Marketing and Relative Ethics

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A couple of months back I wrote a piece on marketing ethics and free will. I received quite some feedback, occasionally well written. However, none of the critique makes for any changes in my reasoning, I guess I just should be even more clear about what I mean. I’ll do my best to explain my point of view again.

First of all I just want to make clear why I decided to write about this subject in the first place. I’m not a mathematician, a physicist, biologist, or in any way a scientist. But as a secular Humanist, I do love science and the scientific method. Denying progress attributed to scientific method is like denying the usefulness of vaccine. I am also a marketing and PR professional which means I’m part of a powerful institution. Members of powerful institutions need to make honest inquiries about their influence in society. I think it’s sort of our duty.

We don’t have to look very far to find unethical marketing. Yet, few seems to feel it’s our common responsibility to deal with. I do think it is our common responsibility and it reaches across different kinds of business, markets, cultures and people. The meta-ethical position saying; ”It’s moral to me, because I believe it is” does not apply.

I’m obviously not claiming to know the answer to every moral dilemma. What I am saying is that I agree on the proposition of morality being an undeveloped branch of science. This means, for instance, that the concept of right and wrong isn’t bound exclusively to the ”world of ideas”.

Elephants and fantasies

Whatever thought experiments we engage in, our conclusions are the result of more causes than what’s visible to us. Yes, we can in fact imagine a pink elephant without limiting the fantasy to laws of physics. And surely no breed of pink elephant exists even if we really believe they do.

The pink elephant tells us nothing except that we have the ability to imagine things, like for instance that Chewbacca is real, that demons causes epilepsy, or that smoking cigarettes makes us liberated and free. These are all fantasies and the fact that someone might believe in them doesn’t make them right. To encourage people to such beliefs is clearly not doing anyone a favor.

The interesting question is rather why we made the elephant pink in the first place. Why not write yellow, or green? In retrospect it seems like we had the power to choose different. I don’t think we’re that powerful.

Free will is an idea, or more accurately, a feeling. We look back on our choices and feel like we could have done things differently. I don’t think we can. We can’t control what or why thoughts pop in to our conscious mind. We can’t possibly know every cause that make us choose what we in fact choose. That does not mean we can’t be moral.

It seems to me that most of us intend to do things that help us live a long and healthy life. Thus, no one consciously intends to voluntarily spend a lifetime inhaling lethal smoke that eventually is going to kill them. It would be completely out of character for most of us. But we do intend to engage in activities that help us to be included in contexts that brings identity and a feeling of belonging, or perhaps liberation, we seek it out.

Smoking kills (no way of denying)

Duping people to smoke, by any measure, is immoral, it’s wrong. It’s just not something that could have any contextual legitimacy. How could it? People meet death in some of the most painful ways possible, directly related to smoking.

Even if the marketer, however unlikely, knew nothing about the correlation of smoking and painful death, endorsing smoking would still be wrong. Medical science has shown us without the shadow of doubt that cigarettes kills people, which of course was true even before the day science could show it. The lack of knowledge merely held us unaware about the more moral way. And just because we don’t know what the more moral thing is, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

To say ”it’s moral to me, because I believe it is” or ”it’s ok for them to do it, because they believe it is moral” is just a way to deny the blood on our hands.

Spooky stuff

Or consider this; these days we know about epilepsy. Simply put, electrical discharge in the brain leads to attacks of cramp. To avoid possible lethal outcomes, treating it properly requires an extremely careful process. This is something that science has taught us and it’s clearly the ethical and moral thing to do.

Recommending an exorcism, to me, seems like the wrong thing to. It’s wrong even if we knew nothing about the causes behind the seizures. The exorcism is wrong irrespective of beliefs. No moral relativism can challenge this proposition. Again: just because we don’t know what the moral choice is, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. To market the idea of proper, careful treatment is more moral than to market the idea of exorcisms, irrespective of any belief system. The only way to know this is to learn from science. Not learning from science is called science denial, and thats lethal.

Clearly, marketing the ideas of smoking and exorcisms is objectively wrong, both kill people by extreme pain, whether we are aware of it or not, and it can’t possibly, in any way, make someone a hero. ”It’s moral to me, because I believe it is”, please…

Responsibility

Just as a consumer isn’t aware of every cause of influence, the marketer obviously doesn’t have all causes lined up in front of her either. We don’t know why people make specific choices. But we do know that people do make them, and we do know that choices aren’t the result of free will. We also know that choices are influenced by marketing, among other things, such as what other people do, or what influential people say and do. These are facts that holds marketing responsible. The individual marketer may intend to exercise her expertise ethically but could still be limited by ignorance or the culture of the workplace.

Every marketer doesn’t have to deal with cigarettes and exorcism, but we all have to look at our methods and be honest about the fact that we don’t really know if they are moral. Believing them to be right doesn’t automatically make them right. We might unknowingly be doing morally questionable marketing at this very moment, caused by, well, limited knowledge. It seems to me that the way forward can’t be the deception of moral relativity but instead to always welcome more knowledge.