Madhav Tipu Ramachandran is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at The New School for Social Research. He has a Master's in Economics from SOAS, University of London, and a Master's in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. His research interests are in ethics, economics, and development. As a GIDEST fellow, Madhav will be working on his dissertation work relating to questions of ethical consumption.

Ethical consumption refers to the idea of consuming and acquiring goods and services based on moral and ethical precepts, rather than on the conventionally presupposed economic principles of price, quality, and convenience. Ethical consumption is gaining increasing importance in the modern world, with at least a quarter of Americans being engaged in some form of consumer boycotts presently.

Madhav’s dissertation work has two primary objectives. The first is to define ethical consumption, using methods from the contemporary fields of distributive ethics, analytic philosophy of science, and theories of justice. The second is to uncover the effects of conscious consumption on the economic processes of production and on inequality.

The first step involves using contemporary econometric techniques to analyze particular episodes of ethical consumption and consumer boycotts and their efficacy in terms of their effects on the target institution’s profits, output, and productive relations.

The next step is to ask if we find out that it is in fact ineffective, why do people keep doing it—and in increasing numbers? Ethical consumption is propelled by different motives, and different motives make for different kinds of ethical consumption. It can have both consequentialist and deontological justifications—for instance, a vegetarian could stop consuming animals to reduce the suffering of animals or an individual’s environmental impact, or to simply extricate the individual from the entirety of the meat production process without expecting any quantifiable impact.

Finally, in the language of social choice theory, the research tries to understand why and how ethical consumption could work, and why and how it doesn’t. In a simplistic sense, if everyone stopped consuming a particular commodity, the market for that good would cease to exist. However, there are various disparate issues that emerge—firstly those of identifying the sufficiency threshold for enacting this change, and consequently, the collective action problem of trying to get enough consumers to act together.