Duty and Boycotts: A Kantian Analysis Richard Robinson 1 Received: 2 June 2015 / Accepted: 15 January 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Abstract The societal benefits derived from competitive markets certainly depend upon participants conforming to generally accepted notions of moral duty. These notions include negative duties such as those against fraud, decep- tion, and coercion and also positive duties such as those that favor beneficence but with limits. This investigation exam- ines the extent that product, capital, and internal-labor markets are capable of imposing conformance to society’s expectations of duty through both formally and informally organized boycotts. A categorization of classic and recent boycotts into those motivated by (i) establishing new norms, or (ii) enforcing existing generally accepted norms is pro- vided. This categorization helps to explain why some boy- cotts are successful, and others not. Through this exploration, a contribution to the resolution of the so called ‘‘Adam Smith problem’’ concerning the morality-enforcing capability of the invisible hand is offered. Keywords Boycotts Á Duty Á Market efficiency Á Pricing ethics The Adam Smith Problem Market philosophers have long argued about ‘‘the Adam Smith problem,’’ i.e., the apparent contradiction between Adam Smith’s ethical philosophy as expressed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and the egoistical agent of the invisible hand as expressed in Wealth of Nations (1776). In attempting to resolve this apparent conflict, Samuel Fleischacker (2004, p. 91) argued that ‘‘human beings can pursue even their individual interests together, that even society without benevolence need not be a hostile society, that economic exchange, even among entirely self-interested people is not a zero-sum game.’’ More recently, White (2010) argued that in the Wealth of Nations, Smith did not make an argument in favor of egoism, although he did show that pursuit of self-interest might be sufficient for a hypothetical economic flourishing. Smith only argued that because agents knew their own self- interests, the economic philosophy of mercantilism was inefficient by its nature, i.e., that markets can operate based on self-interest, not that they strictly should operate in this way. The moral behavior of participants still determines whether market interactions are hostile to society’s inter- ests and also the extent of this hostility. Chambers and Lacey (1996) argue that markets are capable of ‘‘pricing’’ participants’ sense of ethics in that through product- and capital-market boycotts, people can negatively affect the demand for a company’s products and financial securities thereby attempting to impose the pub- lic’s ethical will on producers. We have a considerable history of product- and capital-market boycotts of those producers who appear to violate society’s sense of pro- priety. Generally these boycotts have been effective in changing some business practices especially in areas such as child labor, environmental degradation, consumer fraud, and other areas of public concern. A few of these boycotts are reviewed below. Economists would argue that boycotting those practices that are generally perceived as unethical is potentially an effective method for people to force a more efficient allocation of resources, an allocation not associated with unethical practices; that if boycotts of this sort are & Richard Robinson richard.robinson@fredonia.edu 1 School of Business, SUNY at Fredonia, E340 Thompson Hall, Fredonia, NY 14036, USA 123 J Bus Ethics DOI 10.1007/s10551-016-3028-7