The Business of Boycotting: Having Your Chicken and Eating It Too

Alan Tomhave () and Mark Vopat ()
Additional contact information
Alan Tomhave: Youngstown State University
Mark Vopat: Youngstown State University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2018, vol. 152, issue 1, No 9, 123-132

Abstract: Abstract We assume that there are certain causes that are morally wrong, worth speaking out against, and working to overcome, e.g., opposition to same sex marriage. This seems to suggest that we should also be boycotting certain businesses; particularly those whose owners advocate such views. Ideally, for the boycotter, this will end up silencing certain views (political or otherwise), but this seems to cause two basic problems. First, it appears initially to be coercive, because it threatens the existence of the business. Second, it runs counter to the intuition that we should not force unpopular opinions out of the marketplace of ideas. Boycotting is by its very nature a coercive act, and thus we have to carefully consider what types of actions may warrant this type of coercive action. In this paper, we will argue that an organized boycott is justified if and only if the actions taken by the company have negative consequences that outweigh the negative outcome of the boycott.

Keywords: Boycott; Business; Coercion; Expression; Freedom; Marketplace; Protest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-016-3336-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:152:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-016-3336-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-016-3336-y

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().