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
A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that – all else equal – we’re never required to create extra people, or to act in ways that increase the probability of extra people coming into existence. In this paper, I use Parfit-style fission cases to construct a dilemma for person-affecting views: either they forfeit their seeming-advantages and face fission analogues…
The Conservation Multiplier – Bård Harstad (University of Oslo)
Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a positive theory of this situation and shows when a small change in parameter values has a multiplier effect on exploitation. The multiplier strengthens the influence of a lobby paying for exploitation, and of a donor compensating for conservation. …
Doomsday and objective chance – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Lewis’s Principal Principle says that one should usually align one’s credences with the known chances. In this paper I develop a version of the Principal Principle that deals well with some exceptional cases related to the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic modality. I explain how this principle gives a unified account of the Sleeping Beauty problem and chance-based principles of anthropic reasoning…