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> Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want?
This isn't a bad line of reasoning, but it prompts the question: is it
> Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want?
This isn't a bad line of reasoning, but it prompts the question: is it good for amoral, profit-focused corporations to genuinely change what people want?
There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't absolve us from asking questions about whether they way they're being influenced is healthy and in their best interest. Instead, it prompts us to ask ourselves how to make that manipulation more ethical and how to tell the difference between re-engineering people in an ethical way and re-engineering them for selfish/unethical reasons.
Ideally, we want to give people some degree of agency over how they're influenced. At the very least, we want the people manipulating them to have their best interests at heart. Advertisers don't. If people genuinely want Pepsi, and the reason is that Pepsi made them genuinely want Pepsi, that isn't necessarily a better outcome. We still have to ask why Pepsi chose to do that, and whether some desires are healthier than others, and whether Pepsi should have that kind of power over a population?
In general, we view top-down control over people's actual personalities as dystopian-adjacent, or at least very dangerous and tricky to navigate. Most people on this forum would react negatively to the idea of a government brainwashing or even genuinely shaping people in a highly manipulated way so that they felt a stab of pleasure every time they voted for a particular political party. At the least, we would want to think about the long-term consequences of that manipulation. And a corporation isn't special, we should have the same fears about them.
Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money. It's worth asking whether or not that is a parasitic relationship, given that the implication behind it is that you could have also been manipulated to enjoy something that didn't require giving a company money. Under your theory, a company took steps to make sure that didn't happen. In the worst-case scenario, it's like engineering someone to enjoy cleaning specifically my house for free and then going back to their house to live in poverty. You can still argue that is an exploitative action, even if the end result is that they like what's happening.
Thanks for that perspective. When reading these replies, each person contributes such a distinct and yet clear analysis, it begs the question of whether we are delivering the intended outcome of an agent provocateur. Alternatively, can one view today's advertising techniques in a positive light? The mental gymnastics required to answer that question are certainly more acrobatic if you choose any but the most shallow reply. This is the nature of insidious yet profitable devices. We all know the answer, but the persistence required to defeat these efforts is beyond most.
> There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't absolve us from asking questions about whether they way they're being influenced is healthy and in their best interest
Most of your argument hinges on the idea that there is an objective "best interest" that exists. Not all ethical (or religious) philosophies have this idea. There's a longstanding debate between the subjectivist (Hobbesian) view on ethics and the objectivist (Aristotelian) view on ethics, and this conflict arises often between non-Abrahamic religious ethical philosophies (which often can be varying degrees of subjectivist depending on the religion) and Abrahamic religious ethical philosophies (which are objectivist and rely on Divine Will to create the standard of goodness).
> Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money.
This too depends on the ethical philosophy. Your arguments are from the deontological view of ethics, the idea that consequences of some actions cannot justify their means. The opposing view, consequential ethics, often argues that the desires or values behind the choices have no bearing if the effect of the action, its consequences, are positive. To sum up, your view is deontological and objectivist, often views ascribed to adherents of what scholars today call Virtue Ethics.
All this to say that there is good reason for there to be debate in this space. A lot of folks angrily shout at each other when it comes to advertising and let their emotions do the talking. In reality advertising ethics often delve deep into longstanding unresolved ethical debates that several scholars over millennia have argued positions over.
> Most of your argument hinges on the idea that there is an objective "best interest" that exists. Not all ethical (or religious) philosophies have this idea.
To quote somebody somewhere that I've forgotten, "there's no right way to write a song, but there are wrong ways." We do not need to come to a consensus about the best possible outcome for the world to understand that some states of the world are preferable to other states.
I would challenge you to find any Hobbesian or Arisotelian philosophy, or any non-Abrahamic religion that concludes that making companies money is the ultimate telos of humanity. Certainly the Buddhists are not running around advocating that priming people for consumerism is good.
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> Your arguments are from the deontological view of ethics, the idea that consequences of some actions cannot justify their means.
No, not at all. I'm arguing from the consequentialist point of view that it's bad to have a society where everyone has been wireheaded into getting a stab of pleasure every time they drink Pepsi. I'm arguing that the consequence is bad. I'm also arguing that the means (wireheading) are also dangerous and should approached cautiously, but that's not really the crux of what I'm saying.
And I really don't think that consequentialism or deontology comes into this, I think they're in agreement with each other on this point. If someone argues that it's bad to wirehead citizens for entirely amoral ends (particularly when they're being wireheaded to consume products that are objectively shortening their lives and that are objectively unhealthy), and that it's bad to do all of that purely so that people will be more loyal to a company -- you can argue that position from any moral framework.
Morality is complicated, but that doesn't mean that we can't say anything about morality. There are outcomes and processes that pretty much everyone agrees are bad. If we look at someone beating a cat to death, we might argue deontologically that this is inherently bad because all violence is wrong, we might argue from a consequentialist position that it's a bad outcome for the cat and for society overall. We might argue (as some religious scholars do) that the abuser is sinning against themselves, or we might argue that the cat has inherent moral worth and is sentient. But the one thing all of those frameworks agree on is that it's bad to beat the cat. Similarly, we can argue endlessly about what the telos of a modern member of society is. However, pretty much all moral frameworks agree that manipulating other people for purely selfish ends without any consideration of whether there is any benefit to them is at least morally suspect if not outright morally wrong.
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I don't think I'm saying anything that is particularly controversial, either in Western society or in broader philosophies. I view the retreat into "how can we philosophically say that anything is right or wrong" as something of a deflection of that point. It conveniently sets up a world where we can't say anything about the outcome of any policy or criticize any system until we solve an unsolvable debate on the origin of ethics. And I think that's an ultimately a self-defeating philosophy.
Just to kind of flip this around:
> A lot of folks angrily shout at each other when it comes to advertising and let their emotions do the talking.
Who's to say this is bad? Maybe people shouting at each other over advertising is good actually, how can any of us say for sure? Maybe there's a religion somewhere that thinks yelling at advertisers is a moral end-goal. Would you say it's impossible to condemn ad-blocking without first solving these eternal ethical debates?
The problem with treating literally everything like it's unknowable, even when there's broad consensus that certain outcomes are bad, is that in the end you lose the power to condemn or advocate for anything. This is convenient for advertisers and existing structures/businesses that want to shut down conversations about their morality under the guise that it's impossible to have those conversations, and therefore everyone should just debate consequentialism and stop trying to change the world and stop being angry about anything that existing power structures are doing.
And reminder that we are talking about the idea that advertisers might manufacture a new urge in someone to drink Pepsi, purely because that makes them money. If you want to argue that wireheading people to drink Pepsi is good, pick a moral philosophy and argue that drinking Pepsi is a moral good using that framework. Don't just argue that it's unknowable.
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> In reality advertising ethics often delve deep into longstanding unresolved ethical debates that several scholars over millennia have argued positions over.
Just as one last aside, I want to push back on the idea that advertisers are sitting around talking through moral frameworks before they put out these campaigns. They're not.
Companies are amoral, they exist in a system designed to make money. I like free markets, but to the extent advertisers broadly are thinking about morality within free markets, they are thinking about it through whatever moral framework is immediately available to them, and through whatever moral framework most easily justifies the decisions that benefit the company's bottom line. Independent of your philosophy on wireheading and manipulation, it is very important and relevant for us to question whether companies are the best people to make these moral decisions.
If advertising ethics are actually dependent on large ethical questions, then it does not follow that a board of directors at Walmart/Amazon are the best equipped people to tackle those questions. The advertising system that we have today exists without my consent or input. For some reason this is not viewed by advertisers as a problem; they don't feel that they need to get my sign-off on the ethics of the situation before they manipulate me.
Regardless of the morality of the situation, it's pretty simple to see that the advertising industry is not equipped to decide the outcomes of longstanding unresolved ethical debates and that it might be a bad idea to give them that power.