Abstract

The close of the twentieth century has witnessed a surge in popular and academic criticism of consumer society. Scientists warn that the global environmental consequence of unabated economic growth are potentially disastrous. The growing gap between the affluent North and the developing South has heightened questions of international economic justice and catalyzed searching critiques of the globalization of laissez faire capitalism. Members of affluent countries themselves increasingly suspect that the consumer lifestyle touted as the "American Dream" embodies dubious ideals of the good life. And many North Americans are frustrated by the homogenization of the retail sector of their communities and the increasingly commercial character of civic life. ;At such a time, comfortable situated individuals have cause to question the ethics of their own consumption habits, a topic that has so far received little philosophical attention. As I argue in chapter one, our qualms about consumer society should motivate more rigorous moral scrutiny of our individual consumption habits than has yet been undertaken. In chapter two I clarify and circumscribe the project and defend criteria for the adequacy of proposed approaches to consumption ethics: Such ethics, I argue, should provide substantive but realistically imprecise practical guidance, should have implications that are both livable and anti-complacent, and should remain neutral with respect to competing theoretical foundations. In chapter three I argue that existing approaches to the problem, situated within debates over the proper analysis of well-being, do not offer adequate accounts of our moral responsibilities in this area. ;In chapters four and five I focus on the quantitative dimension of consumption ethics---the question, that is, how much we ought to consume. Because our consumption habits contribute to environmental degradation, because the consumption levels typical of North Americans cannot be sustainable universalized, and because the world's poorest people must increase their consumption in order to meet their basic needs, North Americans have strong moral reason to constrain the quantity of their consumption insofar as it threatens the ecological basis for everyone's well-being. I defend a distinct principle of consumption ethics---based on the notion of an ecological footprint---whose upshot is that, prima facie, average North Americans ought to reduce the ecological impact of their consumption by half or more