We pose and resolve a puzzle about spontaneous symmetry breaking in the quantum theory of infinite systems. For a symmetry to be spontaneously broken, it must not be implementable by a unitary operator in a ground state's GNS representation. But Wigner's theorem guarantees that any symmetry's action on states is given by a unitary operator. How can this unitary operator fail to implement the symmetry in the GNS representation? We show how it is possible for a unitary operator of this (...) sort to connect the folia of unitarily inequivalent representations. This result undermines interpretations of quantum theory that hold unitary equivalence to be necessary for physical equivalence. (shrink)

Nature seems to be such that we can describe it accurately with quantum theories of bosons and fermions alone, without resort to parastatistics. This has been seen as a deep mystery: paraparticles make perfect physical sense, so why don’t we see them in nature? We consider one potential answer: every paraparticle theory is physically equivalent to some theory of bosons or fermions, making the absence of paraparticles in our theories a matter of convention rather than a mysterious empirical discovery. We (...) argue that this equivalence thesis holds in all physically admissible quantum field theories falling under the domain of the rigorous Doplicher–Haag–Roberts approach to superselection rules. Inadmissible parastatistical theories are ruled out by a locality-inspired principle we call charge recombination. 1 Introduction2 Paraparticles in Quantum Theory3 Theoretical Equivalence3.1 Field systems in algebraic quantum field theory3.2 Equivalence of field systems4 A Brief History of the Equivalence Thesis4.1 The Green decomposition4.2 Klein transformations4.3 The argument of Drühl, Haag, and Roberts4.4 The Doplicher–Roberts reconstruction theorem5 Sharpening the Thesis6 Discussion6.1 Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics6.2 Structuralism and haecceities6.3 Paraquark theories. (shrink)

I advance a stipulational account of symmetry-to-reality inference, according to which symmetries are part of the content of theories. For a theory to have a certain symmetry is for the theory to stipulate that models related by the symmetry represent the same possibility. I show that the stipulational account compares positively with alternatives, including Dasgupta’s epistemic account of symmetry, Møller-Nielsen’s motivational account, and so-called formal and ontic accounts. In particular, the stipulational account avoids the problems Belot and Dasgupta have raised (...) against formal and ontic accounts of symmetry while retaining many of the advantages of these otherwise-attractive frameworks. (shrink)

I consider an argument, due to Geoffrey Lee, that we can know a priori from the left-right asymmetrical character of experience that our brains are left-right asymmetrical. Lee's argument assumes a premise he calls relationism, which I show is well-supported by the best philosophical picture of spacetime. I explain why Lee's relationism is compatible with left-right asymmetrical laws. I then show that the conclusion of Lee's argument is not as strong or surprising as he makes it out to be.

Ted Sider has shown that my indeterminism argument for comparativist theories of quantity also applies to Mundy's absolutist theory. This is because Mundy's theory posits only "pure" relations, i.e. relations between values of the same quantity (between masses and other masses, or distances and other distances). It is straightforward to solve the problem by positing additional mixed relations.

In keeping with the focus of this special section, we concentrate initially on some of the problems of autonomist Marxist concepts such as `immaterial labour', `affective labour' and `precarity' for understanding work in the cultural industries. We then briefly review some relevant media theory (John Thompson's notion of mediated quasi-interaction) and some key recent sociological research on cultural labour (especially work by Andrew Ross and Laura Grindstaff, the latter drawing on Hochschild's concept of emotional labour), which we believe (...) may be more useful than autonomist concepts in developing empirically informed critique. The main body of the article then consists of an ethnographic account of working on one particular television programme, an account that aims to build on these theoretical debates. We analyse how the power to provide exposure or not to individuals in the talent show genre in contemporary television (a feature that derives from the symbolic power of producers to make texts that are then circulated to massive numbers of people) and disputes between commissioners and independent producers about how best to go about doing so (an organizational issue) are registered in the form of stress, anxiety and sometimes poor working relations among project teams of young television researchers (a matter of working conditions and experiences). We especially focus on how additional pressures are borne by these workers because of the requirements to undertake emotional labour, involving the handling of strong emotions on the part of talent show contributors, and to maintain good working relations in short-term project work, requirements generated by the need to ensure future employment. Ultimately, then, we support the view that creative work is `precarious' — but we go beyond the generalizations involved in concepts such as immaterial labour and affective labour to show the specific ways in which precariousness is registered and negotiated in the lives of young workers in one industry. (shrink)

Review of Richard Healey's 2008 book. To appear in MIND.

In his absorbing book Art as Performance, David Davies argues that artworks should be identified, not with artistic products such as paintings or novels, but instead with the artistic actions or processes that produced such items. Such a view had an earlier incarnation in Currie’s widely criticized “action type hypothesis”, but Davies argues that it is instead action tokens rather than types with which artworks should be identified. This rich and complex work repays the closest study in spite of (...) some basic objections to be raised concerning Davies’s central concept of an action token. (shrink)

Over 40 years of research have shown that traumatic brain injury affects brain volume. However, technical and practical limitations made it difficult to detect brain volume abnormalities in patients suffering from chronic effects of mild or moderate traumatic brain injury. This situation improved in 2006 with the FDA clearance of NeuroQuant®, a commercially available, computer-automated software program for measuring MRI brain volume in human subjects. More recent strides were made with the introduction of NeuroGage®, commercially available software that is based (...) on NeuroQuant® and extends its utility in several ways. Studies using these and similar methods have found that most patients with chronic mild or moderate traumatic brain injury have brain volume abnormalities, and several of these studies found—surprisingly—more abnormal enlargement than atrophy. More generally, 102 peer-reviewed studies have supported the reliability and validity of NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage®. Furthermore, this updated version of a previous review addresses whether NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard for admissibility in court. It concludes that NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard based on their reliability, validity, and objectivity. Due to the improvements in technology over the years, these brain volumetric techniques are practical and readily available for clinical or forensic use, and thus they are important tools for detecting signs of brain injury. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Theory of International Bioethics: Multiculturalism, Postmodernism, and the Bankruptcy of Fundamentalism 1Robert Baker (bio)AbstractThis first of two articles analyzing the justifiability of international bioethical codes and of cross-cultural moral judgments reviews “moral fundamentalism,” the theory that cross-cultural moral judgments and international bioethical codes are justified by certain “basic” or “fundamental” moral principles that are universally accepted in all cultures and eras. Initially propounded by the judges at (...) the 1947 Nuremberg Tribunal, moral fundamentalism has become the received justification of international bioethics, and of cross-temporal and cross-cultural moral judgments. Yet today we are said to live in a multicultural and postmodern world. This article assesses the challenges that multiculturalism and postmodernism pose to fundamentalism and concludes that these challenges render the position philosophically untenable, thereby undermining the received conception of the foundations of international bioethics. The second article, which follows, offers an alternative model—a model of negotiated moral order—as a viable justification for international bioethics and for transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments.Man in the Twentieth Century can not be circumscribed by the standards of any single culture.American Anthropological Association (1948) in a statement officially denouncing the 1948 United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights.Recently... so-called “liberal” medicine has revived the old rights of a clinic understood in terms of a special contract, a tacit pact made between one man and another. This patient gaze has even been attributed the power of assuming [a role in clinical decision making].Miracles are not so easy to come by....Michel Foucault (1975, p. 5) [End Page 201]An Overview of the AnalysisInternational bioethics originated in the trauma of the Holocaust, specifically, in the 1946–1947 Nuremberg “Doctors Trial” when a tribunal of three American judges convicted Nazi medical researchers of “crimes against humanity.” In justifying their judgment, the Nuremberg Tribunal cited 10 principles for morally permissible research, which, they claimed, were based on “fundamental” principles that civilized societies “all agree” upon and accept as the foundations of their “moral, ethical, and legal” norms. Foremost among the principles was one stating that morally permissible human experiments require the informed voluntary consent of the subject. The Nuremberg judgment soon became associated with the ideal of human rights declared in the 1948 United Nations Charter. These two ideas—fundamental principles of morality and human rights—have been linked in all major formulations of international bioethics promulgated in the past 50 years, including the Council of Europe’s 1997 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine (Council of Europe 1997; Dommel and Alexander 1997). In this paper, I explore the received justification for international bioethics—the idea that it is grounded in fundamental principles accepted in all societies—tracing it from its initial, almost off-hand, promulgation by the Nuremberg Tribunal, through its more thoughtful development by such bioethicists as Ruth Macklin, to its more complex use by the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.After a brief review of the evolution of the received justification, I discuss the viability of this justification in the face of the critique implicit in two important intellectual movements: multiculturalism and postmodernism. In the international context, multiculturalism asserts the claim that there are no common moral principles shared by all cultures. Postmodernism asserts a similar claim against all universal standards, moral and nonmoral. In the 1990s, bioethicists have attempted to respond to these claims in various ways. These responses are documented, analyzed, and then shown to be “bankrupt,” in the sense that they undercut the most important objective of moral fundamentalism: the justification of transcultural moral judgments, such as the condemnation of the Nazi doctors.A second article, which follows the present one in the same issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, revisits the contractarian tradition [End Page 202] of Hobbes and Locke, as it has been reinterpreted by David Gauthier (1986), John Rawls (1971, 1993), and Robert Nozick (1974), to develop the idea of negotiated moral order as the basis of international bioethics. When conceptualized as a negotiated moral order, international bioethics can accept the genuine insights... (shrink)

Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers - healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians - assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the historical nature and function of professional codes of ethics. Arguing that professional codes are aggregative enterprises growing in response to a field's historical experiences, it asserts (...) that bioethics now needs to assert its integrity and independence and has already developed a body of formal statements that could be aggregated to create a comprehensive code of ethics for bioethics. A Draft Model Aggregated Code of Ethics for Bioethicists is offered in the hope that analysis and criticism of this draft code will promote further discussion of the nature and content of a code of ethics for bioethicists. (shrink)

According to comparativist theories of quantities, their intrinsic values are not fundamental. Instead, all the quantity facts are grounded in scale-independent relations like "twice as massive as" or "more massive than." I show that this sort of scale independence is best understood as a sort of metaphysical symmetry--a principle about which transformations of the non-fundamental ontology leave the fundamental ontology unchanged. Determinism--a core scientific concept easily formulated in absolutist terms--is more difficult for the comparativist to define. After settling on the (...) most plausible comparativist understanding of determinism, I offer some examples of physical systems that the comparativist must count as indeterministic although the relevant physical theory gives deterministic predictions. Several morals are drawn. In particular: comparativism is metaphysically contingent if true, and it is most natural for a comparativist to accept an at-at theory of motion. (shrink)

We address concerns raised by Maul (2012) regarding the validity of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). We respond to requests for clarifications of our model, and explain why the MSCEIT’s scoring methods stand up to scrutiny and why many reported reliabilities of the MSCEIT may be underestimates, using reanalyses of the test’s standardization sample of N = 5,000 to illustrate our point. We also organize findings from four recent articles that provide evidence for the MSCEIT’s validity based on its (...) relations with other tests. (shrink)

The widely held picture of dynamical symmetry as surplus structure in a physical theory has many metaphysical applications. Here, I focus on its relevance to the question of which quantities in a theory represent fundamental natural properties.

If we divide our physical theories into theories of matter and theories of spacetime, quantum field theory is our most fundamental empirically successful theory of matter. As such, it has attracted increasing attention from philosophers over the past two decades, beginning to eclipse its predecessor theory of quantum mechanics in the philosophical literature. Here I survey some central philosophical puzzles about the theory's foundations.

Eleanor Knox has argued that our concept of spacetime applies to whichever structure plays a certain functional role in the laws (the role of determining local inertial structure). I raise two complications for this approach. First, our spacetime concept seems to have the structure of a cluster concept, which means that Knox's inertial criteria for spacetime cannot succeed with complete generality. Second, the notion of metaphysical fundamentality may feature in the spacetime concept, in which case spacetime functionalism may be uninformative (...) in the absence of answers to fundamental metaphysical questions like the substantivalist/relationist debate. (shrink)

I examine some problems standing in the way of a successful `field interpretation' of quantum field theory. The most popular extant proposal depends on the Hilbert space of `wavefunctionals.' But since wavefunctional space is unitarily equivalent to many-particle Fock space, two of the most powerful arguments against particle interpretations also undermine this form of field interpretation. IntroductionField Interpretations and Field OperatorsThe Wavefunctional InterpretationFields and Inequivalent Representations 4.1. The Rindler representation 4.2. Spontaneous symmetry breaking 4.3. Coherent representations The Fate of Fields (...) in Interacting QFTConclusions. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that string theory posits a fundamental ontology including extended mereological simples, either in the form of minimum-sized regions of space or of the strings themselves. But there is very little in the actual theory to support this claim, and much that suggests it is false. Extant string theories treat space as a continuum, and strings do not behave like simples.

A persistent sociological thesis posits that the spread of formal education causes an inevitable decline in religion as a social institution and diminishes adherence to religious beliefs in postindustrial society. Now that worldwide advanced education is a central agent in developing and disseminating Western rationality emphasizing science as the ultimate truth claim about a humanly constructed society and the natural world this seems an ever more relevant thesis. Yet in the face of a robust “education revolution,” religion and spirituality endure, (...) and in certain respects thrive, thus creating a sociological paradox: How can both expanding education and mass religion coexist? The solution proposed here is that instead of educational development setting the conditions for the decline and eventual death of religion, the two institutions have been, and continue to be, more compatible and even surprisingly symbiotic than is often assumed. This contributes to a culture of mass education and mass religion that is unique in the history of human society, exemplified by the heavily educated and churched United States. After a brief review of the empirical trends behind the paradox, a new confluence of streams of research on compatible worldviews, overlapping ideologies, and their enactments in educational and religious social movements illustrates the plausibility of an affinity argument and its impact on theory about post-secular society. (shrink)

The nature of antimatter is examined in the context of algebraic quantum field theory. It is shown that the notion of antimatter is more general than that of antiparticles. Properly speaking, then, antimatter is not matter made up of antiparticles—rather, antiparticles are particles made up of antimatter. We go on to discuss whether the notion of antimatter is itself completely general in quantum field theory. Does the matter–antimatter distinction apply to all field theoretic systems? The answer depends on which of (...) several possible criteria we should impose on the space of physical states. (shrink)

Eleanor Knox has argued that our concept of spacetime applies to whichever structure plays a certain functional role in the laws. I raise two objections to this inertial functionalism. First, it depends on a prior assumption about which coordinate systems defined in a theory are reference frames, and hence on assumptions about which geometric structures are spatiotemporal. This makes Knox’s account circular. Second, her account is vulnerable to several counterexamples, giving the wrong result when applied to topological quantum field theories (...) and parity- and time-asymmetric theories. I advance an alternative account on which our spacetime concept is a cluster concept. On this view, the notion of metaphysical fundamentality may feature in the cluster, in which case spacetime functionalism may be uninformative in the absence of answers to fundamental metaphysical questions like the substantivalist/relationist debate. (shrink)

Eleanor Knox has argued that our concept of spacetime applies to whichever structure plays a certain functional role in the laws. I raise two objections to this inertial functionalism. First, it depends on a prior assumption about which coordinate systems defined in a theory are reference frames, and hence on assumptions about which geometric structures are spatiotemporal. This makes Knox’s account circular. Second, her account is vulnerable to several counterexamples, giving the wrong result when applied to topological quantum field theories (...) and parity- and time-asymmetric theories. I advance an alternative account on which our spacetime concept is a cluster concept. On this view, the notion of metaphysical fundamentality may feature in the cluster, in which case spacetime functionalism may be uninformative in the absence of answers to fundamental metaphysical questions like the substantivalist/relationist debate. (shrink)

The phenomenon of broken spacetime symmetry in the quantum theory of infinite systems forces us to adopt an unorthodox ontology. We must abandon the standard conception of the physical meaning of these symmetries, or else deny the attractive “liberal” notion of which physical quantities are significant. A third option, more attractive but less well understood, is to abandon the existing (Halvorson-Clifton) notion of intertranslatability for quantum theories.

A new argument is given for the thesis that only symmetry-invariant physical quantities are real. Non-invariant quantities are dynamically epiphenomenal in that they have no effect on the evolution of invariant quantities, and it is a significant theoretical vice to posit epiphenomenal quantities.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Understanding Musical Understanding: The Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology of the Musical ExperienceDavid BakerHarold E. Fiske, Understanding Musical Understanding: The Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology of the Musical Experience. (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).Building on several earlier publications on music and the mind (1990, 1993, 1996, 2004), Harold Fiske offers Understanding Musical Understanding. This is a well-referenced piece that outlines the thinking of various authors (for example, Crowder, (...) 19931; Huron, 2006;2 Snyder, 20073). Furthermore, as Fiske meticulously constructs his case, it draws in psychologists such as Carl Seashore and philosophers like Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer. All this suggests an author of great expertise and wide appeal.Fiske begins to build his argument by discussing musical cognition in terms of ‘time’ (Chapter 2) and ‘shape’ (Chapter 3) returning to these themes in greater detail in Chapter 6. It may seem axiomatic that music is perceived structurally and through time. Yet, as the author mentions, the capacity for someone to designate musical form is no way in which to illustrate systematically the workings of musical understanding. This happens swiftly and unceasingly in the course of a person’s musical encounter. It is commonplace, too, for musicians and listeners to allude to visual imagery and shape when describing music (for example, ‘high [End Page 204] and low pitches,’ ‘a texture that is dense or thin,’ or ‘an angular melody’). Fiske contributes a plausible explanation of musical shape:... the perceived shape of music can only be the outcome of a construction (not reconstruction or ‘copy’) calculated on the part of the neural network mechanisms… The ‘reality’ of a musical-auditory image is likely a result of imposing a three-dimensioned visual perspective on an inherently unstructured (invisible, tasteless, intangible, and otherwise unknowable) transitory experience. This is the only means the brain has for making sense of a sound event. What it seems to do is: identify relevant cues, piece the cues together into patterns that can be retained (in the echoic memory) long enough for brain mechanisms to examine and create the sense that we can ‘look’ at music by invoking principles borrowed from vision, and then creating the impression of an auditory ‘object.’ The ‘object’ seems complete and multidimensioned but is, however, only remotely related to what we hear during the slit-like limitations of the perceptual ‘now.’(p. 56).Nonetheless, the manner in which we communicate musical perception with terms borrowed from vision does not inconclusively evidence the same mechanisms of human thought on receiving visual or, on the other hand, musical stimuli. Use of such language may only represent an opportune mode of expressing phenomena to which we have no dedicated vocabulary. Fiske argues that musical understanding is part of the human organism’s genetically-inherited capacity to construe (rapidly invent) patterns from sonic stimuli thus making sense of temporal experience. This process, he argues, is part of the brain’s facility to determine quickly the source, kind and meaning of stimuli for the organism’s immediate safety and survival; the mental processes involved are regulated by ‘brain time’ as opposed to ‘clock time.’ Brain time is “... a rapid, micro-temporal, flexible-variable scheme...” (p. 8) in contrast to pre- and externally-determined ‘clock time.’Musical memory is addressed in Chapter 4 in tandem with ‘pattern constructs.’ Pattern constructs, Fiske explains, are ‘chunks’ of learned musical experience encoded in ‘brain time’ as multi-dimensional, unidirectional entities (p. 63). There is evidence of the ‘inner replay’ of learned events such as these.4 Incoming musical information is perceived, though, according to the listener’s cognitive context, and perhaps retroactively linked for ‘best fit’ rather than being ‘measured’ against fixed expectations and pre-established contextual information, say, about genre. The degree of ‘best fit’ either confirms or modifies assumed context. An important point Fiske makes, then, is that “... a misfit... between incoming information and the presumed context” evidences learning (p. 84).5 Since a ‘misfit’ triggers modifications to the cognitive context by which a person discerns music, it enriches his or her musical knowledge and understanding. [End Page 205] Consequently, Fiske sets a challenge for music education: “... how [do we] design teaching... (shrink)

Comparativism--the view that comparative relations like mass ratios are fundamental and intrinsic values of quantities are not--faces a challenge from physics. In its standard form, comparativism predicts indeterminism in physical theories that are ordinarily understood as deterministic. I explore an option for saving comparativism from this objection: the introduction of "mixed" relations that compare values of unlike quantities. Although tenable, this revised version of comparativism lacks some of the theoretical virtues of the standard version.

The permutation symmetry of quantum mechanics is widely thought to imply a sort of metaphysical underdetermination about the identity of particles. Despite claims to the contrary, this implication does not hold in the more fundamental quantum field theory, where an ontology of particles is not generally available. Although permutations are often defined as acting on particles, a more general account of permutation symmetry can be formulated using superselection theory. As a result, permutation symmetry applies even in field theories with no (...) particle interpretation. The quantum mechanical account of permutations acting on particles is recovered as a special case. (shrink)

Comments and replies from the 2021 Eastern APA book symposium on Jill North's Physics, Structure, and Reality.

One widely used method for allocating health care resources involves the use of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to rank treatments in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. CEA has been criticized for discriminating against people with disabilities by valuing their lives less than those of non-disabled people. Avoiding discrimination seems to lead to the ’QALY trap’: we cannot value saving lives equally and still value raising quality of life. This paper reviews existing responses to the QALY trap and argues that all (...) are problematic. Instead, we argue that adopting a moderate form of prioritarianism avoids the QALY trap and disability discrimination. (shrink)

Brutus wanted to kill Caesar. He believed that Caesar was an ordinary mortal, and that, given this, stabbing him (by which we mean plunging a knife into his heart) was a way of killing him. He thought that he could stab Caesar, for he remembered that he had a knife and saw that Caesar was standing next to him on his left, in the Forum. So Brutus was motivated to stab the man to his left. He did so, thereby killing (...) Caesar. (shrink)

Supersymmetry in quantum physics is a mathematically simple phenomenon that raises deep foundational questions. To motivate these questions, I present a toy model, the supersymmetric harmonic oscillator, and its superspace representation, which adds extra anticommuting dimensions to spacetime. I then explain and comment on three foundational questions about this superspace formalism: whether superspace is a substance, whether it should count as spatiotemporal, and whether it is a necessary postulate if one wants to use the theory to unify bosons and fermions.

In this paper we attempt to show how the goal of resolving moral problems in a patient's care can best be achieved by working at the bedside.We present and discuss three cases to illustrate the art and science of clinical ethics consultation. The sine qua non of the clinical ethics consultant is that he or she goes to the patient's bedside to obtain specific clinical and ethical information. Unlike ethics committees, which often depend on secondhand information from a physician or (...) nurse, clinical ethics consultants personally speak with and examine patients and review their laboratory data and medical records. The skills of the clinical ethics consultant include the ability to delineate and resolve ethical problems in a particular patient's case and to teach other health professionals to build their own frameworks for clinical ethical decision making. When the clinical situation requires it, clinical ethics consultants can and should assist primary physicians with case management. (shrink)

This study provides empirical evidence in relation to a growing body of literature concerned with the ‘socialisation’ effects of accounting and business education. A prevalent criticism within this literature is that accounting and business education in the United Kingdom and the United States, by assuming a ‘value‐neutral’ appearance, ignores the implicit ethical and moral assumptions by which it is underpinned. In particular, it has been noted that accounting and business education tends to prioritise the interests of shareholders above all other (...) stakeholder groups. This paper reports on the results of a set of focus group interviews with both undergraduate accounting students and students commencing their training with a professional accounting body. The research explores their perceptions about the purpose of accounting and the objectives of business. The findings suggest that both university and professional students' views on these issues tend to be informed by an Anglo‐American shareholder discourse, whereby the needs of shareholders are prioritised. Moreover, this shareholder orientation appeared to be more pronounced for professional accounting students. (shrink)

Although consumers are increasingly engaged with ethical factors when forming opinions about products and making purchase decisions, recent studies have highlighted significant differences between consumers' intentions to consume ethically, and their actual purchase behaviour. This article contributes to an understanding of this 'Ethical Purchasing Gap' through a review of existing literature, and the inductive analysis of focus group discussions. A model is suggested which includes exogenous variables such as moral maturity and age which have been well covered in the (...) literature, together with further impeding factors identified from the focus group discussions. For some consumers, inertia in purchasing behaviour was such that the decision-making process was devoid of ethical considerations. Several consumers manifested their ethical views through post-purchase dissonance and retrospective feelings of guilt. Others displayed a reluctance to consume ethically due to personal constraints, a perceived negative impact on image or quality, or an outright negation of responsibility. Those who expressed a desire to consume ethically often seemed deterred by cynicism, which caused them to question the impact they, as an individual, could achieve. These findings enhance the understanding of ethical consumption decisions and provide a platform for future research in this area. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 9, Page 1001-1002, November 2022.