Shopping for meaningful lives: A Christian existential reinterpretation of the moral motivation of consumerism through the theology of Paul Tillich

This dissertation aims to provide the basis for a valid ethical critique of Western consumerism by settling the question of consumerism's moral motivation. It organizes current theories of moral motivation into a typology. Five theoretical types are identified that contend that consumerism is motivated, respectively, by greed, semiotic emulation, manipulation by economic producers, imaginative hedonism, or parental concern. An empirical critique is developed that evaluates each of these theoretical types in connection with the following socioeconomic findings: consumerism's emergence as a mass social phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s, the presence of consumerism across all social classes, the lack of relation between consumption and happiness in consumer societies, the dependence of consumer demand on social utilities as well as direct material utilities, the limited influence of advertising on consumer demand, and the limited influence of childrearing and economic class on housing demand growth. This critique partially invalidates each of the existing theoretical types and so identifies a need for a new theory. Such empirical validation is necessary, it is argued, for ethics to sustain practical claims about how existing persons and communities do and should exercise moral judgment and agency.;A constructive theological ethical method is developed that draws on empirical validation along with Paul Tillich's theology of culture and method of correlation. The position is advanced that consumerism is motivated by its function as a provisional answer to the existential question of the meaningfulness of individual life, a claim that is sustained without reference to any particular theological standpoint. Accordingly, consumerism cannot be understood merely as a matter of socioeconomic structures and institutions, but only through the existential concerns and forms of life of the individual persons who inhabit these structures and institutions. This claim is validated empirically according to the same criteria applied to the current theoretical types. A further claim is advanced, for those who acknowledge the validity of Christian theological claims, that the question of the meaningfulness of individual life to which consumerism provides a flawed working solution is answered more adequately, morally and existentially, by existential Christian faith.