Earlier in December, there was a three-day sale of imported Oriental rugs at the Mennonite church near my house in Baltimore. “They are a little pricey,” one of my neighbors warned me wryly, “because the workers are paid a living wage.” What a concept! The last time I bought an Oriental rug — years ago in Kashmir — I haggled over the price with little thought for the well-being of the rugmakers. I was pretty sure most of the profit would go to the store owner, anyway. But now my already stressful shopping season — garlanded with aspirations to find creative presents — had been complicated by the intrusion of altruism: I was meant to worry about the workers.

So it was that I found myself watching another neighbor sort through piles of richly patterned, hand-knotted rugs, looking for just the right ruby tone to replace the threadbare floor covering in her dining room. She knew she probably wouldn’t get a bargain that day, but she had been convinced by the saleswoman’s spiel that there was added ethical value to her purchase: Her investment would support Pakistani craftsmen and women (but no children, of course) who use looms donated by a charity, Jakciss, that is committed to building schools and promoting harmony between the country’s Christian and Muslim populations.

I left the church with a warm feeling about an organization that was helping to maintain village life half a world away. But without a rug.

Buying a pricey Oriental would have been beyond my budget, I told myself, and was not, therefore, the right thing for me to do. I’d check out some cheaper handcrafts instead, and other goods sold to support traditional artisans and farmers in the developing world. That decision pitched me, walletfirst, into the moral minefield of the movement known as “ethical shopping.”

Using buying power to improve the world is a growing commitment among consumers in this country, according to the rug sellers at the Mennonite church, who told me that increasing numbers of customers ask well-informed questions about the conditions under which their purchases had been made. And it has become big business in Europe, where a fair trade consumer guarantee was launched almost 20 years ago under the Dutch label Max Havelaar. The aim back then was to replicate the moral mindset that charities like Jakciss had fostered around niche handcraft markets and take it mainstream. According to the umbrella group Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), there are now fair trade initiatives in 20 countries, including the United States, for such staples as cocoa, chocolate bars, orange juice, tea, honey, sugar and bananas as well as the ur-currency of the fair trade world — coffee. Between 2002 and 2003, sales of these goods grew by 42.3 percent worldwide. But there is also controversy brewing about just who’s profiting from the guilt-charged spending habits of the Western world’s consumers.

The pervasiveness of those habits came home to me a couple of months ago when I was in Britain (the world’s largest fair trade market). My usually frugal brother sought out ground decaf coffee with the distinctive green and blue Fairtrade logo — and a higher price tag — for me at the Sainsbury’s supermarket. Matthew told me he’s prepared to pay more for fair trade “if a couple of pennies go to the poor grower,” and he also tries to support people who grow produce locally in Cornwall, where he lives. But, he says, he’s not holier-than-thou about his shopping, and he sometimes finds that his two goals conflict. He’ll cast an eye over the ethical shopping reports that appear in London’s newspapers now that the movement has picked up enough steam to cater regularly to people like him. The liberal Guardian reviews the Ethical Consumer Research Association’s “best buys,” which allocates each purer-than-the-driven-snow product a numerical “ethiscore.”

The knowledge that people like my brother will pick fair trade products first off the supermarket shelves has prompted many stores to advertise the fact that they stock fair trade foods. And that has led, others suggest, to an indigestible melange of entrepreneurship and ethics.

That, at least, is the contention of conservative commentator Philip Oppenheim, who argued recently that in Britain, it’s supermarkets that profit most from fair trade sales. They charge a premium for fair trade bananas, for example, while a “minuscule sliver ends up with the people the movement is designed to help,” he writes. I’m not sure whether he’s right. And that’s the root of the problem: I’m a consumer, not a trade expert. I’m more interested in finding fresh fruit than in investigating profit margins as I swoop bananas into my shopping cart. But if he is right, Europe’s experience may be a warning. A Wall Street Journal story last year, about misleading labeling by some companies here, said that Cafe Borders adjusted its pricing after it was suggested that the company might be taking advantage of consumers’ charitable instincts.

If this modern, mainstream incarnation of fair trade is under attack from the right by those who believe that free trade is the fairest trade of all, it also risks a hammering from those on the left who feel that all big business is bad business. As Julian Baggini, who edits the British-based Philosophers’ Magazine, put it, ethical consumerism “is characterised by three almost religious convictions: that multinationals are inherently bad; that the ‘natural’ and organic are inherently superior; and that science and technology are not to be trusted.” So anti-globalization activists criticize companies like Levi Strauss and Starbucks, even though Levi Strauss was among the first multinationals to establish a code of conduct for its manufacturing contractors and Starbucks is one of North America’s largest roasters and retailers of fair trade coffee. And both can probably afford to be more altruistic than many smaller companies.

At this time of the year, some people I know have taken the idea of doing good by buying well to greater heights than I ever will. Over dinner a couple of weeks ago, a friend told me what he was planning to give his adult sons this Christmas: a heifer (to be donated to a family in the developing world by Heifer International, the charity whose goal is “Ending hunger, caring for the earth”) and a bag of stone-ground cornmeal (from an 18th-century Pennsylvania grist mill, which is preserved as a museum “for the pleasure and education of the public”).

Unlike my friend, I’m prepared to toss a little tinsel over my conscience and spend some money for fun instead of for socially responsible reasons. Still, I did buy toothpaste from Tom’s of Maine (which donates 10 percent of profits and 5 percent of paid worker time to charity). I bought stocking stuffers from the Body Shop, whose founder Anita Roddick is savvy enough to leaven her company’s earnest mission statement (“To dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change”) with such sprightly scents as “Zest for Satsuma” and “Perfect Passion.”

And I bought handmade soap (crafted from natural oils by traditional Indian soap makers) as well as folded paper Christmas ornaments (made by a group that supports disadvantaged Bangladeshis) from a special seasonal outlet of Ten Thousand Villages, which is the company that distributes the Jakciss rugs. And I enjoyed finding out more about the artisans on the company’s informative Web site.

But I’m left with a conundrum. I want to do the right thing, but I’m not prepared to make a career of it. It’s not hard to find criticisms online about the Body Shop, for example; it’s much harder to verify them. And I’m much less interested in checking out the story behind the bananas I buy than I am in the origin of those origami ornaments. What’s more, despite efforts by nonprofits like TransFair and the International Fair Trade Association or IFAT (which monitors companies like Ten Thousand Villages), there’s a lot of room for misleading labeling in our ethical shopping baskets. So when it comes to my food shopping in particular, I’m left wondering whether I would be doing just as much good if I simply bought the best bargain and sent the money I had saved to a development charity (as Oppenheim would have me do). Best of all might be to buy locally whenever possible, like my brother.

Even the purchase that I believe was one of my most ethical is controversial. I bought a lamb. No, not a lamb like my friend’s heifer, which will help feed a family in the developing world for years to come. My lamb will feed my already well-fed family in the weeks to come. I bought it — butchered and packaged for my freezer — from my daughter’s old kindergarten teacher, who lives on a farm and used to bring orphaned lambs to school to be bottle-fed.

I can’t pretend that I was motivated by the need to provide the workers with a living wage, although I do know that running a profitable business helps keep property taxes down and therefore keep the farmland open. No, I bought the lamb largely because the more I’ve read about the lives of animals that end up shrink-wrapped on supermarket shelves, the more I’ve developed a distaste for mass-produced meat. So it struck me as a principled stance to know that the animal I’m eating led a happy, hormone-free life, even if it was a short one.

But try telling my vegetarian friends that. Or even the carnivorous friends who came to dinner last Sunday and could hardly stomach the fact that I had such intimate knowledge of the creature I was carving.

One man’s meat, you see, can be another man’s ethical predicament.