The undemocratic face of greenwashing and the duty to counter-frame

Normative research on greenwashing has largely focused on the environmental and economic consequences of false or misleading green claims. This article introduces a new perspective that sheds light on its democratic costs. First, I argue that by interfering with the transmission of a public political culture through deceptive claims, greenwashing constitutes a particularly problematic form of corporate capture of democratic rhetoric. I further contend that greenwashing should also be examined against ordinary patterns of language use, given their capacity to shape the range of communicative possibilities available. At the normative level, I then defend a duty to counter-frame: a duty of ordinary citizens to play their part in avoiding reinforcing the communicative conditions that facilitate corporate capture of public rhetoric. This duty aims to initiate processes of reciprocal reason-giving about responsible language use within everyday conversations.