The Business of Boycotting: Having Your Chicken and Eating It Too

We assume that there are certain causes that are morally wrong, worth speaking out against, and working to overcome, e.g., opposition to same sex marriage. This seems to suggest that we should also be boycotting certain businesses; particularly those whose owners advocate such views. Ideally, for th...

Full description

Saved in:  
Bibliographic Details
Authors: Tomhave, Alan (Author) ; Vopat, Mark (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Journals Online & Print:
Drawer...
Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2018
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2018, Volume: 152, Issue: 1, Pages: 123-132
Further subjects:B Protest
B Marketplace
B Boycott
B Expression
B Freedom
B Coercion
B Business
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:We assume that there are certain causes that are morally wrong, worth speaking out against, and working to overcome, e.g., opposition to same sex marriage. This seems to suggest that we should also be boycotting certain businesses; particularly those whose owners advocate such views. Ideally, for the boycotter, this will end up silencing certain views (political or otherwise), but this seems to cause two basic problems. First, it appears initially to be coercive, because it threatens the existence of the business. Second, it runs counter to the intuition that we should not force unpopular opinions out of the marketplace of ideas. Boycotting is by its very nature a coercive act, and thus we have to carefully consider what types of actions may warrant this type of coercive action. In this paper, we will argue that an organized boycott is justified if and only if the actions taken by the company have negative consequences that outweigh the negative outcome of the boycott.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-016-3336-y