At the retail end of the chain, you have a shoe store that sells shoe-laces (separately or ‘packeaged’ with shoes) priced at a fraction of the price of their main product, the shoes. It would be “penny wise pound foolish” to carry poor quality laces (for the sake of a very small difference in cost) and thereby risk future sales of shoes because customers come to regard the shoe store as unreliable.

That is a non-ethics, business-reasoning approach. An additional ethics perspective would imagine a mission discussion at the shoe-lace plant where workers and management decide to look at the ramifications of producing high versus low quality. They might think, for instance, of the disastrous consequences of someone losing a shoe in an emergency situation. Yes, we can think about corporate social responsibility … even on a shoe-string!

My worry is not at all the indeterminacy of the relevant science. Even when all the facts are in, we can still face deep dilemmas, since (to return to the wind-farm example) there’s math to tell us which is more important ethically — reducing pollution or avoiding killing.

And nor is the problem that there are *no* ultimate ethical principles. There may well be. And even without those, we can certainly reach agreement on *some* issues because some points of view are not supported by decent arguments (from basic principles to practical conclusions). My claim here is a more modest one, namely that for at least *some* issues, we are likely to find that there are deep ideological differences — where people’s moral POV is deeply bound up with their own self-conception — that make resolving moral debate literally hopeless. For example, I think the debate over GM foods is in that terrain. At very least, I think the likelihood of “near-term” agreement is next to nil.

Forgive me for drilling on this issue, but it’s a troubling one for me. If we believe that there ultimately is an ethical rule that should guide us, then your answer of “purchasing according to values that matter to you” means it arguably shouldn’t make a difference if the value that matters most to me leads to a less ethical result simply because it is too complicated to get to an answer. Clearly, that’s not how ethically motivated consumers think. They believe there is a right answer, and if they find it they will abide by it. The value that matters to me is the right one – neither choice is has moral value independent of that quality.

On the other hand, if there is no ultimate ethical rule, then is ethics just a matter of personal preference among theories? I understand that you are not saying this, but I don’t quite see how we avoid the conclusion. There are competing theories, and neither is really right, so choose the one you like best. It seems that this answer is being rejected at the end of the day, and we are left with consumers striving for a grand answer.

That leaves the problem in your example being that we have the ethical principles, but not the science, to answer the question. If the science is unclear, shouldn’t the answer be to go with the approach that has the strongest data supporting it? This I can live with.

No, I’m not saying there are never right answers. I’m saying things are complicated. In at least some cases, I think there’s little hope of arriving at a best answer (e.g., organic vs mainstream agriculture), in which case we may need to settle for making purchases that align with our personal values. But we shouldn’t rush to that conclusion in any particular instance. It’s still important to think carefully.