Abstract
Ethical consumerism is the thesis that we should let our values determine our consumer purchases. We should purchase items that accord with our values and refrain from buying those that do not. The end goal, for ethical consumerism, is to transform the market through consumer demand. The arm of this movement associated with food choice embraces the slogan “Vote with Your Fork!” As in the more general movement, the idea is that we should let our values dictate our choices. In this paper, I offer a critique of the Vote with Your Fork campaign (hereafter VWYF) that focuses on the agency of individuals. For VWYF to be effective, minimally, individuals must act intentionally when making food choices. In the ideal case, individuals adopt and endorse the values implicit in VWYF and exhibit autonomous agency when they purchase and consume food. The problem, though, is that a number of things can go wrong along the way. I argue that very few of us are in the position to exhibit autonomous agency with respect to our food choices. Because of this, VWYF could very well undermine its own goals.
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Notes
There are broader conceptions of agency, according to which an agent need not have the capacity to act for reasons; on these conceptions, having the capacity to act is sufficient for agency. See Schlosser (2015).
Contemporary philosophy of action rejects the reduction of intentions to beliefs and desires. See Schlosser (2015) for discussion. The debate does not impact the discussion in this paper.
This is a bit oversimplified. It might be that third- or fourth-order desires are involved in cases where our second-order desires conflict. However, for the purposes of this paper, we can mostly ignore these complications.
See Buss and Westlund (2018) for a concise summary of the debates.
At least under some descriptions. If I intend to buy product X because I believe that it is environmentally friendly, and I buy it, then, under at least one description I am doing what I intend to do. But I I was deceived into believing the product is environmentally friendly and my belief is actually false, then, since what I really want to do is buy environmentally friendly products, there is a description of my action in which I am not doing what I intend to do.
Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Utah. Idaho’s farm protection law was the first to be declared unconstitutional in Animal Legal Defense Fund v. C.L. Butch Otter. The laws in Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, and Utah have also been struck down, and the Arkansas law is currently under challenge. (See ASPCA 2021).
Killmister argues that false beliefs of this kind compromise autonomy, but it seems better to construe this as a compromise of agency.
‘Sustainability’ is an ill-defined concept; see below for discussion.
At least under some descriptions. See footnote 7 for discussion.
Or perhaps she excuses her choice on the grounds that she normally eats ethically. For an overview of the literature on the kind of cognitive dissonance involved here, see Fischer et al (2008). I thank an anonymous referee for this point.
The exact figure is 34.1%.
See Guthman (2011, Chapter 7) for an excellent discussion of the whiteness of alternative food movements.
This is because, unlike individual purchasing decisions, policies and regulations can foster broad and effective change. A discussion of the kinds of policies that would address the myriad problems in our food system is outside the scope of this paper.
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This paper was written while on a sabbatical funded by Eastern Michigan University.
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Dieterle, J.M. Agency and Autonomy in Food Choice: Can We Really Vote with Our Forks?. J Agric Environ Ethics 35, 5 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-022-09878-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-022-09878-3