Ethical Consumerism
Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Economics Department, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 22-2024
I study a static production economy in which consumers have not only preferences over their own consumption but also external, or “ethical”, preferences over the supply of each good. Though existing work on the implications of external preferences assumes price-taking, I show that ethical consumers generically prefer not to act even approximately as price-takers. I therefore introduce a near-Nash equilibrium concept that generalizes the near-Nash equilibria found in literature on strategic foundations of general equilibrium to accommodate ethical preferences. I find (narrow) sufficient criteria under which such equilibria exist, and characterize consumer behavior in all such equilibria. Finally I find that ethical preferences can have arbitrary impacts on consumer behavior in equilibrium, including motivating a consumer (1) to decrease her consumption of all goods which she would prefer in greater supply and vice-versa, or (2) not to exhaust her budget, even if her utility increases both in her consumption and in the supply of all goods.
Other working papers
Social Beneficence – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
A background assumption in much contemporary political philosophy is that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, taking priority over other values such as beneficence. This assumption is typically treated as a methodological starting point, rather than as following from any particular moral or political theory. In this paper, I challenge this assumption.
Exceeding expectations: stochastic dominance as a general decision theory – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal’s Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls…
Desire-Fulfilment and Consciousness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
I show that there are good reasons to think that some individuals without any capacity for consciousness should be counted as welfare subjects, assuming that desire-fulfilment is a welfare good and that any individuals who can accrue welfare goods are welfare subjects. While other philosophers have argued for similar conclusions, I show that they have done so by relying on a simplistic understanding of the desire-fulfilment theory. My argument is intended to be sensitive to the complexities and nuances of contemporary…