Fidgety Widgets: Incommensurability and Indeterminacy in Consumer Choice

Many people believe that individual actors should and can respond to social and environmental problems by making ethical or conscientious decisions in the marketplace. They encourage consumers to purchase fair trade coffee, buy locally grown produce, avoid shopping in stores with union-busting tactics, boycott exploitative soda manufacturers, and so on. In this paper, I argue against the idea that demand-side decisions on the part of individual consumers can adequately capture the complicated moral dimensions of any given product. I argue this position by pointing to two intermingled features of consumer choice: value incommensurability and market indeterminacy.