The Inconclusive Ethical Case against Manipulative Advertising

The Inconclusive Ethical Case against Manipulative Advertising

By Michael J. Phillips

 

This essay explores the ethical implications of [the] perception that advertisers successfully “exploit and manipulate the vast range of human fears and needs.” It begins by defining its sense of the term manipulative advertising.

Then the essay asserts for purposes of argument that manipulative advertising actually works. Specifically, I make two controversial assumptions about such advertising:

(1) that it plays a major role in increasing the general propensity to consume, and

(2) that it powerfully influences individual consumer purchase decisions.

With the deck thus stacked against manipulative advertising, the essay goes on to inquire whether either assumption justifies its condemnation, by considering four ethical criticisms of manipulative advertising. Ethically, I conclude, manipulative advertising is a most problematic practice. If probabilistic assertions are valid in ethics, then the odds strongly favor the conclusion that manipulative advertising is wrong. Nevertheless, there still is room for doubt about its badness. Like the apparently easy kill that continually slips out of the hunter’s sights, manipulative advertising evades the clean strike that would justify its condemnation once and for all.

 

What is Manipulative Advertising?

. . . I define “manipulative advertising” as advertising that tries to favorably alter consumers’ perceptions of the advertised product by appeals to factors other than the product’s physical attributes and functional performance. There is no sharp line between such advertising and advertising that is nonmanipulative; even purely informative ads are unlikely to feature unattractive people and depressing surroundings. Nor is it clear what proportion of American advertising can fairly be classed as manipulative. Suffice it to say that that proportion almost certainly is significant. As we will see, advertising’s critics sometimes seem to think that all of it is manipulative.

Perhaps the most common example of manipulative advertising is a technique John Waide (1987, 73– 74) calls “associative advertising.” Advertisers using this technique try to favorably influence consumer perceptions of a product by associating it with a nonmarket good (e.g., contentment, sex, vigor, power, status, friendship, or family) that the product ordinarily cannot supply on its own. By purchasing the product, their ads suggest, the consumer somehow will get the nonmarket good. Michael Schudson describes this familiar form of advertising as follows: “The ads say, typically, ‘buy me and you will overcome the anxieties I have just reminded you about’ or ‘buy me and you will enjoy life’ or ‘buy me and be recognized as a successful person’ or ‘buy me and everything will be easier for you’ or ‘come spend a few dollars and share in this society of freedom, choice, novelty, and abundance’ ” (1986, 6). Through such linkages between product and nonmarket good, associative advertising seeks to increase the product’s perceived value and thus to induce its purchase. Because these linkages (e.g., the

 

 

connection between beer and attractive women) generally make little sense, such advertising is far removed from rational persuasion.

 

The Effects of Manipulative Advertising: What the Critics Think

In the previous section, I tried to describe manipulative advertising in terms of sellers’ efforts, rather than their actual accomplishments. But does manipulative advertising successfully influence consumers? As might be expected, advertising’s critics generally answer this question in the affirmative. Perhaps the best-known example is chapter XI of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, where he described his well-known dependence effect.

Galbraith’s dependence effect might be described as the way the process of consumer goods production creates and satisfies consumer wants (1958, 158). “That wants are, in fact, the fruit of production,” he intoned, “will now be denied by few serious scholars” (154). In part, these wants result from emulation, as increased production means increased consumption for some, followed by even more consumption as others follow suit (154–55). But advertising and salesmanship provide an even more direct link between production and consumer wants. Those practices, Galbraith says:

cannot be reconciled with the notion of independently determined desires, for their central function is to create desires…. This is accomplished by the producer of goods or at his behest. A broad empirical relationship exists between what is spent on production of consumers’ goods and what is spent in synthesizing the desires for that production. A new consumer product must be introduced with a suitable advertising campaign to arouse an interest in it. The path for an expansion of output must be paved by a suitable expansion in the advertising budget. Outlays for the manufacturing of a product are not more important in the strategy of modern business enterprise than outlays for the manufacturing of demand for the product. (155–56)

[If you find the above quote confusing, you’re far from alone. But know that Galbraith found advertising to be manipulative in general. He saw the goal of advertising not to sway consumers from one product to another, but instead, as a means to create higher demand for goods. Put another way, he saw the goal of advertising as causing us to consume more goods, as opposed to different goods. That is, that the goal is to cause us to buy more products, as opposed to swaying us from buying one product instead of its alternative.]

. . . From all this, it is a short step to the notion that advertising plays a major role in shaping and sustaining the modern society of material abundance. Implicitly, at least, some accounts of this kind liken society to a huge machine whose aim is the conversion of natural resources into consumer products. For the machine to work properly, its human components must be motivated to play their role in producing those products. This can be accomplished by:

(1) implanting in people an intense desire for consumer goods, and

(2) requiring that they do productive work to get the money to buy those goods.

. . . Galbraith suggested that these social imperatives of production and consumption make the worker/consumer resemble a squirrel who races full-tilt to keep abreast of a wheel propelled by his own efforts (1958, 154, 159).

 

 

[We’ve now seen a description of Galbraith’s attack on advertising. This next part describes a defense of advertising that advertising is a necessary condition for prosperity. ]

. . . William H. Genge, the chairman of Ketchum Communications’ board, wrote:

I regard the many millions of dollars spent by fast-food companies (and other retailers as well) as healthy and necessary stimulation of the consumption that makes our economy the most dynamic and productive in the world.

Some people talk as though large advertising budgets are wasteful and nonproductive. It just takes one simple question to put that down. The question is: Where does the money go? The answer is: It provides jobs and livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of people—not only in the advertising and communications sector but for all the people employed by fast-food companies and, indeed, all marketing organizations. (1985, 58–59)

“So,” Genge concluded, “large advertising expenditures are not a misallocation of economic resources. They are, in fact, an essential allocation and the driving force behind consumption, job creation, and prosperity” (59).

Advertising that is sufficiently manipulative to create a consumer society also might be able to determine consumers’ individual purchase decisions. Most often, I suppose, these would be brand choices within a particular product category, although advertising might also steer people toward certain products and away from others . . ..

[I like the remainder of this essay. I chose it as your reading, in part, because this is how I want you to be able to reason about issues on your final.]

Assumptions and Plan of Attack

As we have just seen, many critics of advertising say that it socializes people to a life of consumption. And some regard it as a strong influence on individual brand or product decisions. However, these beliefs are not universally shared. Some students of advertising doubt that ads do much to dictate individual brand choices. And even if advertising strongly influences consumer decisions, it does not follow that any specific ad invariably compels the purchase of the product it touts. The reason is that a particular product advertisement is only one of many factors—especially competing advertisements— influencing consumers (Hayek 1961, 347). For the same general reason, it is difficult to assess advertising’s role in making people lifetime consumers . . ..

 

Despite such difficulties, this essay assumes for the sake of argument that manipulative advertising really works. Thus, I assume that such advertising strongly influences individual purchase decisions, and that it plays a major role in producing consumerist attitudes among the populace. In neither case, however, do I wish to specify all the links in the causal chain through which manipulative advertising does its work. In particular, I make no assumptions about the personal traits that render consumers responsive to manipulative advertising. Later in the essay, for example, I consider the possibility that manipulative advertising succeeds because consumers want and need it.

 

 

 

Operating under the assumptions just stated, I now consider four possible ethical attacks on manipulative advertising. These are the claims that such advertising:

(1) has negative consequences for utility,

(2) undermines personal autonomy,

(3) violates Kant’s categorical imperative, and

(4) weakens the personal virtue of its practitioners and its victims.

I also consider one qualified defense of manipulative advertising: that even though no moral person would choose it were he writing on a clean slate, by now its elimination would be worse than its continuance. . ..

[Phillips does not question whether any of the competing normative theories that he assesses advertising through are true. He takes their (contradictory) claims for granted and uses them as a lens to analyze advertising through.]

 

Utilitarianism

As just stated, this essay assumes that advertising can manipulate people in two distinct ways:

(1) by socializing them to embrace consumerist values, and

(2) by dictating individual purchase decisions.

One important utilitarian criticism of manipulative advertising seems mainly to involve the first of these effects. Another implicates the second effect . . . . I now discuss each of these utilitarian attacks in turn. Throughout, I explicitly or implicitly compare my assumed world in which manipulative advertising exists and is effective with a world in which all advertising is merely informative.

 

The Implications of the Dependence Effect

The Affluent Society marked Galbraith’s arrival as a critic of consumer society and its works. For his critique to be persuasive, he had to counter the argument that America’s enormous production of consumer goods is justified because people want, enjoy, and demand them. This required that he undermine at least two widespread beliefs:

(1) that consumer desires are genuinely autonomous, and

(2) that they produce significant satisfactions.

As we saw earlier, he attacked the first assumption by maintaining that consumer wants are created by the productive process through which they are satisfied, with advertising serving as the main generator of those wants. This argument would have enabled Galbraith to contend that advertising is bad because it denies autonomy, but he seemed not to emphasize that point. Instead, he maintained that the satisfaction of advertising-induced desires generates little additional utility. His argument was that if

 

 

advertising is needed to arouse consumer wants, they cannot be too strong. “The fact that wants can be synthesized by advertising, catalyzed by salesmanship, and shaped by the discreet manipulations of the persuaders shows that they are not very urgent. A man who is hungry need never be told of his need for food” (1958, 158).

As a result, Galbraith continued, one cannot assume that the increased production characterizing the modern affluent society generates corresponding increases in utility. Instead, as he summarizes the matter:

[O]ur concern for goods … does not arise in spontaneous consumer need. Rather, the dependence effect means that it grows out of the process of production itself. If production is to increase, the wants must be effectively contrived. In the absence of the contrivance the increase would not occur. This is not true of all goods, but that it is true of a substantial part is sufficient. It means that since the demand for this part would not exist, were it not contrived, its utility or urgency, ex contrivance, is zero. If we regard this production as marginal, we may say that the marginal utility of present aggregate output, ex advertising and salesmanship, is zero. (160)

Because wants must be contrived for production to increase, on Galbraith’s assumptions production would be lower were advertising completely informative. Since on those assumptions that contrived production generates little additional utility, however, the loss would not be much felt. Indeed, with resources shifted away from advertising and consumption and toward activities that improve the quality of our lives, overall utility might well grow in manipulative advertising’s absence.

Galbraith’s basic argument was that because consumer wants are contrived, they are not urgent; and that because they are not urgent, their satisfaction does not generate much utility. One way to attack his argument is to maintain that consumer desires really do arise from within the individual, but my two assumptions foreclose that possibility here. Another is to follow the lead established by Friedrich Hayek’s 1961 critique of Galbraith’s dependence effect. To Hayek, Galbraith’s argument involves a massive non sequitur: the attempt to reason from a desire’s origin outside the individual to its unimportance (1961, 346–47). If that assertion were valid, he thought, it would follow that “the whole cultural achievement of man is not important” (346).

Surely an individual’s want for literature is not original with himself in the sense that he would experience it if literature were not produced. Does this mean that the production of literature cannot be defended as satisfying a want because it is only the production which provokes the demand? In this, as in the case of all cultural needs, it is unquestionably, in Professor Galbraith’s words, “the process of satisfying the wants that creates the wants.” (347)

Presumably, the same general point applies to utility-maximization. Just because product desire A originated within Cal Consumer while product desire B came his way through manipulative advertising, it does not follow that satisfying desire A would give him more utility than satisfying desire B. Indeed, as we will see presently, the opposite may be true.

 

 

 

 

 

The Frustration of Rational Interbrand Choices

The second major utilitarian objection to manipulative advertising concerns its power to distort consumer choices among brands and products. As R. M. Hare once observed:

[T]he market economy is only defensible if it really does … lead to the maximum satisfaction of the preferences of the public. And it will not do this if it is distorted by various well-known undesirable practices…. By bringing it about that people decide on their purchases … after being deceived or in other ways manipulated, fraudulent advertisers impair the wisdom of the choices that the public makes and so distort the market in such a way that it does not function to maximize preference-satisfactions. (Hare 1984, 27–28)

For example, now suppose that Cal Consumer’s preferences would find their optimum satisfaction in Product A. Intoxicated by Product B’s manipulative advertising, Cal instead buys that product, which satisfies his original preferences less well than Product A. If Cal would have bought Product A in a regime where advertising is purely informative, presumably B’s manipulative advertising cost him some utility.

The previous argument, however, might fail if manipulative advertising gives consumers satisfactions that they would not otherwise obtain from their purchases. In that event, the utility lost when manipulative advertising causes consumers to choose the wrong product for their needs must be weighed against the utility consumers gain from such advertising. Due to the inherent uncertainty of utility calculations, it may be unclear which effect would predominate. Sometimes, though, the gains could outweigh the losses: that is, manipulative advertising could generate more utility than purely informative advertising.

But how can “manipulated” desires and purchases generate more utility than their “rational” counterparts? One answer emerges from the dark masterpiece of the literature on manipulative advertising—Theodore Levitt’s 1970 contribution to the Harvard Business Review. Levitt’s main thesis is that “embellishment and distortion are among advertising’s legitimate and socially desirable purposes” (Levitt 1970, 85). His determinedly nonlinear argument for that conclusion may be regarded as proceeding through several steps. The first is his assertion that when seen without illusions, human life is a poor thing. Natural reality, Levitt insists, is “crudely fashioned”; “crude, drab, and generally oppressive”; and “drab, dull, [and] anguished” (86, 90). For this reason, people try to transcend it whenever they can. “Everyone everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich, and reconstruct the world around him—to introduce into an otherwise harsh or bland existence some sort of purposeful and distorting alleviation” (87). People do so mainly through artistic endeavor, but also through advertising. “[W]e use art, architecture, literature, and the rest, and advertising as well, to shield ourselves, in advance of experience, from the stark and plain reality in which we are fated to live” (90). Thus, “[m]any of the so-called distortions of advertising, product design, and packaging may be viewed as a paradigm of the many responses that man makes to the conditions of survival in the environment” (90).

From all this, it follows that consumers demand more than “pure operating functionality” from the products they buy (89). As Charles Revson of Revlon, Inc., once said: “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope” (85). Thus, “[i]t is not cosmetic chemicals women want, but the seductive charm promised by the alluring symbols with which these chemicals have been surrounded—hence the rich and exotic packages in which they are sold, and the suggestive advertising with which they are

 

 

promoted” (85). In other words, consumers demand an expanded notion of functionality which includes “‘nonmechanical’ utilities,” and do so to “help … solve a problem of life” (89). Therefore, “the product” they buy includes not only narrowly functional attributes, but also the emotional or affective content produced by its packaging and advertising. “The promises and images which imaginative ads and sculptured packages induce in us are as much the product as the physical materials themselves…. [T]hese ads and packagings describe the product’s fullness for us; in our minds, the product becomes a complex abstraction which is … the conception of a perfection which has not yet been experienced” (89–90)….

To Levitt, therefore, we do not merely buy a physical product, but also a set of positive feelings connected with it by advertising. If his argument is sound, those feelings give us extra utility above and beyond the utility we get from the product’s performance of its functions. This extra utility might well outweigh the utility we lose because manipulative advertising has made us buy a product that is suboptimum in purely functional terms and that we would not have bought were advertising only informative.

Is Levitt’s argument sound? Although his description may not apply to all people, or even to most, it hardly seems ridiculous. People who object to Levitt’s contention that human life is crude, drab, and dull should recall that he is speaking of a human life we infrequently experience—human life absent the embellishments all civilizations try to give it. If his contention is correct, the need to transcend our natural condition is an obvious motive for those embellishments. John Waide, however, insists that our need for embellishment can be satisfied without manipulative advertising—through, for example, ideals, fantasies, heroes, and dreams (Waide 1987, 76). But why assume this? If the need for comforting illusions is strong and pervasive, why should embellishment not extend to the products people buy?

Bigger problems, however, arise from Levitt’s assumption that consumers are aware of advertising’s illusions. If people know that advertising lies, how can they derive much psychic benefit—i.e., much utility—from its embellishments? Worse yet, products tend not to deliver on manipulative advertising’s promises of sex, status, security, and the like. When this is so, how can such advertising deliver much utility to the consumers it controls (cf. Waide 1987, 75)? Indeed, the gap between manipulative advertising’s implicit promises and its actual performance may lead to frustrated expectations and significant disutility.

Recall, however, that for Levitt consumers want and need to be manipulated because life without advertising’s illusions is too much to bear. If so, it is unlikely that everyone would be continuously aware of advertising’s illusions and the low chance of their realization. Only intermittently, in other words, would people assume a tough-minded, rational-actor mentality toward advertising. On other occasions, some would effectively suspend disbelief in advertising’s embellishments. Although they might retain latent knowledge of those illusions, that knowledge would not be constantly present to their consciousness. And when the illusions rule, they could generate real satisfactions.

Are these assumptions about consumers realistic ones? To me, they are plausible as applied to some people some of the time…. There … is nothing ridiculous in assuming that people gain utility by accepting advertising’s illusions, while retaining some latent and/or intermittent knowledge of their condition . . ..

 

 

 

Autonomy

All things considered, the utilitarian arguments against manipulative advertising are unimpressive. Indeed, utilitarianism might even support that practice. Galbraith claimed that little utility is generated when we satisfy contrived wants. But the connection between a desire’s origin outside the individual and the low utility resulting from its satisfaction is unclear. At first glance, it appears that manipulative advertising robs consumers of utility by inducing them to buy functionally suboptimal products. But while this may be true, the resulting utility losses arguably are counterbalanced by the utility people gain from manipulative advertising. . . .

 

The Autonomy-Related Objection to Manipulative Advertising

To some people, however, the preceding points may say more about utilitarianism’s deficiencies than about manipulative advertising’s worth. One standard criticism of utilitarianism emphasizes its indifference to the moral quality of the means by which utility is maximized. Thus, even if manipulative advertising increases consumers’ utility, it is bad because it does so by suppressing their ability to make intelligent, self-directed product choices on the basis of their own values and interests. In a word, manipulative advertising now seems objectionable because it denies personal autonomy.

Among the many strands within the notion of autonomy, one of the most common equates it with self- government or self-determination. According to Steven Lukes, for example, autonomy is “self- direction”; the autonomous person’s “thought and action are his own, and [are] not determined by agencies or causes outside his control” (Lukes 1973, 52). At the social level, Lukes adds, an individual is autonomous “to the degree to which he subjects the pressures and norms with which he is confronted to conscious and critical evaluation, and forms intentions and reaches practical decisions as the result of independent and rational reflection” (52).

If manipulative advertising has the effects this essay assumes, it apparently denies autonomy to the individuals it successfully controls. On this essay’s assumptions, people become consumers and make product choices precisely through “agencies and causes outside [their] control,” and not through “conscious and critical evaluation” or “independent and rational reflection.” To Lippke (1990), moreover, advertising also has an “implicit content” that further suppresses autonomy. Among other things, this implicit content causes people to accept emotionalized, superficial, and oversimplified claims; desire ease and gratification rather than austerity and self-restraint; let advertisers dictate the meaning of the good life; defer to their peers; and think that consumer products are a means for acquiring life’s nonmaterial goods (44–47). People so constituted are unlikely to be independent, self- governing agents who subject all social pressures to an internal critique. Nor is it likely that they would have much resistance to manipulative appeals to buy particular products.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are Consumers Autonomous on Levitt’s Assumptions?

On Levitt’s assumptions, however, perhaps consumers do act autonomously when they submit to manipulative advertising. If Levitt is correct:

(1) manipulative advertising works much as its critics say that it works; because

(2) consumers suspend disbelief in its claims and embrace its illusions; because

(3) they want, need, and demand those illusions to cope with human existence; while

(4) nonetheless knowing on some level that those illusions indeed are illusions.

In sum, one might say, advertising manipulates consumers because they knowingly and rationally want to be manipulated. That is, they half-consciously sacrifice their autonomy for reasons that make some sense on Levitt’s assumptions about human life. In still other words, they more or less autonomously relinquish their autonomy . . ..

Levitt’s argument, however, appears to concern only individual purchase decisions, and not advertising’s assumed ability to socialize people to accept consumerism and reject autonomy. But his argument is broad enough to explain this second process. On Levitt’s assumptions, people would more or less knowingly embrace consumerism because unfiltered reality is too much to bear, and would reject autonomy in favor of Lippke’s “implicit content” because autonomy offers too little payoff at too much cost. If those assumptions are accurate, moreover, people arguably have sound reasons for behaving in these ways….

 

The Categorical Imperative

One problem with some of the claims discussed thus far is that they present difficult empirical issues. This is plainly true of Levitt’s claims. It also is true of Galbraith’s assertion that because advertising- induced wants originate outside the individual, they have low urgency and therefore generate little utility when they are satisfied. The same can be said of Hayek’s response to Galbraith. Given these problems, maybe manipulative advertising is best addressed by ethical theories whose conclusions do not depend on empirical matters such as consumer psychology, or on manipulation’s consequences for utility. Kant’s categorical imperative is an obvious candidate.

 

R. M. Hare made two Kantian arguments against manipulative advertising. “Kantians will say … that to manipulate people is not to treat them as ends—certainly not as autonomous legislating members of a kingdom of ends…. But even apart from that it is something that we prefer not to happen to us and therefore shall not will it as a universal maxim” (Hare 1984, 28). His reference, of course, was to the two major formulations of Kant’s categorical imperative. The first, which comes in several versions, underlies Hare’s second argument. The version employed here goes as follows: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Kant 1964, 88). According to the second major formulation of the imperative, one must “[a]ct in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end” (96).

 

 

 

Under either formulation of the imperative, it seems, manipulative advertising stands condemned. Under the first formulation, it seems difficult to identify a maxim that would:

(1) clearly justify manipulative advertising, and

(2) be universalized by any advertiser.

Consider, for example, the following possibility: “In order to induce purchases and make money, business people can use advertising tactics that undermine the rational evaluation and choice of products by associating them with desired states to which they have little or no real relation.” Presumably, no one would will the maxim’s universalization, because to do so is to waive any moral objection to manipulative advertising aimed at oneself. Manipulative advertising apparently fares even worse under the second statement of the categorical imperative. As James Rachels has noted, under this formulation “we may never manipulate people, or use people, to achieve our purposes” (Rachels 1993, 129). Instead, we should respect their rational nature by giving them the information that will enable them to make informed, autonomous decisions (Rachels 1993, 129–30). As the term manipulative advertising suggests, businesses that employ it to generate sales obviously try to use people as means to their own ends, and do so precisely by undermining their rationality and their ability to make informed, autonomous decisions.

Even in the Kantian realm, however, empirical concerns intrude. Suppose again that Levitt is right in claiming that people want and need manipulative advertising. Given this assumption, the relevant maxim becomes something like the following: “In order to induce purchases and make money, people can use manipulative advertising tactics that undermine the rational evaluation and choice of products and services, but only when such advertising tactics liberate consumers from their dark, stark, and depressing natural existence.” Although I cannot speak for everyone (or for Kant), I might will this maxim’s universalization if I found Levitt’s conception of the human condition at all plausible. This illustrates a common criticism of the first formulation of the categorical imperative: that one can manipulate the imperative to get the results one wishes by framing the maxim appropriately.

Even if Levitt’s account is perfectly accurate, however, the second major statement of the imperative still creates problems for manipulative advertising. Here, the question seems to boil down to the following: are firms that employ manipulative advertising using a consumer merely as a means to their own ends and therefore violating the imperative if the consumer, in effect, needs and wants to be manipulated? If, as I suggested earlier, the suspension of disbelief required for one to accept manipulative advertising may be more or less reasonable, then advertisers conceivably are respecting consumers’ rationality by providing them with product-related illusions….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[I almost omitted the section on virtue ethics, since we did not cover it formally. But it’s an important part of the essay, and it actually explains virtue ethics quite well while using it as a lens to analyze manipulative advertising through.]

Virtue Ethics

Earlier I depicted Galbraith as a utilitarian, but other moral aspirations probably were at work within The Affluent Society. The book opened with the following quotation from Alfred Marshall: “The economist, like everyone else, must concern himself with the ultimate aims of man.” Galbraith’s conviction that consumerism does not rank high among those aims pervades much of his writing, and almost certainly informed his critique of advertising. However, the ethical values and theories previously considered in this essay do not state and enjoin the desirable substantive conditions of human life . . ..

Waide’s alternative to such approaches is to examine “the virtues and vices at stake” in manipulative advertising (1987, 73), and to see “what kind of lives are sustained” by it (77). Stanley Benn sounds the same note when he suggests that the key question about advertising is whether it promotes “a valuable kind of life,” with this determination depending on “some objective assessment of what constitutes excellence in human beings” (1967, 273). Because manipulative advertising encourages advertisers to ignore the well-being of their targets and encourages those targets to neglect the cultivation of nonmarket goods, Waide concludes that it makes us less virtuous persons and therefore is morally objectionable (1987, 74–75). Many other critics of advertising make the same general point . . .. Heilbroner called advertising “perhaps the single most value-destroying activity of a business civilization,” due to the “subversive influence of the relentless effort to persuade people to change their lifeways, not out of any knowledge of, or deeply held convictions about, the ‘good life,’ but merely to sell whatever article or service is being pandered” (1976, 113–14). His main specific complaint is that by offering a constant stream of half-truths and deceptions, advertising makes “cynics of us all” (114). Virginia Held makes a related point when she criticizes advertising for undermining intellectual and artistic integrity (1984, 64–66).

 

To Christopher Lasch, on the other hand, advertising’s greatest evil may be its tendency to leave consumers “perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored” (1978, 72) . . .. One suspects that Lasch might reject advertising’s consequences as inherently bad even if they did mark an increase in utility. The same probably holds for most of advertising’s cultural critics. As a group, Michael Schudson remarks, they see “the emergence of a consumer culture as a devolution of manners, morals and even manhood, from a work-oriented production ethic of the past to the consumption, ‘lifestyle’-obsessed, ethic-less pursuits of the present” (1986, 6–7).

Uniting all these varied criticisms of advertising is the notion that it promotes substantive behaviors, experiences, and states of character which are inherently undesirable, and that it is morally objectionable for this reason…. This essay assumes that manipulative advertising both creates a consumer culture and strongly influences individual purchase decisions. Its main means for accomplishing the second aim (and perhaps the first) is to associate the product with such nonmarket goods as sex, status, and power. On those assumptions, manipulative advertising almost certainly undermines such standard virtues as honesty and benevolence in its practitioners, and arguably dilutes

 

 

its targets’ moderation, reasonableness, self-control, self-discipline, and self-reliance (Rachels 1993, 163 [listing these virtues]) . . ..

 

Manipulative Advertising’s Last Defense

All things considered, virtue ethics appears to be the best basis for attacking manipulative advertising. In particular, it seems to dispose of a defense that has plagued our other three attacks on such advertising: Levitt’s claim that people want and need advertising’s illusions and therefore more or less knowingly and willingly embrace it. Like our other bases for attacking manipulative advertising, however, virtue ethics is not assumed to be an absolute. This might mean that the claims of virtue would have to give way if human beings simply could not endure without advertising’s illusions or if its psychic satisfactions give people enormous amounts of utility.

In any event, there is yet another possible defense of manipulative advertising. This defense is mainly utilitarian, but it also implicates my other three ethical criteria to some degree. It arises because by hypothesis all my criteria must be weighed against competing moral claims. The defense does not so much challenge the assertion that manipulative advertising is bad, as argue that it is the lesser of two evils.

Throughout this essay, I have assumed for the sake of argument that manipulative advertising’s critics are correct in their assessment of its effects. As we have seen, these people usually maintain that manipulative advertising plays an important role in socializing people to consume. This means that on the critics’ view of things, manipulative advertising is central to the functioning of modern consumer society. But if manipulative advertising is central to the system’s operation, how safely can it be condemned? Assuming that the condemnation is effective, manipulative advertising disappears, and all advertising becomes informative, people gradually would be weaned from their consumerist ways. This is likely to create social instability, with a more authoritarian form of government the likely end result. That, in turn, could well mean an environment in which aggregate utility is lower than it is today, human autonomy and rational nature are less respected, and/or the virtues less recognized.

One set of reasons for these conclusions is largely economic. If people become less consumerist as manipulative advertising leaves the scene, aggregate demand and economic output should decline. At first glance, this would seem to be of little consequence because by hypothesis people would value material things less. The problem is that the economic losses probably will be unevenly distributed: for example, some businesses will fail and some will not, and some people will lose their jobs while others stay employed. These inequalities are a potential source of social instability. Both to redress them and to preserve order, government is likely to intervene. This may involve a significant increase in outright governmental coercion . . ..

To my knowledge, Waide is the only business ethicist to raise these kinds of problems, and he finds himself without a solution to them. Because “[i]t seems unlikely that [manipulative] advertising will end suddenly,” however, Waide is “confident that we will have the time and the imagination to adapt our economy to do without it” (1987, 77). Although I suspect that Waide is too optimistic, I have no solution to the dilemma either. Thus, I am left with the unsatisfactory conclusion that while various moral arguments may provide sound bases for attacking manipulative advertising, prudential considerations

 

 

dictate that none of them be pressed too vigorously. Manipulative advertising’s ultimate justification, in other words, may be its status as a necessary evil.

 

Concluding Remarks

For all the preceding reasons, it seems that there is no completely definitive basis for condemning manipulative advertising. But this obviously is not to say that the practice is morally unproblematic. Of my four suggested attacks on the practice, virtue ethics seems the strongest, with Kantianism a close second, autonomy third, and utilitarianism last. Indeed, utilitarianism may even support manipulative advertising. The main reason is that the practice’s three most important defenses—Levitt’s argument, the assertion that there is little connection between a want’s origin outside the individual and the benefit resulting from its satisfaction, and manipulative advertising’s centrality to our economic system—are more or less utilitarian in nature.

Except perhaps for hard-core utilitarians, therefore, manipulative advertising is a morally dubious practice. However, this conclusion may depend heavily on a critical assumption made earlier: that manipulative advertising actually works. Specifically, I assumed that such advertising:

(1) socializes people to adopt a consumerist lifestyle, and

(2) strongly influences individual purchase decisions.

But what happens if, by and large, each assumption is untrue?

On first impressions, at least, it appears that if manipulative advertising is inefficacious, utilitarianism, autonomy, and virtue ethics largely cease to be bases for criticizing it….

However, Kantian objections to manipulative advertising might well remain even if it is inefficacious. On that assumption, admittedly, perhaps one would will the universalization of a maxim permitting such advertising. If manipulative advertising simply fails to work, moreover, maybe it does not treat consumers merely as means to advertisers’ ends. But such arguments ignore the strong anti- consequentialism of Kant’s ethics, which arguably renders advertising’s ineffectiveness irrelevant. More importantly, those arguments ignore Kant’s stress on the motives with which people should act. The only thing that is unqualifiedly good, Kant says, is a good will; and the good will is good not because of what it accomplishes, but simply because it wills the good (Kant 1964, 61–62). Even if manipulative advertising is unsuccessful, advertisers presumably try to make it work. Unless they believe that their efforts would benefit consumers in the end, it is unlikely that they are acting with a good will when they devise and employ their stratagems.

At a first cut, therefore, it seems that if manipulative advertising is ineffective, the only significant ethical objections to it are Kantian. (To these we might add the money wasted on the practice, as well as its effect on the virtue of its practitioners.) For those inclined to ignore Kantian objections, therefore, it seems that manipulative advertising’s rightness or wrongness depends less on ethical theory than on empirical questions within the purview of the social sciences…. As the preceding discussion suggests, the most important such question is the extent to which manipulative advertising actually affects purchase decisions and socializes people to consume. Even if manipulative advertising actually has those effects, other more or less empirical issues would remain. These include the validity of Levitt’s arguments,

 

 

Galbraith’s asserted connection between a desire’s origin outside the individual and the low utility resulting from its satisfaction, and manipulative advertising’s contribution to gross domestic product. All these questions, I submit, are unlikely to be answered any time soon.

 

References

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Hayek, F. A. (1961) “The non sequitur of the ‘dependence effect.’” Southern Economic Journal 27: 346– 348.

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Lukes, S. (1973) Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Rachels, J. (1993) The Elements of Moral Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2nd ed.).

Schudson, M. (1986). Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 2nd ed.).

Waide, J. (1987) “The making of self and world in advertising.” Journal of Business Ethics 6, no. 2: 73–79.