian or vegan. The thrust of Singer's political message is that through boycotting something that leads to a negative outcome, we could collectively reduce the outcome.
While PMB is sympathetic to a number of causes that call for boycotts, there remains a disturbing and legitimately dangerous logic that underpins the act of boycotting.
When we choose boycotting as a means of individual and/or collective action as consumers, what we're really saying is that the responsibility to make ethical judgments, and then to do the right thing, lies only with us consumers. In taking on the brunt of this responsibility, the boycotter demonstrates to the producers--of meat, clothing, etc.--that we've chosen the market as our primary weapon against their ethical shortcomings. In boycotting, we tell corporations that as long as they can get by selling unsavory things to enough of us, they can survive without changing their behavior.
The explicit problem with boycotting, then, is that it's a strategy that aims to take on producers at their own game: marketing to as many people as possible an image of the company as providing not only a product you want, but by a means with which you can be satisfied. The boycotting efforts of righteous individuals--and righteous groups of individuals--are easily co-opted by large and unscrupulous corporations and industries. In fact, in many cases, as with the tobacco industry, companies actually market controlled versions of counterculture to their adversaries and critics, with much success. Boycotting is a game that, very often, boycotters are already set up to lose.
The implicit and more insidious problem with boycotting, however, is that it plays into corporate hands in a much more profound way. By taking the market as the primary instrument of ethical critique, boycotters implicitly give primacy to the market as a means of ethical regulation. In a move that's meant to be pragmatic--an acknowledgment that because money talks so loudly, the most effective attack is a blow to the pocketbook--boycotters actually undercut their very raison d'etre as boycotters: to introduce ethics into a system that fails to produce ethical standards for itself. Boycotting, in other words, is an admission that the market rules the day, and that the only (or best) way to effect change is by and through the market itself. Boycotting absolves corporations of their responsibility to anything but the bottom line.
The obvious alternative to boycotting, however, is throwing the same political effort behind industry regulation. Why boycott BP, a prominent example of corporate ethical lapse, when you can appeal to an elected government for better regulation of the entire industry? Why go vegan instead of campaigning for reforms of the entire farming industry, including where even veggies are loaded with growth hormones? Why take individual responsibility for something that is more properly the responsibility of a whole society?
PMB is aware that unapologetic free-marketers and some kinds of libertarians will take umbrage with the idea that citizens might appeal to an elected government, rather than the market itself, to impose industry regulations; however, the reasonably successful history of governments imposing industry regulations to account for gross ethical problems not solved by the 'invisible hand'--such as anti-trust legislation, or the laws and inspections that prevent any old schmuck from opening a restaurant that serves you rat feces sandwiches--should be enough to placate most of you.
In the end, it's easy enough to wash your own hands of corporate malfeasance; but what should we do when an entire economy needs a bath?
