In the piece below, Chris MacDonald (co-editor of BEH) argues for keeping your views of Colin Kaepernick, and protest, and patriotism, out of your shoe-shopping decisions. Question: if MacDonald is arguing, in a sense, for keeping our values out of our consumer decisions, does that also mean we shouldn’t let what we see as a company’s immorality (e.g., treating workers badly) affect our purchase decisions? Or is that an importatly different sense of ‘keeping values out of commerce’?
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LINK: Why I’m Not Buying Nikes This Week (by Chris MacDonald, on The Business Ethics Blog)
I’ll get right to the point. I’m not buying a pair of Nikes this week because I don’t need them.
No, I’m not boycotting Nike. Far from it. I think Nike’s recent move to feature Colin Kaepernick in their ads is strategically very clever, and more generally I’m supportive of Kaepernick’s kneeling as a form of protest, and so by extension I’m supportive of Nike’s support of Kaepernick. And no, I don’t think there’s any need to decide between those two analyses: a given business decision can be both strategic and ethical, opportunistic and morally laudable. I think Nike has scored well on both counts, in the present case.
But buying a pair of Nikes I don’t need would be almost as silly as burning a pair….
What do you think?
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