Research On Consumption Ethical Issues In China's Contemporary Transforming Society

Consumption is extremely important for human society, for it is the base for humans survival and development. Consumption is not only an economic issue but also an important ethical one. Since China's reform and opening up, people's consumption level has been greatly improved, and the great changes in traditional consumption patterns have taken place. Meanwhile, some western concept of consumption has a direct impact in people's consumption behavior, practices and the way owing to missing in all sorts of ethical issues. Furthermore, it has a tremendous negative impact on the building of a harmonious society, so it is necessary to set up proper consumption ethics view to eliminate these disharmonious factors in consumption. Therefore, it is practically significant to conduct the research of expense ethics.With dialectical materialism, value analysis and other methods, the paper, from the ecological and economic point of ethics, explains the meaning of consumption, and its ultimate purpose of the ethical content of consumption; defines the relationship between consumption and ethics; sums up the history of ethical consumption type: thrifty spending, extravagant consumption, moderate consumption and sustainable consumption with its character and content. Thus, in social transformation in contemporary China, the paper puts forward that, to establish the reasonable consumption ethics, it is necessary not only to promote the consumption of traditional ethics and learn from the rational core, but also fully reflect the objective requirements of the consumption to meet the harmonious development of today's society based on the reasonable and balanced moderate consumption as its basic meaning. The paper also discusses ethical content and evaluation criteria of rational--harmonious consumption.As the economic restructuring, China has changed from production period to consumption which resulted in lifestyle changes in social innovation, triggered a fracture of the whole community values, conflict and turbulence, and produced the value of consumerism and way of life with the basis of the materialism. In the field of consumption in China, excessive consumptions have also emerged, such as wasteful consumption, high consumption, competition consumption, and blind consumption, which bring a large negative impact on the ecological environment, social and personal development. We should get out of the induced consumerism, and reconstruct the new consumption values that suit the ecological and human security, social responsibility and spiritual values. Harmonious consumption ethics is the establishment of a harmonious consumption in the theory of a harmonious society on the basis of a new harmonious, science, health consumption ethic which has a harmonious consumption as its core and follows three main relationships that forms the harmonious society like people and themselves, people and people, and people and nature aiming to undertake the moral education to the consumption behavior with the moral evaluation and standards. We can find its factual basis not only from the conflicting reality, but also the theoretical source from the unity of man and nature, and the theoretical guidance from the ideology of consumption in Marxism as well. It norms and ensure our consumption of ethical possibility of life with its five main principles: the unity of practice economy and moderate consumption; the unity of consumer freedom and responsibility; and the unity of material and the spirit consumption. In order to better play its role of ethics, we should accelerate the consumption of this new system of ethics.Therefore, based on the status quo of China's current consumption, especially some more serious ethical conflict of consumption, this paper points out the basic ethical path to build up China's current harmonious consumption which is to innovative consumer moral values, optimize the consumption structure, and construct a harmonious consumption environment.