In June this year, we held a panel discussion on the “Ethics of Boycotts” at Bayreuth University, where I am Professor of Ethics. I was nervous about how it would go, given the tense climate of discussion around the Gaza war in Germany. But it ended up being an example of open, free, constructive discussion, amicable and controversial in equal parts, between thinkers who do not see eye to eye on several of the issues we touched on — and this included an audience of mostly students. It was a reminder of the special space universities can provide for such discourse to take place.
And yet, according to some proponents of a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, the discussion should not have taken place in this form, since we had invited a colleague from an Israeli university: the philosopher Daniel Schwartz of Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We were grateful he agreed, as somebody personally affected by some of the issues the panel was going to discuss. All the more impressive was the gracious manner in which he participated in the discussion. Granted, many of those calling for an academic boycott, including Sally Haslanger, an (equally gracious) distinguished boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) supporter on our panel, try to target boycotts at institutions, not individuals. But the two are hard to disentangle. Refusing to write a promotion recommendation for an Israeli university harms mostly the individual. And if you coauthor with an Israeli colleague, their affiliation will appear next to yours on the published manuscript. Any meaningful academic boycott will negatively impact the kind of open and free discourse I got to witness.
It is easy to disagree with a boycott if you disagree with the cause it promotes. But in this case, I agree that many of the reasons to put pressure on the Israeli government cited by proponents of boycotts are legitimate – in particular, those relating to ending disproportionate killing and destruction in the current conflicts and working towards a two-state solution. Yet I think a general academic and cultural boycott of Israel is unjustified. Why? And what, in general, could be moral problems with calling for or joining a boycott even if your goals in doing so are just?
History tells us that boycotts can be powerful engines for social change. The Montgomery bus boycott led to the overturning of laws of racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama and empowered the civil rights movement all over the US. Boycotts were crucial for ending apartheid in South Africa. And there are many examples of consumer boycotts that directly led to companies changing some of their worst behaviours. Boycotts are particularly powerful as forms of grassroots organisation, where official pathways for achieving change are inaccessible or ineffective.
Aside from their impressive track record, there is something that seems inherently unobjectionable about boycotts. Boycotts involve the choice not to engage with somebody or some institution, or not to buy something where one otherwise would. Generally, within the limits of the law, we should be free to engage with whomever we want, and buy whatever we want. No company has a right to my business, and no fellow academic has a right to be invited by me to give a talk in my department. So how could it be wrong to withhold my business, or academic invitations?
But boycotts do not only involve me withholding my business. Boycotts come with an explicit message to the boycotted, expressing moral blame or calling for specific actions being taken. And they are collective. Organisers of boycotts are asking others to join them. It is the message and the collective nature of boycotts that makes them so effective. But this same powerful combination raises the burden of justification.
By their very nature, boycotts cause harm. Those boycotted lose the benefit of the business and interaction with everybody participating in the boycott. Some may go out of business or lose their jobs. This may have indirect effects on others. Often, these harms are clearly justified because of the greater benefits achieved by the boycott. The harms of the lost profits of the Montgomery public transport system pale in comparison to the good achieved through the boycott. Sometimes, those who are harmed hold a degree of responsibility for the moral wrong the boycott aims to rectify, including having failed to condemn it. Others may at least have benefitted from the moral wrong in question. One or the other would have been true of most white South Africans during apartheid, for instance. Being implicated in the moral wrong in these ways means one has less of a valid complaint against being harmed by a boycott.
But boycotts also harm people who bear little or no responsibility, and even those who are themselves already actively working towards righting the wrong. This is arguably true of many Israeli academics and cultural figures who stand in opposition to their current government. Where this is the case, boycotts had better be effective at achieving at least some of their intended goals, and what they do achieve should be worth this cost. When boycotts are worth the cost, those harmed as collateral damage in fact often fully support them, as many anti-apartheid South Africans did. But while success was worth the cost in the case of many such famous past boycotts, the question is clearly something instigators of boycotts should be mindful of.
A critic might point out that ethics is not all about consequences. Maybe, for instance, we should avoid complicity in evil, even if we could achieve a greater good by making ourselves complicit. If boycotts are just ways for us to remove ourselves from complicity in exploitative labour practices, racial injustice, or a government’s unjustified violence, perhaps that is a good enough reason irrespective of the consequences. Consider, however, that if everybody just cared about their own complicity, all we would each need to do is to not engage. When we publicly announce our boycott and call for others to join, we show we also care about our collectivecomplicity, in us all not being complicit. But then we need to look at consequences again. And one potential unintended consequence of a boycott is that it simply shifts complicity from one group to another, and thus does not reduce collective complicity at all. In the case of boycotts of ethical consumerism, for instance, it might shift complicity from those who can to those who cannot afford alternative, more ethical products.
Complicity can also become a moral problem when joining a boycott. The larger boycotts become, the more diverse the motivations of those joining in. This creates the risk of aligning yourself with those holding and publicly expressing objectionable views in relation to the boycott. It may be a minority, but it is undeniable that a subset of those calling for boycotts of Israel are openly antisemitic or, in the current context, relativise, excuse or even celebrate the horrific Hamas attacks of October 2023. Germans in particular are rightly wary of the expressive harm of aligning themselves with a boycott if that boycott does not do enough to clearly draw a line to exclude such groups.
When we consider joining or calling for a boycott, we should thus not only ask ourselves whether we are boycotting for a just cause. We should also ask ourselves further questions: Who else is going to join this boycott and what are their motivations? Will the boycott be effective in achieving what we want it to achieve? Is it well-targeted, minimising harm to those least responsible and beyond what is necessary to achieve our goal? And are there any unintended adverse consequences? We need to carefully weigh up our responses to these questions.
Looking at boycotts that aim to pressure the Israeli government to drastically reduce violence, better discriminate targets, enable humanitarian aid and more generally shift course in its policy regarding the occupied territories and the wider region, according to the above criteria there are reasons to doubt both the effectiveness and the proportionality of extending them to an academic and cultural boycott. For one, an academic and cultural boycott harms many of those Israelis who are most vocal in holding their government to account. Even looking at those who are not so vocal, a boycott tends to coerce rather than persuade them into more vocal opposition. It thereby sends an othering message that is both likely to be counterproductive, and to help destroy something broader, namely the culture of open and free discourse that characterises the academic and cultural sector. This is a culture that we all benefit from, as I and my students did a few months ago in that panel discussion. In practice, this problem is often made worse by the selective exclusion of those voices not fully on board with the boycott’s goals or methods, thereby shielding it from scrutiny. Economic boycotts well-targeted at those who directly profit from the occupation and the war, so long as they also take a clear stance against antisemitism and terrorism, would avoid these costs and likely be more effective. Given the moral urgency of what is at stake, that is the kind of boycott we should support.
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