Why Do We Keep Sweatshops in Business?

When it comes to sweatshop labor, we talk a good game. Unsafe working conditions! Exploitation wages! Underage workers!

But when we see a pair of fancy shoes we like, many consumers are willing to cast their moral indignation into the trash and pull out their wallet.

Call this "moral disengagement," write Harvard Business School researchers Neeru Paharia and Rohit Deshpandé in their new working paper, Sweatshop Labor is Wrong Unless the Jeans are Cute: Motivated Moral Disengagement. It essentially means we rationalize the inconvenient truth when we are motivated to buy something.

And the consequences can be devastating, the authors note.

When consumers are conflicted between their affective desires and their moral standards they may morally disengage in order to consume products that are made with sweatshop labor. While on the face of it, such actions are less atrocious than the horrors of war, they may perhaps be even more dangerous due to their subtle and insidious nature â€" by some estimates there are hundreds of thousands of sweatshops still operating today.