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Review for Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility
Are Emotions Essential for Consumer Ethical Decision Making: A Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA).

The authors (plural assumed) have submitted a paper that empirically tests the assumption that emotions are a necessary condition for moral judgment and intention to behave ethically, using a analytical method NCA for identifying and measuring necessary condition in datasets. Furthermore, authors specify the necessity levels of the conditions - the emotions - required for high-level moral judgment and behavioral intention. The paper is focusing on relevant topic, and it is built on relevant literature. It is also exercising emerging methodology but at this point its weakness outperforms its strengths.

Conceptualization

The conceptualization of the paper is not done in an appropriate way. The authors easily mix terms (consumer ethics Vs. ethical behavior Vs. moral judgment Vs. ethical decision making Vs. ethical decisions). Authors should be very careful when positioning their work and make sure that the terminology used corresponds to the theoretical background that they refer to. For example, ethical behavior is not the same as behavioral intention, and in this study, the authors do not capture behavior but intention using items according to Vitell & Patwardhan (2008) and Vitell, Singhapakdi, & Thomas (2001). Therefore, the theoretical background and positioning should be revised. In addition, Reidenbach & Robin's (1990) multidimensional scale measures different dimensions of moral/ethical judgment (not ethical decision making) and thus the theoretical background and positioning should be revised in this regard.

While it is a minor detail, the authors should be careful in positioning the paper when citing examples of unethical behavior, including copyright breaches; retail theft; withhold too much change received; speeding or texting and driving; or even binge drinking and drunk driving (all illegal activities). On the other hand, among the legal but not ethical activities, the authors mentioned the purchase of single-use plastic products. Buying single-use plastic products is not sustainable nor responsible consumer behavior, but one may question its moral rightness (when no other alternatives are around for example).

Scholarly work outline that no human interaction does take place in an emotional vacuum, of course emotions are always present to some extent. The question is why moral judgments might turn out differently, so we have to have a study to prove that emotions are involved when making moral judgment. Indeed, the authors mention a cognitive component and antecedent of moral judgment. Thus, the model must also include this component to prove that the emotional component (as per dual-process theory of moral judgment) is more important and to determine which specific emotions are most important.

Operationalization of the study

Measuring emotions is complex and multidimensional, and usually connected to physiological or physical processes. Most of the people cannot distinguish among two similar emotions (e.g. happiness and gladness), the one that are able to distinguish are the ones who have high emotional intelligence. Thus, I am wondering how certain one can be that respondents indeed could distinguish among their emotions? Further more, in this type od studies people have tendency to report positive emotions, due to social desirability bias, and thus answers should be treated for social desirability responses. It would be good to have descriptive statistics for respondents, to understand how many responded reported negative emotions.

As people have difficulties to perceive and interpret their emotions accurately, recent studies are showing that measuring emotions with the survey instrument, today when new technologies are rising, is highly inaccurate.

Finally, if scenarios are not tested before the study, there are no prove that they capture what they are supposed to capture.

Convenience sample of consumers, besides being heavily biased and unreliable, is in this study, substantial moved toward younger students’ population, that are proved to be more sensible to social issues and more ethical compared to older ones. Thus, maybe authors would like to focus on this segment their study

Minor
• What criteria is selected for articles to be included in the Table 1? It is very strange that only one article is from the Journal of Busines Ethics
• Harman’s single factor test- is not strong, it is advised to use another test such as marker variable.
• It is not clear how respondents were asked about the different stages of the ethical decision making process.
• Language throughout the manuscript should be improved.
• References are not taken with care and full list of the references is not provided.

I hope this review has been helpful. I wish the authors well as they continue to develop this project. I look forward to seeing how it progresses.

Thank you to the authors for responding to the comments. Although some of the comments are not formally addressed, but merely noted and listed in the limitations section, I can understand that this may be sufficient for journals that are not of the highest rank. However, I still have some comments that should be addressed more carefully than in the previous revision:

Convenience samples: I urge authors to be very careful about how they incorporate the results of other papers into their arguments. Winton and Sabol (2021) do compare convenience samples in terms of the source of data collection. They, by no means claim that the convenience sample offers generalizability. Winton and Sabol's (2021) study merely confirms that on-site and classroom data collection do not yield significant differences in both the measurement and structural parameters of the data (Winton and Sabol, 2021). In addition, the statement that convenance sampling is often used in consumer research is overstated as I am not familiar that in leading consumer research journals there are a recent study published solely based on convince sample (unless supported by other datasets). Finally, your sample is heavily skewed toward college students and young professionals, so conclusions based on this sample just cannot be generalized to the population as a whole.

Ethical Decision Stages: It would be helpful if you made it clear that the phases of ethical decision making in your study are as follows: Ethical Awareness, Ethical Judgment, Ethical Intention, Ethical Behavior. However, if these are the phases, it is not clear why these phases are not linked, which would allow validation of the ethical decision-making process.

Literature Review Table: your answer about the inclusion criteria for selecting articles in Table 1 is not clear. What do you mean by relevance? How did you "define" relevance? Why are articles like the examples below not relevant?

Chowdhury, R. M. (2017). Emotional intelligence and consumer ethics: the mediating role of personal moral philosophy. Journal of business ethics, 142(3), 527-548.
Hassan, S. M., Rahman, Z., & Paul, J. (2022). Consumer ethics: an overview and research agenda. Psychology & Marketing, 39(1), 111-130.
De Bock, T., & Van Kenhove, P. (2010). Consumer ethics: the role of self-regulation. Journal of Business Ethics, 97(2), 241-255.

Inclusion criteria must be clearly specified if the LR table is to make sense. Inclusion criteria are to confirm objectivity, transparency, and replicability of LR. You do not want an arbitrary table.