Ethical Trade-Offs in Consumer Decision Making || Consumer Attitudes about Personal and Political Action

Society for Consumer Psychology

Consumer Attitudes about Personal and Political ActionAuthor(s): Jonathan BaronSource: Journal of Consumer Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 3, Ethical Trade-Offs in ConsumerDecision Making (1999), pp. 261-275Published by: Society for Consumer PsychologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1480392 .

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JOURNAL OF CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY, 8(3), 261-275 Copyright ? 1999, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Consumer Attitudes About Personal and Political Action

Jonathan Baron Department of Psychology University of Pennsylvania

People can express their moral views through their purchases or through political action. If a product is morally bad, or bad in other ways, people may refuse to purchase it for themselves, or they may take political action against it. Two questionnaire studies examined the determinants of attitudes toward these two types of action. Both types of action are affected by moral concerns. Political actions are more affected by univer- salized moral concerns, in which people think that something is wrong for everyone regardless of whether they think it is wrong or not. Some moral principles are seen as absolute values, protected from trade-offs with other values. The studies also found evidence for moralization of many kinds of attributes, including some that affected

only the buyer, particularly those that put the buyer at risk of harm.

Consumers have moral opinions about the goods and services they buy. These

opinions are about the effects of their purchases on the environment, on human

rights, and on the welfare of other people or animals. Goods may also come to sym- bolize favorable or distasteful moral qualities.

The concern of this article is with attitudes toward the expression of negative moral opinions. When people think that a company or a good violates their moral values, they can refrain from purchasing that good, or from purchasing any goods from that company or even that nation. They can also express their values in other ways. They can, for example, support laws that regulate the good in question, or they can express their support for governments that have passed such laws.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Jonathan Baron, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3815 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6196. E-mail: baron @ cattell.psych.upenn.edu



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We can thus distinguish between personal and political expressions of moral values. Personal expressions are limited to the buyer's role as part of a relationship with the seller. Political expressions, by contrast, are designed to influence social policy in general, usually through government. Of course, personal expressions have political effects. If enough people refuse to buy sport utility vehicles because of their environmental effects and safety risk to others, then government will find it easier to regulate them, and companies may stop producing them. However, when the motive is personal, these effects are secondary. Note that expressing a moral concern through not purchasing something is, typically, not acting, whereas expressing the concern through political action is, typically, acting.

Most previous studies of personal versus social expressions of values in an economic context have concerned effects of altruism on willingness to pay (WTP) for repevant products or policies (i.e., with beneficial effects on the welfare of others; Baron, 1997a). For example, Jones-Lee, Hammerton, and Phillips (1985) found that drivers were willing to pay more (in hypothetical surveys of WTP) for safety devices that reduced their passengers' risk as well as their own. Viscusi, Magat, and Forrest (1988) found that people were willing to pay more for a national advertising campaign to reduce risk from insect spray than for a state-wide campaign. Baron and Greene (1996) found that students were generally willing to pay tuition increases for crime prevention programs that would take effect after their own graduation. On the other hand, Johannesson, Johansson, and O'Connor (1996) found that people were willing to pay less for improved road quality (through a tax that all drivers would pay) than for a private safety device with the same benefit for each driver. Arguably, the last result reflected a preference for public provision of a good (as opposed to private provision of a similar good), rather than a preference for negative altruism.

The literature on altruism concerns the consequences of decisions for others' welfare (i.e., the achievement of their goals; Baron, 1996). Moral concerns are not limited to consequences. In particular, much moral theory concerns deontological principles of action-principles dictating that certain types of actions be done or, more typically, not done under certain antecedent conditions, regardless of their consequences for welfare. Deontological principles, unlike consequentialist ones, can enjoin action with a certain effect (under certain conditions) while allowing omissions with the same effect.

Deontological principles seem to underlie expressions of absolute values, which have been called protected values because they are protected from tradeoffs with other values (Baron & Spranca, 1997). People say that they are not willing to permit the sacrifice of endangered species or human rights in return for any economic benefit, no matter how great the benefit. They thus express the view that, for them, species are infinitely more important than money. If protected values were consequentialist, then people with such values would see themselves as obliged to spare no personal sacrifice to promote them. Of course, people can act inconsis-



PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACTION 263

tently with their values, thus experiencing conflict, or deceive themselves about what they are doing, but conflict and self-deception are not needed if protected values are deontological. A person can realistically honor (e.g., value) as "do not (knowingly) act so as to cause the extinction of an endangered species, no matter how great the personal gain from such action."

More generally, we would expect a person with deontological values-protected or not-to avoid active participation in anything that violated those values. We would, for example, expect people with deontological values to avoid certain purchases. A purchase is a positive act that could be seen as going against some value. (Only rarely may consumers go out of their way to buy something they would not otherwise buy as a way of expressing moral ap- proval.) By contrast, political action for the same cause is typically a positive act designed to oppose negative acts committed by others. Omission of such positive acts of opposition is not seen as "doing harm," so protected values and other deontological values ought to have greater effects on consumer purchases than on political action.

Consider the consequentialist. Suppose someone cares about endangered species as a result, regardless of his or her own participation. He or she can do, or refrain from doing, several things to promote this value. One broad distinction is between voluntary and political action (Baron, 1997b). Political action favors the change of a law or regulation, which would compel others to honor the value in question (e.g., supporting a strengthening-or opposing a weakening-of a law protecting species). The effects of such action are diluted by the number of others who participate in the political decision. Individual action, such as building nest- ing sites for rare birds or not eating bluefin tuna, has a small effect on the whole problem, but a more certain one. I have argued that the effect of political action is-from the perspective of expected consequences (probability by magnitude)-often comparable to the effect of individual voluntary action. The large potential payoff of political action can compensate for the small effect of the individual on the decision. Moreover, in many cases, the personal sacrifice in tak- ing political action is lower than that of voluntary action, so that the political course has a higher benefit-cost relation for those whose capacity for self-sacrifice is limited (Baron, 1997b).

The exploratory experiments that follow examine people's moral values and protected values with respect to hypothetical product choices and alternative actions. In each experiment, subjects answer questions about several different product features. Some features are of purely personal interest, and others are of the sort that involve moral values. The questions address values concerning saving money on a product with a bad feature-either moral or personal-and other ways of expressing the same values (e.g., political action). Data are analyzed across subjects-looking for individual differences-and across items.

The main hypotheses are:



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HI: People have deontological values that affect purchases of consumer goods. They are, in principle, willing to sacrifice for these values by paying more or doing without a good.

H2: Some people are more inclined to express these values by refusing to purchase a good than by engaging in political action, even when the costs and benefits are the same. This follows from the claims that deontological values most often involve prohibitions on acts and that some people hold these values.

H3: People will sometimes moralize attributes that affect only the consumer. Buyers may view their relationship with sellers as more than one based on pursuit of self-interest. They may see sellers as having moral respon- sibilities (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986), one of which is to pro- duce goods that serve their intended purpose. It may be seen as espe- cially immoral to put consumers at risk by making unsafe goods.

EXPERIMENT 1

Each subject in this experiment answered four questions (plus one, omitted because of lack of clarity) about a list of goods that had potentially immoral features. Three questions addressed different ways in which moral values could be expressed: (a) resistance to purchasing the good, (b) support of a law that would reduce the availability of such goods, and (c) resistance to investing in a company that sold the good. Another question asked about the morality of producing each good. The in- vestment question addressed deontological values, because it included an option in which the subject could refuse to buy a stock even though this option would have no consequences for production of the good. Baron and Spranca (1997) found that answers to a question of this sort were correlated with expressions of absolute value-unwillingness to sacrifice a value no matter what the benefit. The goods included those with bad features that affected their personal utility rather than their morality, which allowed the question of whether such goods were considered immoral to be asked.

Method

Fifty subjects completed a "consumer decisions" questionnaire on the World Wide Web. They were paid $5 if they answered all the questions and provided their name and address. (Most did both.) The subjects were 72% women, 84% were students, and their ages ranged from 17 to 48 years old (median = 19); age, sex, and student status did not affect any summary measures significantly. The questionnaire began:




Below are some consumer decisions you might make. For each decision answer the questions that follow. Each decision involves a characteristic of a product you might buy. Imagine that you had a choice between products that were identical except for the characteristic in question.

Subjects answered the following questions about each of 26 product-feature pairs (by choosing one number in each group):

I. How would you feel about choosing a product with this characteristic? 1. The characteristic would not matter to me. 2. I would choose the product if I could save 5% of the cost. 3. I would choose it only if I could save 25% or more. 4. I would not choose it even if I did not have to pay at all. 5. I would not take it under any circumstances. II. How would you feel about a law or regulation that would make prod-

ucts with this characteristic less available (e.g., by banning them or raising the price)?

1. I would oppose such a law or regulation. 2. Not sure how I would feel. 3. I would favor it. 4. I would contribute money to an organization that supported it effectively.

III. If you invested in stocks, how would you feel about buying stock in a company that made this kind of product?

1. I would have no problem with it. 2. I would do it only if the expected return were higher than alterna-

tive investments. 3. I would not do it if I thought that my decision had any chance of having

an effect on this company or others. 4. I would not do it even if I were sure that my decision would have no ef-

fect at all. IV. How do you feel about the morality of making products like this?

1. It is not immoral. 2. I consider it immoral, but I would not condemn others for doing it. 3. It is immoral for others to do this, regardless of what they think.

The product and feature were both given before each set of questions. The choice of features was based on the various aspects of goods that arouse moral concerns: environmental effects; risk effects; foreign manufacture (out of a moral or moralistic nationalism); and violations of moral rules, legal rules, or human rights. In addition, several features were included that had purely personal effects. Table 1 shows the products and their features. (The type of product was repeated each time.)



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TABLE 1 Products and Characteristics Used in Experiment 1

A word processor for a computer. 1. You are buying it from someone who copied it in order to sell it, in violation of the copyright. (54) 2. Takes up excessive space on your hard disk. (24) 3. Not made in the U.S. (14)

A power lawnmower. 4. Produces more polluting fumes. (70) 5. Makes excessive noise. (26) 6. Lacks a safety guard, and is thus dangerous to user. (86) 7. Has small fuel tank, so runs out often. (12)

A car. 8. A danger to others because of bumper design. (72) 9. Not made in the U.S. (10) 10. A reputation for falling apart in a few years. (54) 11. Creates excessive pollution (but still within the legal limit). (44) 12. A danger to the driver because of poor safety design. (94) 13. Unattractively designed. (6)

A shirt. 14. Not made in the U.S. (14) 15. Made in the U.S., but by non-union labor. (18) 16. Made in a country with a reputation for violating rights of workers. (80) 17. Made by a company with a reputation for poor treatment of workers in underdeveloped

countries. (80) 18. Made of material likely to fall apart. (46)

Over-the-counter pain medicine. 19. Made by a company that has been found to have made false claims in its advertising about

other products. (78) 20. Made by a company that has been found to have withheld information about risks of other

products. (94) Chicken.

21. Animals raised in overcrowded conditions. (46) 22. Animals treated with antibiotics that are likely to get into the meat. (82)

Breakfast cereal. 23. Comes in packaging that is excessive and that fills up landfills. (44) 24. Inferior taste. (18) 25. Excessive saturated fat. (28) 26. Made from genetically engineered grain. (18)

Note. The number after each item is the percentage of answers to the stock question indicating unwillingness to buy stock.

Results

In general, subjects were more willing to express their values negatively-by not purchasing the good or by not buying stock-than positively-by engaging in political action. In 25% of the responses to Question I (choose), subjects endorsed the




most extreme response (Choose-5: "not take it under any circumstances"). How- ever, only 6% of the responses to the law question indicated willingness to contribute-Law-4: t= 8.88,p < .0005, for the differenceacross subjects. Similarly, 33% of the responses to the stock question were as extreme as possible (Stock-4: would not own even if no effect; p < .0005, for difference from Law-4). The contrast between Law-4 and Stock-4 is particularly striking, because both involve some (unspeci- fied) self-sacrifice. Stock-4, however, involves no consequences for the value in question, thus showing a purely deontological value.

Although support for a law was generally low, subjects differed systematically in their tendency to endorse it. To examine the correlates of these differences, I computed each subject's average response on the law, stock, moral, and choice items, excluding any items with the "not immoral" response to the morality question. The other items were treated as interval scales except that the few "opposition to a law" responses were collapsed with "not sure" responses to the law item, because the former could result from political opposition to any kind of regulation. Thus, each subject had one number for each of these questions. Table 2 shows the correlations among these numbers across subjects.

I also did a regression of the law item on the other three. Across subjects, mean support for a law was predicted from mean response to choice, stock, and moral items (r2 = .43, p < .0005 overall), but only the stock and moral items were significant predictors (standardized coefficients = .33 and .26, with p = .0387 and .0340, respectively). Although these correlations may reflect differences in degree of opposition, the moral item itself may reflect a different effect: Subjects may feel that laws are needed only when they think something is immoral for everyone. (Note that "not immoral" responses were excluded so that this item simply distinguished between personal and universal moral views.) Consistent with this view is the finding that the mean response to the choice item was predicted only by the stock item (coefficient = .65, p < .0005) and not significantly by the moral item, in a regression on both.

The "universal" response to the moral item ("immoral for others to this, regardless of what they think") was given for 52.6% of the selected items (mean

TABLE 2 Correlations Among the Measures Used in Experiment 1, Across Subjects

Law Choice Stock

Choice 0.5292 Stock 0.5692 0.6664 Moral 0.4123 0.2357 0.2890

Note. N = 49. The number used for each subject is an average of the items excluding those with "not immoral" answers. All correlations are significant (p < .05) except that between choice and moral (p = .103).



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across subjects), and the "relativist" response of "I consider this immoral, but I would not condemn others for doing it" for 47.4%. Subjects ranged from zero to 100% on this measure.

As found previously (Baron & Spranca, 1997), subjects differed in their endorsement of items indicating protected values, in particular the extreme responses to the choosing, stock, and moral items: Correlations among the proportions of these responses were all at least .38 (p < .01).

Table 1 shows the proportion of subjects who endorsed the third or fourth response to the stock question for each item (unwillingness to buy stock). This was chosen as the clearest index of moral concern as expressed in attitudes toward behavior. There was little concern about items that affected product quality alone (e.g., unattractive design of a car or poor taste of a cereal), so it is unlikely that subjects were concerned about the effect of each feature on profitability of the stock, nor was there much concern about foreign manufacture or use of bio- technology. Of interest is the strong moralization of the items concerned with risk, such as danger to the driver of a car (94%). Apparently, risky products are considered highly immoral, even when the risk is mainly to the buyer. For the

risky car, 62% of the subjects also endorsed Moral-3 (i.e., immoral, regardless of what others think).

EXPERIMENT 2

The comparison of purchase refusals and political action in Experiment 1 may result in part from different beliefs about their effectiveness. Experiment 2 presented the two actions as equally effective. Other questions also differed from Experiment 1, as did the list of products.

Method

A questionnaire on consumer decisions began:

Below are some consumer decisions you might make. For each decision answer the questions that follow. Each decision involves a characteristic of a

product you might buy. Suppose you are looking for this product to buy it for yourself. Imagine that all products in each choice were identical except for the characteristic in question, and, as noted, the price. Assume that the basic price is always the typical price for which such items are sold.

To save words, we will call the product "inferior" when it has the characteristic and "superior" when it does not. However, we understand that some of the characteristics do not matter at all to many people.




In each case, you are asked about two actions, one in which you pay more for the superior product and one in which you contribute to a fund that lobbies for regulation of the inferior characteristic by industry or government. It is very important that you think of these two actions as equally effective in reducing sales of the inferior product. So, we want you to suppose that, on the average, each contribution to the fund reduces the number of inferior products by one. This is the same as the reduction from refusing to buy the product yourself. Of course, the effect of lobbying in real life is variable. But we want you to think of these two actions-paying more for the superior product and contributing to a fund-as equally effective on the average. Can you do this? (Answer here.)

The first question asked about each feature and for a ranking of private action versus private action matched for cost (Options 1-2), both (Option 3), or neither (Option 4):

I. Rank the following options (best first, next best, worst, in order): 1. Get the superior product for the regular price. 2. Get the superior product for half of the regular price, AND contribute

half of the regular price (the money you save) to a fund to lobby for increased regulation of this characteristic.

3. Get the superior product for the REGULAR price, and, IN ADDITION, contribute half of the regular price to a fund to lobby for increased regulation of this characteristic.

4. Get the INFERIOR product for half of the regular price.

The next three questions asked about the morality of the feature, first about in- vestment in a company that made the product (stock), the morality of the product (moral), and whether the badness of the feature can be justified by some other compensating benefit (trade-off). The last answer in each list, and the last two answers in trade-off, can be considered as evidence of protected values. The last question was a check on the classification of features. The questions follow:

II. If you invested in stocks, how would you feel about buying stock in a company that made this kind of product?

1. I would have no problem with it. 2. I would do it only if the expected return were higher than alterna-

tive investments. 3. I would not do it if I thought that my decision had any chance of having

an effect on this company or others. 4. I would not do it even if I were sure that my decision would have no ef-

fect at all.



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III. How do you feel about the morality of making products like this? 1. It is not immoral. 2. I consider it immoral, but I would not condemn others for doing it. 3. It is immoral for others to do this, regardless of what they think. Enter one number:

IV. Suppose that making products like this led to some other benefit, such as more jobs, better health, or saved lives.

1. Making a product like this should be allowed even if these benefits are small. 2. If these benefits are great enough, then making a product like this

should be allowed. 3. Although there may be cases in which these benefits would be greater

than the harm of making a product like this, we should still never allow it. 4. No benefit, no matter how great, can ever outweigh the immorality of

making a product like this, so we should never allow it. Enter one number:

V. How would you classify a product with this characteristic? 1. This bothers me morally but does not make the product any less useful to me. 2. This makes the product less useful but does not bother me morally. 3. This bothers me morally and makes the product less useful. 4. This does not bother me morally and does not make the product less useful. Enter one number:

Forty-eight subjects were solicited on the World Wide Web, as in Experiment 1. They were 52% men, 65% were students, and their median age was 23 years old. These variables did not affect any of the results reported.

Results

The more careful instructions made subjects more inclined toward political action than they were in Experiment 1. Excluding items that were considered not immoral (in the morality question or the classification question) or less useful (in the classification question), 71.4% of the subjects ranked political action higher (more favor- ably) than personal action, on the average across all items, and 28.6% ranked personal action higher. The mean ranks of the four options were (for the selected items, with 4 the most favorable and 1 the least favorable rank):

1. Get the superior product for the regular price: 2.7. 2. Get the superior product for half of the regular price, AND contribute half of

the regular price (the money you save) to a fund to lobby for increased regulation of this characteristic: 3.4.




TABLE 3 Products and Characteristics Used in Experiment 2

A word processor for a computer. 1. It is sold by a company that pirates software to sell it, violating the copyright. (43) 2. Made by a company that bribes government officials to avoid taxes. (57) 3. Crashes often, in a way that causes the loss of work. (57)

A power lawnmower. 4. Lacks a safety guard, and is thus dangerous to user. (74) 5. Has small fuel tank, so runs out often. (5)

A car. 6. Not made in the U.S. (5) 7. Made with a Confederate flag painted on the inside of the trunk, under the mat. (26) 8. A reputation for falling apart in a few years. (43) 9. Creates excessive pollution (but still within the legal limit). (50) 10. A danger to the driver because of poor safety design. (76) 11. Made using wood from cutting trees a fast-disappearing pristine tropical rain forest. (67)

A shirt. 12. Made by workers in underdeveloped countries who are fired if they complain about working

conditions. (55) 13. Made by a company that will not hire African Americans. (69) 14. Made of material likely to fall apart. (38) 15. Has a small Nazi sign (swastika) sewed onto the inside collar. (69)

Over-the-counter pain medicine. 16. Made from pigs raised in crowded conditions. (19) 17. Made by harvesting an endangered plant species, without replacing what is harvested. (55)

Breakfast cereal. 18. Comes in packaging that is excessive and that fills up landfills. (33) 19. Inferior taste. (7) 20. Excessive saturated fat. (12)

Chicken. 21. Animals raised in overcrowded conditions. (33) 22. Animals treated with antibiotics that are likely to get into the meat. (60)

Note. The number after each item is the percentage of answers to the stock question indicating unwillingness to buy stock.

3. Get the superior product for the REGULAR price, and, IN ADDITION, contribute half of the regular price to a fund to lobby for increased regulation of this characteristic: 2.2.

4. Get the INFERIOR product for half of the regular price: 1.7.

As in Experiment 1, individual differences were predictable from other measures. A political index for each item was the rank (favorable given high numbers) of political action minus the rank of personal action. The average political index was computed for each subject by averaging across the selected items (excluding



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"not immoral" or "less useful"). This number was regressed (across subjects) on responses to the stock, moral, and trade-off items. Again these predictors were av- eraged for the selected items to yield a single index for stock, moral, and trade-off for each subject. The overall regression was significant (p < .0029), and the only significant predictor was the moral item (standardized coefficient = .63, p < .0003). That is, the subject who favored lobbying over purchase refusal were those who saw the morality as applying to everyone rather than to just themselves. (Items had been excluded if the subject saw no moral issue.) On the morality item itself, the mean endorsement of the universal response (wrong for everyone) was 66.5% (hence, 33.5% for the relativist response).

Again, subjects differed in their tendency to have protected values. In particular, the numbers of the most extreme responses to the stock, morality, and trade-off (Question IV) items correlated at least .49 (p = .001) across subjects.

Table 3 shows the proportions of times that the third and fourth answers to the trade-off question (Question IV) were chosen. (These differed little from the third and fourth choices of the stock item.) These indicated unwillingness to sacrifice the value in question for any benefit. Once again, the most serious item was a car that puts the driver at risk. Subjects were not so concerned about poor products or

foreign production.

Discussion

The results agree with other results in showing that people are willing to sacrifice their narrow self-interest for the sake of their moral beliefs (Dawes & Thaler, 1988; Kahneman et al., 1986; Thaler, 1988). However, also in agreement with earlier results, the willingness to do this is not fully based on consequences. People are sometimes more willing to pay extra for a product that does not have some bad moral effect than to pay the same money to advocate a law that would have the same

consequence as not buying the product. They are also unwilling to buy stock in a

company that does something immoral, even if their refusal has no effect except (presumably) to hurt themselves.

In Experiment 1, subjects generally favored paying more for a product than paying the same money for political influence. In Experiment 2, the instructions emphasized that the two kinds of action were equally effective, and almost all subjects said that they accepted this assumption. The contrast between Experiments 1 and 2 suggests that part of people's aversion to political action is that they do not believe it is effective. Alternatively, the instructions may have led subjects to think that they were supposed to think highly of political action. Still, even in Experi- ment 2, some subjects-particularly those who would not buy stock even when it would have no effect-still ranked refusal to buy a product as generally better than political action, and 76% of the subjects put refusal ahead of political action at




least once (45% when the analysis was restricted to items that the subject classified as moral). Most of the subjects were from the United States, and it is possible that the current political culture of the United States is skeptical of government inter- vention in the market.

Some of the reluctance to purchase "immoral products" may represent a general tendency based on the laws of contagion or association (Rozin & Singh, 1999/this issue). People do not want to be personally associated with what they regard as morally wrong. Thus, saving money on the purchase price of a good is a kind of personal association that does not result from saving money by not contributing to a political campaign. Buyers see a direct link between their benefit from the good and their saving money on the price. Not paying a tax or not

contributing to a political movement do not seem to evoke such strong associa- tions. This could be more likely in the absence of an organized consumer boy- cott. People may see participation in boycotts as part of a cooperative scheme with real consequences that increase disproportionately with the number of sub-

jects (Smith, 1989). Organized boycotts do have an effect (Pruitt & Friedman, 1986), although it seems doubtful that even the same number of people acting individually would have much effect in the absence of publicity.

The comparison of purchase refusal and political action is difficult to make in real life. Political action is seen as having a large effect if it is successful, little effect if it is not, and unlikely to be successful. When people think about political action, they may tend to think of winning an election or getting a particular law passed. By contrast, consumer action is certain to have a small effect-one fewer purchase of the immoral product. The logic of expected utility is required for a comparison. When

thinking about risky moral action, people may focus either on the magnitude of the

potential gain or on its low probability. In fact, political action may have a more in- cremental effect. The antiabortion movement in the United States, for example, al-

though failing to outlaw abortion, has succeeded in making it less available. The role of morality in both consumer decisions and political action is not just

consequentialist. Some behavior expresses deontological values, such as the un-

willingness to buy stock even when this has no effect. Some of these deontological values are seen as protected from trade-offs. Individuals can express such values

through their purchase decisions without having much effect on others. When the same values become politicized, and when people seek to impose these values on others who may not agree with them, conflict ensues. In a way, then, expression of values in consumer choices may be a kind of safety valve-a way of reducing conflict in democratic societies.

Another safety valve is relativism, the morality question asked for a three-way classification: (a) not immoral, (b) immoral for me, and (c) immoral for everyone. The last, universal response represents a category of morality that is seen less fre-

quently in U.S. adults than in adults elsewhere (e.g., Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993), and substantial numbers of our responses were relativist. People who see something



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as wrong for themselves but not necessarily wrong for others will avoid personal participation but not try to impose their views on others. Yet laws are a form of impo- sition, so relativist views are inconsistent with support for legislation. These results show that people are generally consistent in this way. Relativist views amount to a kind of tolerance for others, which allows coexistence without conflict over what the law should say. Arguably, it does not make sense to say that something is immoral for one person only (Hare, 1952). We may want to consider these views as personal preferences rather than true moral views. However, they surely feel like moral views to those who hold them, except for the desire to make others conform.

It is of interest how many properties of products were seen as moral. Of interest are those properties that affect only the buyer, particularly risk. In principle, no social regulation of these properties is required so long as they are not secret. Further investigation of moral views about these features is warranted. In particular, do people regard them as particularly immoral exactly because information is not fully available, or does information matter at all?

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SBR95-20288.

REFERENCES

Baron, J. (1996). Norm-endorsement utilitarianism and the nature of utility. Economics and Philosophy, 12, 165-182.

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Ethical Trade-Offs in Consumer Decision Making || Consumer Attitudes about Personal and Political Action