The Market of Virtue

Estelle Ferrarese shows us that ethical consumerism collaborates with the very order it seeks to break. Today’s spread of consumer practices advocating ‘fair’ prices or ‘responsible’ purchases is grounded in a supposed critique of capitalism at the level of everyday life. This book runs counter to the prevailing view. Ferrarese argues that ethical consumerism conceals the fact that the market perpetually undoes any of the moral standards that are injected into it. Arguments for ethical consumerism incorrectly suppose that capitalism can be reduced to psychological mechanisms, such as an apparently predatory temperament, mechanisms that can then be curbed by the upholding of virtues. Practices of ethical consumerism invest individual intention with absolute mastery over the world, with a boundless ability to reshape it. And given ethical consumerism’s want to put a figure on everything – from damages to virtuous behaviour – it ends up contributing to the very form imposed on the world by the market, namely generalised commensurability.