Ethical purchasing

Some people strongly prefer the terminology ethical purchasing to that of "moral purchasing". They believe that:

"Morality tends to be based on assumptions about universal constants. Morality systems rest on a belief in right or wrong. The concepts lack any semantic foundation, so they most often trace their roots to cosmic assumptions..."

However, there are strong arguments against any collusion of the idea of ethics and of purchasing:

• there are more objective, embodied, bases for morality which are derived from undisputed (if not undisputable) moral concepts like "deforestation is bad"; these ought to be exposed, shared, extended, and augment the "cosmic"
• to ignore the "cosmic" is a very bad idea - most people believe in some ethical tradition that determines the universe in some moral fashion, and obviously their participation in moral purchasing is required, and they're to be very strongly encouraged to rigorously apply their moral beliefs to the market - they already do through such labels as kosher and halal and vegan! we must converge with, not compete with, these overtly moral labels
• ethical and economic decisions are both supposed to be conscious and positive, yet, they clearly interfere with each other; to say "ethical purchasing" is to say that one can (thus "must"?) justify a purchasing decision in some ethical code - but the philosopher you argue with is paid by the producer, he is a funded troll, so as soon as you enter this argument, you lose, and he wins, and you are convinced to buy; (this is why SA 8000 cannot possibly work)
• individual buying criteria do, certainly, express a set of moral views of "right and wrong"; even if we think institutional buying criteria are ethical and explicit, we must allow the individual to be moral and implicit. A great responsibility lies on the purchasing agents and other personnel who are directly responsible for the sourcing.
• local purchasing is also implicit, a moral belief that "where we are and who we are near is good"; asking the local to justify itself as most ethical is to create a God's Eye View that will necessarily favour the powerful

That said, it would be impossible to agree on faction or institution buying criteria without some explicit process. But if we're going to call that ethical, it will also be factionally defined, and so we lose coherence by asking everyone to justify their choices on an ethical level.

For all these reasons, the terminology moral purchasing has come into use, and that seems to be an optimum for getting the point across. Everyone knows what "moral" is, even if we are all different, we know what is moral for our selves, even if we got that from a Big Book. While everyone does not know what is ethical, and is almost always referred to some authority to find out. This is not what we really want Consumerium Services to do. Even Consumerium Governance Organization is just a way of s/electing some Lowest Trolls.