The Ethical Criticism Of Luxury Consumption

Currently,with the deepening of “reform and opening up” policy and the rapid development of economic society,people’s consumption level is increasing steadily.However,adverse events among consumption,such as luxury consumption,occurred frequently.For example,just one dinner on New Year’s Eve cost several hundreds of thousands RMB.A boss of coal-mine in Shanxi spends tens of millions on the marriage of his daughter.A group of people collectively bought planes to show off their money.Some persons even sold their kidneys to just buy a famous brand mobile phone.Chinese traditional consumption concept,that is getting rid of luxury and advocating thrifty,is being forgotten gradually by people.However,consumption behavior has a close relationship with moral.What’s more,the happening of immoral phenomena in consumption field will have harmful effects on social climate inevitably.Thus the phenomenon of luxury consumption was analyzed from an ethical point of view,and reasonable moral control measures were given in this thesis.That the phenomenon of luxury consumption continues to occur leads to huge negative impacts on contemporary society,such as waste of resources and ecological environment destruction,the intensify of social contraction,the alienation of human,hedonism,materialism and so on.It is many factors such as culture,individual psychology,policy and regime that lead to the appearing of luxury consumption.From the aspect of regime,the unfairness of the income and distribution system in China results in the increasing income gap and the huge difference of consumption levels between people.From the aspect of social culture,Chinese ingrained “face” culture causes the faintness of civism and moral consciousness,and further leads to the bad habits of conspicuous consumption.From the angle of social psychology,the imbalance of consumption psychology for luxury and pomp also give rise to this phenomenon.In the aspect of individual value,alienation consumption makes people’s consumption of materials convert to the consumption of their own desire,and makes people’s control and manipulation to goods convert to goods’ control to people.As a result,people become the slaves of goods,equate the luxury consumption with happiness,partially pursue the enjoyment of material desire and ignore the pursuit of mind level.In accordance with continually happening of a variety of moral abnormality in contemporary society’s consumption,several moral measures must be taken.Firstly,government should advocate people to establish the ethical concept of green consumption and arouse people’ “moral consciousness” and “ecological consciousness”,which may automatically get rid of waste of resources and ecological environment destruction caused by luxury consumption.The improvement of social moral responsibility may contribute the moderate and rational consumption.Secondly,government should construct reasonable consumption order which could be achieved by three methods.First is constructing the fair oriented social income and distribution system and reducing the income gap between people.Second is to strengthen moral education of personal consumption,to build people’s awareness of the relationship between consumption and moral,and to regulate people’s conspicuous consumption.Third is strengthening the mass media,especially the construction of moral responsibility of advertising,which makes advertisers and media regard the “credit first” as the core to advertise their goods.In addition,government should enhance consumers’ moral critical consciousness to false and exaggerated information of advertising and other media,strength the guidance of public opinion to guide the rational consumption.