Challenges of Ethical Traceability to the Public-Private Divide

Abstract

Ethical traceability and informed food choice challenge the way we think of the two main spheres of society: public and private. The public sphere typically includes the state, the media, democratic political deliberation, public opinion, advertisements, books, buildings, plays, public transportation, etc. Public means open and visible. The private, on the other hand, is the sphere of that which cannot be seen or heard. It is the ‘un-common’ world, characterized by intimacy, individuality, family life, (private) property, private transportation, private businesses, etc. Ethical traceability and informed food choice challenge this divide because they seem to have a foot in both camps. On the one hand, ethical traceability addresses the common good in society – and more specifically in the food production chain. Ethical traceability is public in the sense that it belongs to the sphere of public goods. Furthermore, it contains elements of the public sphere as public discussion about the content of ethical traceability schemes is paramount for the framing of such schemes (see Chapter 11 for elaboration of this idea). On the other hand, ethical traceability addresses private consumers who make their choices on the private premises of the market. The roles of ‘private’ market actors such as producers, retailers and consumers are challenged in that informed food choice enables a political and ethical stance on the part of the market actors. This questions the classical economic idea of an ethically neutral market consisting of non-political consumers and producers. It challenges the idea of food purchase as a purely private matter based on self-interest. The empowerment of consumers through ethical traceability is the extension of the citizen role into the economic sphere of the market. Taken together, these challenges make up a complex terrain, in which market actors and political actors find it hard to find their feet. This is evident from at least three observations that I would like to point to here. Firstly, the empirical work on ethical traceability presented in Part II shows that, for some stakeholders in the food supply chains studied, it was hard even to grasp the idea of ethical traceability. Some were sceptical of the idea because revealing certain aspects of production processes or decision-making could raise ethical