business ethics in-class activity week 5
Cooper2021
5-1.pptxBusiness Ethics Summer 2022 (1) Week 5, Lecture 1
Chaeyoung Paek
In Week 5…
In Week 4, we discussed whether certain advertising techniques/certain forms of advertising could be harmful.
Arrington defends the use of puffery/indirect information transfer/subliminal advertising, on the ground that ads that use them do not undermine one’s autonomy.
Cathy O’Neil & Daniel Susser, Beate Roessler, and Helen Nissenbaum focus on online ads.
In Week 5…
While O’Neil focuses on how online ads can be so effective to so many people, Susser et al. focus on the nature of (many of) online ads.
According to them, many of online ads are cases of online manipulation; all cases of manipulation carry significant harm; so, many of online ads carry significant harm.
But in 4-1 in-class activity responses, many people were on the fence about whether many of the ads we see are really manipulative.
About Allstate ad: “The ad certainly is full of puffery and gives a false impression, however I’m not certain its completely manipulative. It certainly leaving the impression that of puffery with the song choice, their claims of making money by saving money with them as your insurance, and even with the car blowing up and it being okay because you’re covered.”
About (probably Lay’s?) potato chips: “I think the ad was slightly manipulative since it was showing other packs of chips and openly wanted customers to ignore other brands and buy their chips instead.”
About a new car, Genesis: “The ad was promoting the car and glorifying it. I do not believe its manipulative to exaggerate or we would all be considered manipulative human beings. However, glorifying it might persuade consumers it is a good car for them in terms of status or what not.”
In Week 5…
What was interesting was that even though some people said that the ads they’ve seen were not so manipulative, they also said that something seemed problematic.
Maybe this shows that advertising can have some ethical problems not because it is manipulative but because of something else!
According to Andrew Johnson, this indeed is the case; by borrowing Harry Frankfurt’s famous account on “bullshit,” he argues that most ads are bullshit and therefore morally problematic.
In today’s class…
We’ll look at Andrew Johnson’s account of “bullshit” and why he believes that most advertisements are cases of bullshit.
There will be an in-class activity at the end of the class.
On Bullshit
Harry Frankfurt’s essay, “On Bullshit,” offers a philosophical analysis of commonly used term, bullshit.
According to Frankfurt…
A statement, X, used by the speaker, A, is bullshit when A is not concerned about or indifferent towards whether X is true or not.
(ex) ”Your call is important to us; please hold.”
Cf. Lying ≠ bullshitting
When you lie, you must be concerned about the truth (or falsity) of your statement!
On Bullshit
On Frankfurt’s account, the reason why we think that bullshitting is wrong is because it is “reprehensible intellectual negligence.”
(ex) Mayor saying “This is the greatest city” vs. 5-year-old kid saying “This is the greatest city”
(Johnson) Perhaps Frankfurt’s account is too vague to capture what really makes bullshitting blameworthy.
Johnson On Bullshit
A person is guilty of bullshitting when, and only when:
the person implicitly or explicitly asserts a proposition;
in the assertion of the proposition, or in the prior process of coming to accept the proposition, any impartial interest in what is true is subordinated to or supplanted by a competing interest;
there is no exculpatory reason for such subordination or supplantation; and
if the proposition is explicitly asserted, it is not believed to be false.
Johnson On Bullshit
According to Johnson, his definition provides more plausible account of bullshit than Frankfurt’s.
Johnson’s account is weaker in a more plausible way.
It is too strong to claim that a bullshitter is indifferent to truth.
Bullshitters may generally care about truth and speaking truth; it’s just that they are ready to ignore their impartial interest in truth to promote other competing interests.
(ex) Advocators of the Intellectual Design theory of evolution
Johnson On Bullshit
2. Johnson’s account captures the sense in which the bullshitter is “guilty” of something.
When someone is guilty of something, it usually means that there’s nothing that could exculpate the person from the wrong they did.
(ex) Coercion at gun point + Renouncing Darwinian theory of evolution
3. Johnson’s account explains the difference between lying and bullshitting better.
Liars believe & know what they explicitly assert is false; bullshitters do not believe so.
(ex) Fourth-of-July oration by a politican
Advertising & Bullshit
Johnson claims that given the purpose of advertising (creating more demands for the advertised product), it’s not surprising that most ads are bullshit.
But bullshit ads are different from deceptive ads.
Deceptive ads lie about the advertised products.
(ex) Activia + “immunity-boost”
Bullshit ads may contain false claims as well, but they do not deliberately lie; they commit certain fallacies in order to serve their own purpose.
Advertising & Bullshit: Fallacies
According to Johnson, bullshit ads often commit fallacies such as…
False analogy
(ex) John McCain’s campaign against Obama in 2008
2. False dichotomy
(ex) Duracell ad
3. Appeals to emotion
(ex) Chevy commercial
Advertising & Bullshit: Fallacies
Ads that make use of puffery are also cases of bullshit.
(ex) TAG body spray commercial
...And many others too!
“A more complete cataloging of types of bullshit advertising would include inappropriate appeals to authority, bandwagon arguments ("everybody's using X'), self-image ads, fine-print ads, ads utilizing weasel words, and fake-news-report advertisements.” (23)
Advertising & Bullshit: What’s So Bad?
Such advertisements are examples of bullshit because advertisers subordinate their impartial interest in truth to their competing interest—interest in promoting certain products and create more revenue.
Johnson claims that much advertising is bullshit; since all bullshit is unethical, much advertising is unethical too.
Q. But the very purpose of ads is to promote certain products and create more revenue; can’t we morally justify bullshitting in ads based on the fact that they’re doing something they’re supposed to do?
Advertising & Bullshit: What’s So Bad?
(Kimbrough) Sometimes, bullshitting helps maximizing utility.
(ex) Bullshit apology + better relationship
Kimbrough’s utilitarian argument for advertising
P1. Advertising promotes certain products and creates revenue in result.
P2. Most advertising is bullshit and ethically wrongs the audience.
P3. The utility created by advertising outweighs the utility diminished by advertising with its bullshit.
P4. [The main thesis of Utilitarianism] X is morally permissible if and only if X maximizes utility.
C. Most advertising is morally permissible.
Advertising & Bullshit: What’s So Bad?
Johnson claims that (P3) is wrong; when you’re trying to maximize everyone’s utility over all time, then you should not allow bullshitting to flourish in your society!
He points out that the reason why most utilitarianists consider lying morally wrong applies to bullshitting too.
Instances of lying cumulatively shape the way the members of the society communicate with each other.
In a society where all lie, people cannot believe each other; then all should do their own background research on others whenever they engage in any sort of conversation to verify what others say.
This costs the society so much of time and energy!
Advertising & Bullshit: What’s So Bad?
While bullshitting may not be not as bad as lying, it is still likely that the harms of bullshit would outweigh whatever benefits that bullshit advertising can provide.
Then even from Utilitarian perspective, allowing bullshit to flourish in our society (as a form of advertising) is not morally permissible.
Cf. Kantian Ethics on bullshit
Bullshitters use the audience as mere means, not as their own ends; so bullshitting is not morally permissible.
Conclusion
Johnson concludes that most advertising campaigns are unethical.
Even from Utilitarian perspective, bullshitting is morally impermissible.
And from Kantian perspective, bullshitting is straight-forwardly impermissible!
Given that most advertising is bullshit, we need to be aware of how unethical most advertising is & start thinking about the ways to solve the problem.
Some remaining thoughts
Bullshitting is bad; but perhaps certain cases of bullshitting is not so bad as other cases of bullshitting?
(ex) Puffery ad for deodorant vs. Bullshit support for anti-immigration law
So advertising could be unethical in two ways:
[O’Neil/Susser et al.] Advertising is unethical when it manipulates the audience.
[Johnson] Advertising is unethical when it bullshits.
Q. Is there any other way(s) in which advertising could be unethical?
Exercise: Advertising Techiniques
Click ”5-1 In-class Activity” below the lecture video.
Click “Write Submission”; fill in your answers & click “Submit.”
This should take about 5 minutes, but feel free to take more/less time as needed.
For the next class…
We’ll move on to a new topic: exploitation and sweatshop labor.
Ian Maitland argues that most criticisms of international sweatshops are not valid; Dennis Arnold and Hartman argue that the conditions of international sweatshops should be bettered for employees & employers.
Read Ian Maitland, "The great non-debate over international sweatshops."
