Ethics and Manipulation in Advertising: Answering a Flawed Indictment

219 Pages·1997·1.11 MB·English

by  Michael J Phillips

E M
THICS AND ANIPULATION
A
IN DVERTISING

E M
THICS AND ANIPULATION
A
IN DVERTISING
Answering a Flawed Indictment
Michael J. Phillips
QUORUM BOOKS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Michael J.
Ethics and manipulation in advertising : answering a flawed
indictment / Michael J. Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–56720–063–X (alk. paper)
1. Advertising—Psychological aspects. 2. Advertising—Moral and
ethical aspects. 3. Manipulative behavior. 4. Consumer behavior.
I. Title.
HF5822.P49 1997
659.1′01′9—dc21 96–40911
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 1997 by Michael J. Phillips
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96–40911
ISBN: 1–56720–063–X
First published in 1997
Quorum Books, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C
ONTENTS
Preface vii
Chapter 1 The Indictment of Manipulative Advertising 1
Chapter 2 Utilitarian Arguments 41
Chapter 3 Three Other Ethical Criticisms 77
Chapter 4 Manipulative Advertising and Consumer
Choice 107
Chapter 5 Advertising and the Propensity to Consume 143
Chapter 6 The Failure of the Critics’ Vision 173
Selected Bibliography 197
Index 205

P
REFACE
This book discusses and critically analyzes an attack on advertising
that has been a permanent feature of American intellectual life
since at least the 1930s. Briefly put, the attack says that advertising
manipulates consumers, and that this manipulation justifies cor-
rective political action. This attack’s influence waxes and wanes,
but it is never without adherents. It finds support because it is
initially plausible, and because many people find its political
conclusions congenial. By and large, however, there is little to
support this assault on advertising. Advertising almost certainly
does not manipulate as well as its critics believe.
This book’s aim, then, is to undermine a critique of advertising
that emphasizes its manipulativeness. Chapter 1 opens by develop-
ing that critique and the political agenda it has inspired. This
agenda ranges from modest recommendations for increased regu-
lation of certain ads, through proposals to limit the volume of
advertising, to John Kenneth Galbraith’s ambitious program for a
less consumerist America. After developing this book’s conception
of the term “manipulative advertising,” the chapter observes that
because advertising’s manipulativeness might be a good thing—by
hypothesis it keeps the economy humming, after all—its critics
badly need a moral argument to justify their political agenda.
Without such an argument, that agenda is a complete non sequitur
viii Preface
even if advertising’s powers are enormous. Advertising’s traditional
critics, many of whom were economists and implicit utilitarians,
usually were not too articulate about the moral underpinnings of
their work. But with the emergence of the business ethics move-
ment in the 1970s and 1980s, moral arguments for manipulative
advertising’s badness finally became available.
Chapters 2 and 3 examine the ethicists’ arguments on the assump-
tion that advertising manipulates as well as its critics believe. These
chapters consider how manipulative advertising fares under three
well-known ethical theories (utilitarianism, Kant’s categorical im-
perative, and virtue ethics) and one widely accepted ethical value
(autonomy). Chapters 2 and 3 conclude that, although the utilitar-
ian arguments against manipulative advertising are inconclusive,
there are other moral grounds for adjudging it wrong if it works.
But does manipulative advertising really manipulate? Employing
empirical work and informed speculation of various kinds, chap-
ters 4 and 5 maintain that manipulative advertising does not work
especially well. (This of course does not mean that it is powerless
or useless to business.) Chapter 4 reaches this conclusion about
manipulative advertising’s ability to dictate consumer choice
among products and services, and chapter 5 reaches the same
conclusion about advertising’s stimulation of the propensity to
consume.
As one might expect, chapters 4 and 5 have implications for the
ethical conclusions reached in chapters 2 and 3. They vitiate all the
earlier moral arguments against manipulative advertising except
one argument based on Kant’s categorical imperative. In chapter
6, I try to dispose of that last ethical argument. Its elimination also
eliminates the last advertising-related rationale for the more ambi-
tious portions of the critics’ agenda. I say “advertising-related”
because the failure of the critics’ assault on manipulative advertis-
ing does not necessarily doom these far-reaching proposals. But it
does preclude using advertising’s manipulativeness to justify them.
On the other hand, nothing in the book necessarily argues against
the piecemeal regulation of particular manipulative ads.
This book does not consider whether advertising’s other alleg-
edly noxious attributes—for example, its tastelessness, its omni-
presence, or its effect on the mass media—might justify its
regulation. In addition, the book examines only the ethical theories
or values employed in the business ethics literature on manipulat-
Preface ix
ive advertising. Despite my legal training, moreover, the book does
not consider whether the regulation of manipulative advertising
might offend the First Amendment. My concern is with the ethical
implications of advertising’s asserted manipulativeness. (And if
enough influential Americans become convinced that advertising’s
manipulativeness justifies political controls of one kind or another,
American constitutional law most likely will follow their lead.)
Furthermore, the book makes only scattered references to a con-
ception of advertising residing 180 degrees away from the vision
propounded by advertising’s critics. This, briefly, is the view that
advertising is information; that consumers respond to it rationally;
and that it therefore is a powerful force for competition, efficiency,
and abundance. I give this view relatively short shrift because my
concerns lie elsewhere and because I am unpersuaded by it. I differ
from this advertising-as-information view in thinking that there are
forms of advertising to which the label “manipulative” fairly
applies. I differ from critics of this manipulative advertising in
denying that it manipulates very well.
Although I am not an expert in the philosophical, economic, and
marketing matters this book considers, I doubt whether this lack
matters much. My presentation of the various ethical theories is,
and need only be, rudimentary. The theories’ application to ma-
nipulative advertising does not require philosophical abilities of a
high order. Because I conclude that manipulative advertising does
not work very well, I largely am spared the philosophers’ problem
of adjudicating among the theories. As for the economic and
marketing literature on advertising, I do not perform or critique
such studies, but merely report them. Due to the vast amount of
relevant work, of course, that report is not exhaustive.
This book tries to tie together several distinct branches of
knowledge as they apply to advertising. If such books require
professional training in all the relevant disciplines, few will ever
be written. Such integrative efforts are needed not only to offset
the one-sidedness of single-discipline books, but also to avoid their
tendency to make casual assumptions about matters that are
contentious outside the discipline. Although economists frequently
praise or condemn advertising, for example, the utilitarian assump-
tions that usually underlie their evaluations rarely are developed
or even made articulate. This means that those utilitarian evalu-
ations do not consider or confront evaluations of advertising from
x Preface
other ethical perspectives. Worse yet, as chapters 2 and 4 suggest,
it sometimes appears as if economists’ economic/utilitarian argu-
ments are influenced by those other perspectives. As for business
ethicists, their pronouncements about advertising often make fac-
tual assumptions about the very issues disputed by economists and
other social scientists. The usual assumption, of course, is that
manipulative advertising works quite well in one or both of the
senses described earlier.
The failure of this assumption has a further implication. Critics
of consumerism who urge a transformation of American society
should stop relying on advertising’s manipulativeness to justify
their position. Too often, I think, that assumption is both an implicit
substitute for moral argument (as if consumerism’s illegitimacy and
the new society’s superiority follow from it), and a tacit justification
for the critics’ paternalism (as if manipulation by business validates
manipulation for supposedly better ends). As I suggest in chapter
1, neither conclusion follows even if advertising manipulates as
well as its critics believe. And while there are moral arguments for
each conclusion, it turns out that manipulative advertising does not
manipulate too well. This is not, of course, to say either that a
consumerist life is the best life and no alternatives are conceivable,
or that paternalism is always wrong. But it is to say that advertis-
ing’s asserted manipulativeness cannot aid those who would argue
the contrary.