The Ethics of Boycotts

There was an opinion piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer this past week urging all male readers to boycott the upcoming season of the Lingerie Football League because it promotes violence against women (and ultimately rape), even when the watchers are fully committed to the idea of gender equality and disgusted by crimes of this type. The theory goes that since this type of violent crime is the ultimate expression of lack of respect for another person, any behavior (however trivial) that supports or fosters disrespect for anyone is simply a point on that spectrum, and once you have taken the first step all of the subsequent ones become easier. Like all “slippery slope” arguments, this one suffers from several logical fallacies, but it does raise several important points about boycotts of business operations. So let’s consider the ethics of the situation…

First off, I want to make it very clear that I have no information regarding the influence television events like the Lingerie Football League games have on human behavior; I’m not a specialist on gender equality issues, and while I am a behavioral scientist I only study behaviors relating to business. That said, there exists in any slippery slope argument the difficulty that the progression the person making the argument sees may not appear that way to others viewing the same facts – and that what appears to be an escalation to one person may not be. Certainly, without a great deal of highly consistent data to support the contention that exposure to images of women playing football in their underwear leads to an elevated rate of violence against women, we can’t accept any one individual’s opinion that this is so, no matter how expert that individual might be. If we wish to be scientific – or even merely professional – we cannot justify such a boycott simply on the grounds of outrage. But can we support it on purely commercial grounds?

Suppose for a moment that sponsorship of this programming generates additional sales for the companies paying for advertising time on those channels – which we can safely assume, considering that the “league” is continuing operations for another year and companies are still buying the ad time. Let us further suppose that those sales contribute wealth to the stockholders of those companies, allow for the creation of new jobs and raises for those currently employed, and increase the tax base of the communities where those companies (and their employees) live. We have no information to suggest that the people producing the Lingerie Football content are also prospering, but it is reasonable to assume that they must also be paying their employees, suppliers and stockholders (if they are publicly held), as well as giving work and media exposure to the young women who constitute their “players.” Can we assume, then, that any of these actions are unethical?

At the same time, it does not seem unreasonable that some elements of our society might confuse the members of the Lingerie Football league with real female athletes, or that such an association might make it more difficult for real women’s sports (those conducted for the purpose of athletic competition, rather than mere titillation) to gain and hold credibility in a media-dominated era. It is possible, in fact, that viewing such programming really will contribute to unrealistic views of women, disrespect for female athletes and/or women who are willing to perform on national television in their underwear, or even the gradual deterioration of behavior suggested by the opinion columnist in the Plain Dealer. However, I feel we are justified in questioning whether the Lingerie Football programs are the only source of such influences, or whether the vague possibility of bad behavior at some unspecified future point outweighs the positive benefit of jobs, standards of living, profits, and other forms of economic prosperity in the present…

Or, to put it directly, do we as viewers have an ethical responsibility to boycott programming that might, possibly, have bad social consequences at some point in the future? Do we, as citizens of a free-market economy, have an ethical responsibility to allow any business enterprise that does not present any clear and present danger to anything to conduct business in compliance with the laws of our country? Or do we, as members of a society possessing both the right to free expression and the right to the pursuit of happiness, have an ethical responsibility to let people make up their own minds about what they want to watch, what they want to believe, and what they choose to do as a consequence of those behaviors and beliefs, even if we know that a non-zero number of them will choose to do things we find repugnant as a consequence?

It’s worth thinking about…