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This paper investigates the normative aspects of animal food production and retailing and takes as a presumption that food consumers deliberately choosing animal-welfare products act normatively (on a moral basis) and thereby include values that either supervene or supplement the values of product price, taste, nutrition, etc. The animal welfare aspect of a given product is a "credence attribute" and can as such not be directly experienced via the product. Thus, information external to the product becomes the only conditions from which to evaluate the product and motivate possible behaviours. There is, however, a well-documented attitudinal ambivalence in food product shopping where we experience inconsistencies between what could be defined as general citizen attitudes or values on the one hand and consumer behaviour patterns on the other. In other words, in anonymous studies people will generally claim a higher level of concern for animal welfare than is subsequently obvious from the sales records of grocery stores. There is, however, also a measurable connection between costumers' willingness to pay (extra) and moral imperatives derived from values about animal welfare. The paper will focus on analysing the relation between the animal welfare related ethical values of consumers and some of the extents and limits of consumers' ethical actions. It will, furthermore, normatively evaluate the concrete social systems of urban life – economic, political and cultural – which constitute the environmental extents and the limits of individual consumers' abilities for ethical deliberation. Thus the main question becomes: What is the connection between the consumers' ability for ethical deliberation (what we with Aristotle could call phronesis) in food choices and the cultural, economic and political framing of consumer deliberation? This question leads to a normative and constructive sub-question which asks what kind of systems of public policy a society needs in order to positively enable the individual consumer to deliberate phronetically. In other words: how do we create a society with genuine possibilities for ethical consumerism?

DOI: 10.3920/978-90-8686-784-4_42

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