Advertising and Deep Autonomy
ABSTRACT. Concerns about advertising take one of two forms. Some people are worried that advertising threatens autonomous choice. Others are worried not about autonomy but about the values spread by advertising as a powerful institution. I suggest that this bifurcation stems from misunderstanding autonomy. When one turns from autonomous choice to autonomy of persons, or what is often glossed as self-rule, then one has reason to think that advertising poses a moral problem of a sort so far unrecognized. I diagnose this problem using Charles Taylor’s work on “strong evaluation”. This problem turns out to have political ramifications that have been only dimly recognized in business ethics circles. KEY WORDS: advertising, autonomy, Barbara Phillips, capitalism, Charles Taylor, ideology, John Waide, Robert Arrington, strong evaluation
Many think advertising poses moral problems.1 A glance at business ethics journals or textbooks bears this claim out. However, when one looks at the details of the discussions of the purported problems of advertising, one might well wonder whether a mountain has been made out of a molehill. An instructor can easily experience this in the classroom: while students are naturally interested in the potential problems with advertising, many end up unimpressed by the charges brought against it.2 On one side, the most discussed problem with associative advertising is whether or not it compromises autonomous choice. The exchange between Robert Arrington and Roger Crisp is typical of this topic; Arrington in particular discusses many other writers who have examined advertising on this matter. The paradigmatic
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example of the manipulation of autonomous choice by advertisers is subliminal advertising: students are introduced to the well-known example of movie-theatre patrons who flock to the concession stand for ice cream after being exposed to subliminal suggestion on the moviescreen. Minor as this case is, its implications are rightly chilling, and students naturally see this. However, the scope of such manipulation is difficult to see, and students are often left with the impression that, while subliminal advertising has been recognized as problematic and is no longer tolerated, other sorts of advertising differ significantly and hence pose no substantial problems for autonomous choice. This, of course, is typically not the contention of the writers who examine associative advertising. Roger Crisp’s criticisms apply to much more than subliminal advertising; Robert Arrington’s defense of advertising arguably does not apply to subliminal advertising, but only to more overt kinds. Despite the theoretical interest in many sorts of advertising, incredulous students have a point here. Two considerations (apart from the details of particular defenses) support the view that advertising is implausibly seen as a substantial threat to autonomous choice. First, there is the phenomenology of being a consumer: it typically does not feel like one is being jerked around and parted from one’s money like a puppet. Although far from conclusive on its own, this point is usefully combined with more objective considerations. In the case of subliminal advertising, the movie-theatre patrons are exposed to the advertisement once, and the subsequent action occurs in the very near future, during the same visit to the theatre. But this does not seem to be what happens to people who are exposed to many
Journal of Business Ethics 33: 15–28, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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television commercials during an evening at home. Typically, they do not get up and go to the mall to buy something they have just seen in an advertisement.3 The suggestion that the push-button effects of subliminal advertising have much wider application strikes students as a cartoonish representation of their own experience with modern commercial media; as such it is both humourous and insulting. Perhaps some people are indeed like the people in the movie theatre. Perhaps all people are like this to a very small degree. If this is the case, then it seems like the purported moral problem either applies to very few people or involves a very slight compromise of freedom and wealth. In the scheme of things, students are right to wonder what the big deal is.4 On the other side, there are theorists who turn away from autonomous choice and towards the ideological aspects of advertising. Barbara Phillips and John Waide are good examples. Phillips turns explicitly from the individual to the collective effects of advertising and its corresponding capitalist ideology.5 Waide claims to be turning away from autonomy altogether – he has been persuaded by Arrington on this front (1987, p. 73). Instead, he wants to look at the kinds of people the ideology of consumerism produces. Again, students are justified in being underwhelmed at the potential problems here. If students do not feel uncomfortable with their exposure to consumerist values, or with their character, or with their participation in capitalist culture, then such discussions are likely to leave them unmoved. Moreover, if the purported problems discussed by Waide and Phillips do not show up in consumer choice or conduct, as the disavowal of interest in autonomous choice suggests, then such writers come off as discussing aspects of the world around us that just do not make a difference. Again, the purported problems with associative advertising amount to very little. In what follows, I will argue that the literature on advertising has been damaged by use of an unduly narrow sense of what autonomy involves. I will show that once we turn to other aspects of autonomy, we can see that advertising poses deep and pervasive problems for many people.
Moreover, we shall see that the ideological considerations favored by some commentators bear directly on autonomy in this deeper sense. Advertising turns out to be a big deal, morally speaking, because it compromises deep autonomy. Some prefatory clarifying notes are warranted. As will become clear, I do not think the problem lies with particular advertisements, nor with occasional exposure to advertisements. Instead, the moral problem I am addressing concerns the current state of advertising as a whole. There are two aspects to this state that are of particular importance: (1) its scale, and (2) its nature. That is, we are exposed to lots of advertising – it is practically everywhere – and it is overwhelmingly devoted to selling things. Public service advertisements exist, but make up a small fraction of advertising as a whole. When I say “advertising”, take this as referring to the current voluminous state of commercial advertising. Given this emphasis, I will not be examining particular advertisements for their effects on autonomy. As will become clear, this is not the sort of problem for autonomy I am examining, although it has concerned others.
Autonomy Outside of business ethics circles, autonomy is used in a variety of ways. Two senses are particularly important: (1) Making autonomous choices/decisions (2) Being an autonomous person As noted above, (1) has been the topic of focus for theorists interested in the implications of advertising for autonomy. (2) has gone largely undiscussed. I shall be concerned with analyzing what is involved in being an autonomous person and what the implications of advertising are for this aspect of our lives. When introducing the notion of autonomy, we often gloss it as self-rule. This is uncomfortably explained in terms of autonomous choices. Self-rule is much better handled in terms of being an autonomous person. What makes a person autonomous? What is involved in self-
Advertising and Deep Autonomy rule? Central to this notion is having and exercising control over one’s life. More loosely, we might explain this in terms of picking and shaping one’s own “destiny”. Importantly, and in support of the idea that self-rule is best cashed out in terms of the characteristics of being an autonomous person, both self rule and being an autonomous person are consistent with making occasional decisions non-autonomously. One can still rule one’s life, yet suffer lapses. More interestingly, one can be an autonomous person yet turn control of certain decisions or aspects of one’s life over to other people. A good example is medical decision-making.6 It is quite plausible for a person to exercise control over his/her life in general, yet recognize that a physician might be best equipped to make decisions over particular aspects of medical care. This autonomous person could relinquish control over some decisions, perhaps over a course of treatment over a long period of time, and remain an autonomous person. An interim conclusion about advertising and autonomy can already be drawn. If we are right to worry about the moral implications of advertising and autonomy, and if autonomy has two senses which are both morally relevant, then focusing on one sense and not the other does not suffice to answer all of the possible worries about advertising and autonomy. Even more seriously, if self-rule is best handled in terms of the characteristics of autonomous persons, and if self-rule has primacy of place in discussions of the moral implications of autonomy (as the history of the study of autonomy suggests), then examining autonomous choices risks being quite beside the point. Showing that advertisements do or do not compromise autonomous choice is not necessarily to address a serious moral issue; it is certainly not to address the most serious moral issue surrounding autonomy. Moreover, showing that advertising either cannot or does not compromise autonomous choice is not necessarily to get it off the hook. As shown above, the notions of autonomous choice and autonomous persons come apart. It is at least in principle possible that advertising could be a problem for having and exercising self-rule without compromising particular decisions.
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Let us call a concern for autonomous choice a concern with shallow autonomy. This is shallow because it seems to address questions which, so to speak, remain on the surface of an individual’s life. By contrast, asking questions about the characteristics of self-rule or autonomous persons is to examine deep autonomy. These concerns are much more central to the identity of individuals than mere autonomous choice. What is the relationship between deep and shallow autonomy? This matter is reasonably seen as complex, but we find a hint in Robert Arrington’s discussion of advertising and autonomy. Arrington divides autonomy into the sub-topics of autonomous desire, rational choice, and free choice.7 A choice is rational if it is done in the light of information relevant to it. A choice is free if an agent can bring forward reasons for making it. Moreover, an action is voluntary if the agent in question could act otherwise if given reason to do so. Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, Arrington follows Harry Frankfurt and explains autonomous desires in terms of 1st and 2nd order mental states (see Crisp, 1987, pp. 414–416 for discussion of Arrington’s treatment of these issues). A desire with some object or event, etc., as its content is a 1st order desire. Many of us have 1st order desires for ice cream: this desire has the form “I want/desire ice cream”. In the well-known example of subliminal advertising, it is reasonable to think that the theatre owners influenced the theatre patrons by inducing exactly this 1st order desire. 2nd order desires have 1st order desires as their content. A 2nd order desire about a desire for ice cream could have the form “I want to want ice cream”. Arrington argues that advertising does not, generally, compromise autonomous desires in the following fashion. He thinks a 1st order desire is autonomous when an agent has a 2nd order desire to maintain the 1st order desire. Moreover, he thinks advertising appeals to 1st order desires. So, movie theatre patrons who want ice cream can be said, by Arrington’s standards, to have an autonomous desire for ice cream, even if induced subliminally, if they have a 2nd order desire to want to want ice cream. If they want not to want ice cream, but end up wanting it anyway, their
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1st order desire is non-autonomous. The notions of rational and free choice can be seen as tied to this treatment of autonomy. Both the relevance of information and the formation of reasons are plausibly linked in part to the 2nd order desires one has. The consideration of 1st order desires – what one wants, what to buy – is the domain of shallow autonomy. When one thinks about what one wants, one is reasonably construed as considering the objects of one’s desires, not one’s own desires or other mental states. This sort of thought, and acting stemming from it, is profitably seen as the exercise of shallow autonomy because it does not call into question one’s own identity. By contrast, considering whether one really wants what one happens to want – asking whether one wants to want a particular item – is the realm of deep autonomy. Now one is being reflective about one’s own mental states and their objects. This cuts much more closely to a person’s conception of him/herself. Arrington focuses on 1st and 2nd order desires. The kind of thought Arrington considers involves taking stock of one’s desires and seeing whether one has higher order preferences with which they match. However, the exercise of deep autonomy is reasonably interpreted as involving more than the calculation of the balance of 1st and 2nd order desires. Accordingly, Arrington’s discussion introduces just the shallowest end of deep autonomy. When I wonder whether I really want to want something, I am not asking merely (if at all) whether I do in fact want to want the item in question. Rather, I am asking whether the 1st order desire is worth wanting or having. In this aspect of the exercise of deep autonomy, one wonders whether certain objects and mental states are desirable, in the roughly objective sense of “worth desiring”. What is involved in assessing whether something or some mental state is desirable?8 This notion is somewhat ambiguous. Part of the exercise of deep autonomy in answering this question involves: (A) assessing what our values are and whether our 1st order desires are consistent with these.
More objectively, but also perhaps more difficult to perform, the exercise of deep autonomy can involve: (B) assessing whether our values themselves are desirable. In both cases, more is involved than the matching of 1st order desires with 2nd order ones. It is reasonable to think that one’s values consist of a web of various levels of desires, beliefs, interests, and needs. It suffices for our purposes merely to note the sorts of mental states that constitute our values; we need not analyze their complex relationships. More specifically, the exercise of deep autonomy in the sense of (A) involves having a sense of the structure of one’s life and assessing 1st order desires against the background of this structure. Moreover, it is reasonable to think that having a sense of the structure of one’s life is more than a matter of observing the shape of one’s life. Rather, it involves projection of an ideal – conscious reflection about one’s values is a combination of description and prescription. So, to examine how one’s current mental states match one’s values is at least in part to ask, “How do my current 1st order desires fit the way I want my life to be?”. In so doing, it is reasonable to think that sometimes one will give up on 1st order desires, and that at other times one will modify one’s values. In considering the coherence of the fit of one’s current mental states with the desired shape of one’s life, a person is exercising substantial control over his/her own identity. Moreover, this control seems largely rational. The exercise of deep autonomy in the sense of (B) is somewhat different. To ask whether one’s own values are themselves desirable, a person still needs a sense of the structure of his/her life. Now, however, this structure is assessed against other possible ways of living. This requires more than knowledge of one’s own mental states and values. It requires a sense of other possible ways of living. In the exercise of (A) type deep autonomy, one’s current mental states are assessed against the background of the structure of one’s life. The exercise of (B) type deep autonomy requires the assessment of the structure of one’s life against the back-
Advertising and Deep Autonomy ground of other actual and possible ways of living. To return to self-rule and control over one’s identity: (B) type deep autonomy is deeper than the reflection one performs in (A) type deep autonomy. Examining oneself along the lines of (B) is to scrutinize oneself to the core, so to speak. At the same time, (A) is deeper than the relatively shallow autonomy examined by theorists interested in advertising such as Arrington and Crisp. It should be clearer now just why that sort of concern is shallow. Moreover, both (A) and (B) are, at least in part, rational processes: besides desires, the exercise of deep autonomy involves scrutiny of beliefs and reasons in an effort to see what one should believe, and subsequently what one should want, value, etc. One might think, following this reflection on autonomous choice and self-rule, that we should give up on the treatment of autonomous desire offered by Frankfurt and Arrington. Perhaps we should see really autonomous desire as one that necessarily gives expression to one’s considered self-identity. Insofar as the analysis of autonomy in terms of 1st and 2nd order desires has no place for such expression, perhaps it is inadequate as a treatment of real autonomy. I am sympathetic to this line of thought. Clearly I place a high premium on the role of deliberate self-consideration in the workings of autonomy. However, I am inclined to think that Frankfurt and Arrington are correct to think that there is a difference in the degree of autonomy or “ownness” about a choice that accords with one’s 2nd order desires and one that does not. Autonomy comes in degrees; in terms of the metaphor used here, it can be more or less deep. Choices that accord with 2nd order desires are more autonomous than ones that do not. They are not as shallow as they might be, since they tap into one’s identity more than choices inconsistent with 2nd order desires. But they are not as deeply autonomous as they might be: it is possible for a choice to accord with 2nd order desires without being an expression of one’s considered self-identity. Perhaps one has never taken such identity into consideration. Given this, I am inclined to think that the distinction between autonomous choice and being an autonomous
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person is a legitimate one, and that existing discussions of autonmous choice are not radically inadequate so long as we understand that there is more to autonomy than such choices. Both (A) and (B), but especially (B), are characterized by what Charles Taylor calls strong evaluation. To throw light on the exercise of deep autonomy, and to start to get us back to advertising, we need to examine what is involved in Taylor’s notion.
Deep autonomy and strong evaluation In an influential body of work, Charles Taylor has examined a cluster of ideas closely related to the concept of deep autonomy. Ideas in this family include authenticity, self-interpretation, and, centrally, strong evaluation. Our present interest is with the latter notion, but these ideas are best explicated together. In “Self-Interpreting Animals” (1985a), Taylor presents strong evaluation in terms very similar to those used by Arrington; like Arrington, Taylor ties his notion explicitly to the work of Harry Frankfurt (Taylor, 1985a, p. 66; see also 1985b, p. 15). In this vein, Taylor casts strong evaluation in terms of the evaluation of desires: “I want to speak of strong evaluation where we ‘evaluate’, that is, consider good/bad, desirable/despicable, our desires themselves” (Taylor, 1985a, p. 65). Elsewhere he says that strong evaluation attends to the quality or worth of our motivation (Taylor, 1985b, p. 16). This accords with (A) type deep autonomy. However, in Sources of the Self (Taylor, 1989), Taylor describes strong evaluation more broadly. Here it is characterized so as not to be limited to the evaluation of 1st order desires: strong evaluation involves “. . . discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged” (Taylor, 1989, p. 4). Whereas strong evaluation in the sense of (A) type deep autonomy consists primarily in the assessment of whether 1st order desires are consistent with our higher order preferences, the broader type of strong evaluation
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presents the possibility of the evaluation of these higher order preferences themselves. As such, it matches what I have described as (B) type deep autonomy. Taylor even uses the metaphor of depth to describe someone attending to the concerns which are the object of strong evaluation: “A strong evaluator, by which we mean a subject who strongly evaluates desires, goes deeper, because he characterizes his motivation at greater depth. . . . But this additional dimension can be said to add depth, because now we are reflecting about our desires in terms of the kind of being we are in having them or carrying them out” (1985b, pp. 25–26). Taylor presents two reasons that, together, establish the importance of strong evaluation. First, he tells us that it is unavoidable (Taylor, 1989, p. 42). The reason for this is that strong evaluation, in both the wide and narrow senses, is part of the establishment of one’s conception of the good life. The good life is taken here as a broad moral ideal, not necessarily hedonistically, as our vernacular often suggests. We cannot help but live under some conception of how we ought to live. Figuring this out involves, at the very least, assessing whether we really want the things we seem to want. This is the narrow form of strong evaluation. However, it also involves some form of evaluation of possible ways of living; see Taylor’s mention of “kind of being” in the last quoted passage. To take a fairly trivial example from our earlier discussion of 1st and 2nd order desires, one may want ice cream, and by performing narrow strong evaluation, one may determine that one wants to want ice cream. In performing wider strong evaluation, one might compare a life involving the satisfaction of such gustatory desires and bodily appetites with one that shuns such pleasures, or assigns to them a vastly inferior role. The result of this sort of strong evaluation could be that, despite one’s 1st and 2nd order desires involving ice cream, one decides that such items and activities have no or little place in the properly good life. Second, Taylor argues that, in articulating a notion of the good life and assessing how one’s own preferences match that ideal, a person sketches a “moral map” of him/herself (Taylor, 1985a, p. 67). “It involves, one might say,
attributing to different motivations their place in the life of the subject” (Taylor, 1985a, p. 67). This parallels our discussion of deep autonomy: deep autonomy in general involves some sort of articulation and use of a notion of the structure of one’s own life. To combine this with the previous idea: strong evaluation is unavoidable inasmuch as it is tied up in the unavoidable activity of operating under some sense of what the good life involves. Figuring out the characteristics of the good life itself necessarily includes a conception of the structure of one’s life. Further, as suggested before, this latter activity is not merely descriptive; it is also creative. In articulating the related notions of the good life and the moral map of oneself, one defines oneself. In Taylor’s own relaxed terms, “It involves defining what it is we really are about . . .” (Taylor, 1989, p. 68; see also 1985b, pp. 35–38).9 Since strong evaluation is an activity, it can be done well or poorly. What do we need in place to have a chance at performing strong evaluation well? Here it is useful to incorporate Taylor’s discussions of other concepts. First, with the idea that strong evaluation involves self-definition, the concept of identity is brought in. In “Atomism” (Taylor, 1985c), Taylor argues that the characteristics of full, rational human existence can only be developed within a social context. In other words, we get our identities from the social context(s) in which we develop. Correlatively, inasmuch as we are properly (and unavoidably) concerned with who we are, we ought to be concerned with the moral character of the social context(s) in which we exist (Taylor, 1985c, pp. 206–207). Second, with the notion that strong evaluation is central to articulating, defining, and acting out of a conception of what we are really about, the concept of authenticity is brought into the discussion. In The Ethics of Authenticity (Taylor, 1991), Taylor portrays authenticity as one of the legitimately central moral ideals of modernity. It is characterized by a call to live one’s life in one’s own way (Taylor, 1991, pp. 28–29). Obviously, to do this one has to figure out what this way is. Moreover, being true to one’s own originality (Taylor, 1991, p. 29) is something one has to
Advertising and Deep Autonomy figure out and accomplish for oneself. To live up to the moral tenor of our age, one has to undergo or pursue strong evaluation. The idea of the importance of being true to oneself and the necessity of pursuing this by oneself has led to certain sorts of individualism and relativism; Taylor is concerned to diagnose and combat the errors in these views. Two things in particular go overlooked in the modern version of the ideal of authenticity. Both are related to the previous idea that one’s identity is determined within a context. First, one must retain, “. . . openness to horizons of significance . . .” (Taylor, 1991, p. 66). These horizons correspond to, among other things, the ideas of possible ways of living necessary for the wide sort of strong evaluation. If being true to oneself is absolutely divorced from some assessment of what is really important, then one’s attempt to live up to the moral spirit of our age runs the risk of degrading to mere narcissism or irrelevance. “. . . one of the things we can’t do, if we are to define ourselves significantly, is suppress or deny the horizons against which things take on significance for us” (Taylor, 1991, p. 37).10 This forces the question of how we come to conceive of these horizons of value upon us; its answer brings the second point out. The source of our horizons of significance is the other people with whom we live. The conversation and interaction which characterize both our adult behavior and our on-going moral education give us both the roots of and the opportunity to develop further our notions of value. In short, our horizons of significance are rooted in our social context(s). We have also seen that this context is central to the formation of our identities. In Taylor’s terms, our conceptions both of value and of ourselves are formed through dialogue (Taylor, 1991, p. 66). Two things are worth noting about the role of horizons of significance in the exercise of strong evaluation. First, it should be clear that Taylor’s idea does not entail that we must sacrifice our reflective authenticity to accord with the context within which we find ourselves. On the contrary, remaining open to such horizons will require searching out information about ways of living that go beyond those we are most familiar
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with, and that are perhaps even incommensurable with them. Strong evaluation does not require commitment to any particular one of the ways of living we find. Instead, we might find ourselves choosing pieces of any number of ways of living. Second, and relatedly, Taylor stresses remaining open to horizons of significance. This means that strong evaluation is an on-going process. This is another way of putting the earlier point that it is unavoidable. It should be clear that there is no a priori guarantee that any of the ways of living to which one is exposed will be rationally grounded. Yet exactly these horizons are the source of information used in strong evaluation. Potential problems here with uncertainty as to the rational adequacy of the results of one’s strong evaluation can only be dealt with through further testing. One must continue such evaluation. Imagination, time, and work are the only tools one has to safeguard oneself against making bad choices in the course of strong evaluation. All of the notions we have examined – strong evaluation, authenticity, horizons of significance, dialogue – necessarily involve the deployment of sophisticated concepts. It is reasonable to think that these sorts of concepts require language. Moreover, dialogue is the form of interaction with others that is central to our attainment and development of these concepts, and it definitely requires language. In short, richness of concepts possible only through richness of language is necessary for authenticity. These threads (and their importance) can be brought together fairly simply: authenticity is developed, or lived up to, through self-rule. Strong evaluation, or the exercise of deep autonomy, is the process of self-rule. To be performed well, strong evaluation requires conceptual richness, especially regarding the background of standards of significance against which we can judge the structure of our own lives. This conceptual richness requires language. Since our concepts and language skills are rooted in the social context(s) in which we live and develop, and since we define ourselves through the deployment of these concepts and skills in strong evaluation, out of sheer self-interest we have a reason to be concerned with the moral tone of the context(s) in which we live.
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Deep autonomy, strong evaluation, and advertising We can now directly address how advertising can compromise deep autonomy. As seen above, the exercise of deep autonomy requires two things: (1) openness to possible ways of living (part of Taylor’s horizons of significance), and (2) conceptual richness rooted in language. Following the work of Barbara Phillips and John Waide, I shall argue that advertising poses a threat to these prerequisites of deep autonomy. (1) Being open to a background of values and possibilities from which to choose and evaluate our own life requires (at least) three things: (a) knowledge of such values and possibilities, (b) a willingness on the part of the agent to examine both his/her own life and this background of values and possibilities, and (c) the mere existence of such horizons of ways of being. Advertising, however, compromises all three aspects of this prerequisite of strong evaluation/deep autonomy. (a) First, for people to know of, e.g., ways of living other than their own, they have to be exposed to them in some way. One way this happens is through exposure to representations of these ways of living (as opposed to actual instantiations of them). However, advertising works against this, in two ways. Particular advertisements encourage homogeneity. Since the purpose of an advertisement is to sell a product, the advertisement works if it can get large groups of people to act in one way. The more people actually act in essentially one way, we can reasonably speculate (but not more than that at this point) that the easier the advertiser’s job becomes. Once some homogeneity is brought about, advertisers have a background of similarity to appeal to. Instead of portraying ways of living significantly different from those being lived by the people exposed to advertising, advertisers will be rewarded by tapping into what already appeals to people living these sorts of life. The obvious answer to this aspect of the problem of knowledge is to point to the com-
petition between advertisements. Particular advertisements encourage homogeneity, but various advertisements are selling different products, and hence are providing consumers with a variety of models of ways of living. Competition leads to exposure to variety; competition will naturally lead to the spread of the sort of information that fosters strong evaluation. This answer has some point, but we have reason to think that its application is very limited. The sorts of models of ways of living people are exposed to through advertising are best seen as part of just one over-arching way of living. Turning from particular advertisements to advertising as a whole reveals the reinforcement of a deeper sort of homogeneity. Barbara Phillips argues that advertising as a whole is a powerful institution that installs and reinforces the values of capitalism (Phillips, 1997, p. 109). As such, it works against exposure to non-capitalist and nonconsumerist values and ways of living. But human history has been characterized by many sorts of non-consumerist societies: various forms of socialist, agricultural and hunter-gatherer ways of living come to mind very quickly. While these ways of living may not be viable candidates for twenty-first century westerners to take up completely,11 it is reasonable to think that we can still learn from them. These ways of living involve values that many people might find enriching if they knew about them. Advertising, as an institution devoted to the strengthening of one way of living, works against having knowledge of other ways of living. In a similar vein, John Waide characterizes advertising as embodying an ideology. Waide argues that associative advertising encourages people to think that they are what they own (Waide, 1987, p. 75). With this message comes suppression (not necessarily conscious or deliberate) of ideas which suggest that we can form our identities in ways that do not involve the market. Public service advertising provides important variety to the sorts of ways of living to which we are exposed through advertising. Public service advertisements need not enhance capitalist values. They need not serve as vehicles for the values of any particular ideology. As such, they can be a
Advertising and Deep Autonomy useful vehicle for values and possible ways of living that are not part of the ideology served by commercial advertising. There is reason to think that public service ads as we encounter them in the west do this to a small extent only. Insofar as such advertisements encourage the satisfaction of desires through non-market methods, they advertise something found in virtually no commercial advertising (and if there, always connected to the selling of a product). But public service ads are not a repository for information about ways of living at odds with those found in the west. Moreover, they constitute a very small fraction of the advertisements to which we are exposed. As such, they provide neither a terribly thorough nor formidable alternative to the values reinforced by commercial advertising. (b) Advertising also works against the willingness of people to examine their lives against a rich background of values and possibilities. Insofar as commercial advertising is an institution devoted to perpetuating one consumerist way of being (Phillips, 1997) or inculcating an ideology that encourages us to form our identities through consumption of goods available through markets (Waide, 1987), it addresses and shapes our desires fairly directly. Part of the ideology of advertising is the notion, deeply embedded so that it is hard for us to articulate, that whenever we want something or feel some dissatisfaction, the market can satisfy our desires. Even more deeply, the effect of constant exposure to advertising – hardly an overstatement in the early twenty-first century – is the spread of the idea that we should want the things that the market can provide. The institution of advertising embodies a normative standard or claim that is very powerful. Exposure to this standard erodes willingness to resist it. Waide usefully defends and develops these ideas. Waide discusses what we can call internal and external effects of advertising on the will. This is the closest Waide comes to discussing what I have called deep autonomy. The external influence on the will to explore oneself and alternative ways of being comes from pressure from other people. The ideology of advertising embodies a standard of being by which we can measure ourselves and others. When someone
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deviates – when one does not own the right things, or tries to define oneself in ways that do not turn on consumption – one invites response from people who have embraced the norm offered by advertising. Waide calls this sneer group pressure (Waide, 1987, p. 76); its effect is to penalize people who stray. Not only does this work against general willingness to be open to various horizons of significance, it also poses a threat to shallow autonomy. Sneer group pressure is a sort of force; choices made under these conditions are hardly autonomous in the ideal sense. More deeply, Waide notes that constant exposure to the ideology of commercial advertising influences our self-perception (Waide, 1987, p. 76); this is an internal effect. We can come to see ourselves as defined as consumers (as opposed to thinkers, builders, community members – choose your own alternative), and this can further incline us to desire as consumers, and to look askance on the possibility of defining ourselves in other ways. This is, perhaps,12 acceptable if it is the result of a process of strong evaluation. If, however, it stands in the way of the exercise of deep autonomy, then it is a moral problem. Phillips makes the same point in terms of values. According to Phillips, “Advertising, as the mouthpiece for capitalism, presents values and assumptions that color consumers’ perceptions of reality” (Phillips, 1997, p. 112) There are two reasonable inferences we can make from this point. One is that one of the values is that of capitalism itself – it is presented as a way of living which embodies or presents a route to the good. Second, it is reasonable to think that our values can influence our desires.13 Combining these ideas leads to the possibility that inculcating the ideas and practices of capitalism is self-perpetuating. This can work against the willingness of people to consider ways of life that are different, perhaps incommensurably so. Yet if we are to exercise deep control over our identities and the course of our lives, we have to perform this sort of strong evaluation.14 Waide lumps the ideas discussed under (a) and (b) above into one discussion. Associative advertising, according to Waide, leads one to seek market solutions to desires/interests which can
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really only be satisfied in non-market ways (Waide, 1987, pp. 73–74). Associative advertising works by linking products with deep needs or desires, such as for friendship, self-esteem, and the like. These are non-market goods because they cannot be directly bought or sold. Attaining these non-market goods probably involves developing skills and character traits that also cannot be bought or sold (Waide, 1987, p. 75). For instance, developing friendships involves developing the traits required to be close to others. These include compassion and trustworthiness, among others. Developing self-esteem might well involve developing the skills required to undertake meaningful projects. These traits and skills take work to acquire. The ideology of advertising works against the development of these skills and traits by encouraging us to spend our time and resources buying things, but non-market goods and skills cannot be bought. The points about knowledge and willingness to examine oneself and others in the light of that knowledge are specific but very important versions of the skills and traits Waide is discussing. As noted above, public service advertisements can encourage non-market ways of achieving non-market values. Some do. But, again, there are comparatively few – advertising as we know it is overwhelmingly connected to commercial interests. If the tides were turned, such that the majority of advertisements were public service ones, this too could impede deep autonomy, unless that was what they were promoting. This sort of advertising might produce better people than the current arrangement. It might even produce people better prepared for deep autonomy than the current arrangement does. But there is no guarantee that this would be the case. Wherever people are exposed to representations of one kind of living in gross disproportion to others, it is difficult to imagine that they will be in a position to exercise self-rule in the manner we have been discussing. (c) Not only does advertising compromise both the knowledge of ways of living and the willingness to pursue and use this knowledge, it also compromises the existence of the objects of such knowledge. This point is an implication of the previous two. Advertising is a powerful tool
for the spread of a certain ideology. This ideology brings with it values including a particular conception of the human good – (something like) you are better off if you buy things. As we have seen, becoming involved with this ideology poses a threat to one’s ability to think of alternatives to it. But taking up a way of living requires being exposed to it. Moreover, incorporating aspects of one way of living into a life previously structured by a different set of values takes cognitive effort. Since advertising works against such exposure and effort, it presents an obstacle to the living of sorts of life incommensurate with capitalism or consumerism. The recent history of the world suggests that capitalism is a very powerful idea. Its existence, along with the use of advertising to reinforce and spread its values, poses a very powerful threat to non-capitalist ways of living.15 Not only does advertising limit epistemic access to the horizons of significance emphasized by Taylor; it also impoverishes them. The homogenization of the world under the influence of capitalism and its primary tool, advertising, relegates some ways of life to history books. This is appropriate for some ways of living, but not for all. (a), (b), and (c) are significant on their own, but they are especially problematic when one phenomenon accomplishes them all together, as advertising does. (2) The seeds of the exposition of the manner in which advertising threatens linguistically rooted conceptual richness necessary for deep autonomy have already been sown, so I will discuss this very briefly. First, in the process of threatening the existence of the ways of living which constitute the background against which examination of a life takes place, advertising might be reducing the number of things we have to think about. At the very least, it makes such phenomena harder to think about. In other words, either advertising directly impoverishes our conceptual horizons, or it practically does so by making certain ideas harder to think about. Either way, advertising is a threat to strong evaluation via its influence on the concepts needed for such an endeavour. Second, let’s return to our immediately previous discussion of Waide. Among the non-
Advertising and Deep Autonomy market goods which advertising co-opts but actually threatens is friendship. This can be broadened to include mere fellow-feeling, or even the general sense of community or togetherness. Commercial advertising threatens these ways of being together by encouraging us to spend our time and money buying things rather than investing them in the development of the skills and character traits necessary for these sorts of relationship. Language is one of the skills threatened in the process. We learn language from other people, we develop our linguistic skills in dialogue with others, we acquire and refine concepts in such dialogue, and we articulate our senses of ourselves and the rest of the world in the process. This latter articulation benefits from the acquisition of new ways of seeing ourselves and the world in complex, attentive conversation. If advertising works against the development of the sorts of relationships in which such conversation takes place, then advertising makes it much more difficult to acquire and refine concepts. It also makes it much more difficult to put concepts to use in articulation of our views of ourselves and the world. Instead of enriching our lives, which is the superficial message of capitalism, advertising poses a direct threat to the conceptual resources necessary for the process of strong evaluation that is directly involved in our pursuit of the good life.
Implications Let’s return to my original discussion of deep autonomy. I presented two forms: (A) assessing what our values are and whether our 1st order desires are consistent with these. (B) assessing whether our values themselves are desirable. Most of what has been discussed in terms of strong evaluation and its prerequisites strikes at (B), the deepest form of deep autonomy. Insofar as some of the skills threatened under the discussion of (B) are also necessary for (A), (A) is also threatened by advertising. However, (B) is threatened more. It is threatened more because
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it is more difficult to accomplish. This is ironic because (B) is more important than (A) in exercising control over our identities and the course of our lives. (B) is more pertinent to self-rule than (A) is. Moreover, and even more ironic, shallow autonomy is threatened by these considerations even less than (A). However, shallow autonomy is indirectly threatened in a very pervasive way. It might be very difficult to manipulate people like puppets and get them to buy things through exposure to particular advertisements. However, this is more than made up for if you get people to define themselves as consumers and prevent them from acquiring the information and skills necessary to take control over redefining themselves. We can now see that Waide is operating under a false bifurcation (Waide, 1987, p. 73). Instead of turning away from autonomy altogether to something different, he is really discussing topics directly relevant to deep autonomy. Shallow autonomy need not come up as a topic of special importance when addressing deep autonomy. Turning from autonomy of choice to autonomy of persons links contemporary discussions of advertising to other, broader sorts of concerns about advertising and autonomy. Aldous Huxley (1958) gave voice to concerns about deep problems advertising poses for autonomy. Contemporary writers share Huxley’s spirit, but pay little if any explicit attention to what he had to say. This trend can usefully be illuminated in terms of shallow and deep autonomy: modern writers such as Crisp and Arrington focus on shallow autonomy, but Huxley’s concerns are best understood in terms of the autonomy of persons, or self-rule. Huxley sees advertising as a threat to democracy. His argument goes as follows: for real democracy, in which people speak (vote, think) as responsible individuals, people have to be able to make rational choices with adequate information. If individuals are incapable of making such choices, then, despite superficial appearances, a society is not a real democracy. The skills which put people in a position to make such choices take work to develop. People have to develop both the ability and the willingness to
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do the work to make such choices. Advertising subverts democracy not by manipulating particular choices – not through interference in shallow autonomy – but by dissuading people from developing the skills that would put them into a position to make rational choices. Advertising does this by discouraging self-rule. Democracy is self-rule writ large. People who are capable of assessing the structure of their lives against a background of possible ways of living can really take control of the way their society works. People incapable or unwilling to determine their lives are likewise unable to participate in democracy in its fullest sense. These sorts of concerns have their contemporary champion not amongst business ethicists, but rather in the figure of Noam Chomsky (qua political watchdog). In “Disinformation”, Chomsky discusses the control of thought and the “manufacture of consent” in western democracies. Chomsky thinks power is controlled in democracies through the blocking of understanding (Chomsky, 1984, pp. 11–12) about both particular issues and general, over-arching concerns. Understanding is blocked in particular cases through the use of what might be described as “selling language” in the media. Chomsky’s essay, and others in the collection, are full of examples of such language. Geno Rodriguez notes the linking of weapons of aggression and destruction to peace (Rodriguez, 1984, p. 7). Chomsky describes a headstone which sells native american genocide as a noble sacrifice in the name of a greater cause (Chomsky, 1984, p. 11). He also describes a self-serving pattern in North American media that consists in the interpretation of aggression as self-defense. In general, understanding is blocked by control of the framework of possible thought: Democratic systems are quite different [from totalitarian ones]. It is necessary to control not only what people do, but also what they think. Since the state lacks the capacity to ensure obedience by force, thought can lead to action and therefore the threat to order must be excised at the source. It is necessary to establish a framework for possible thought that is constrained within the principles of the state religion. These need not be asserted; it is better that they be presupposed, as the unstated
framework for thinkable thought. The critics reinforce this system by tacitly accepting these principles . . . (Chomsky, 1984, p. 16)
These goals and methods are the same as those identified in the present examination of advertising and deep autonomy. Since strong evaluation is an exercise in understanding oneself and the world, and since strong evaluation is central to self-rule, practices which block understanding interfere with self-rule. The ideology of interest in commercial circles is consumerism; the values that go presupposed here are those identified by Phillips. The institution of advertising is devoted to reinforcing the control of thought and understanding through spread and inculcation of these values. People feeling unease about something are directed to act in the way diagnosed by John Waide: their thought is so deeply shaped that their first thoughts about dealing with unease concern buying something. Chomsky links the thought control methods of democracy directly to commercial interests. He describes the “manufacture of consent” as “. . . a main preoccupation of the public relations industry, whose leading figure, Edward Bernays, described ‘the engineering of consent’ as the very essence of democracy” (Chomsky, 1984, p. 18). With this recognition, the concerns of myself and those of Huxley and Chomsky dovetail. Advertising is at least as much of a threat to deep autonomy as it is to shallow autonomy. Since the skills developed in the pursuit of selfrule are necessary for participation in substantial democracy, advertising is also a threat to certain kinds of political organization. These are both serious moral problems. One need only be interested in one of these problems to have reason to be concerned about the moral implications of advertising.
Acknowledgements Thanks to my students in my Philosophy 329 – Business Ethics class at the University of Calgary, fall of 1999, for discussing this topic in helpful ways. Thanks also to anonymous referees for probing comments.
Advertising and Deep Autonomy Notes * This paper was written while I was a sessional lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Calgary. 1 Most attention has been directed at persuasive or associative advertising – generally, advertising which turns attention away from the explicit merits/ problems of the product and towards potentially merely loosely related phenomena, such as sex appeal and self esteem. My discussion of advertising applies to all commercial advertising, but perhaps to such paradigmatically problematic types first and foremost. 2 I talk of students here, but this is convenient shorthand for anyone new to the field of business ethics and who surveys the literature on advertising. 3 This consideration holds for experienced audiences of advertising. It is quite possible that, should the powers of modern advertising be turned on a nonconsumer culture or on a non-media-savvy people, these people could be manipulated like the movie viewers. 4 And this is if there is a problem at all – perhaps Arrington is right in his defense of advertising. So, at most the problem applies to very few, or to all to a very slight extent. 5 Strictly speaking, Phillips defends advertising and attributes problems to the capitalist values passed on through advertising. This distinction makes no difference to my use of Phillips’ work in what follows. However, she risks overlooking the special connection between advertising and capitalism. It is reasonable to think that advertising is not a neutral tool for the dissemination of information, but has internal ties to ideologies centred on consumption and, consequently, selling. Aldous Huxley notes this close connection between free enterprise and “propaganda” (1958). More on Huxley in the final section below. 6 Bioethics, of course, has long been concerned with autonomy and medical practice. 7 He also discusses the concept of control/manipulation, but this is not directly relevant to the present discussion, so I shall omit it. 8 We are familiar with this sense of desirable not just from everyday life (Is the introduction of casinos to our community desirable?) but also from G.E.Moore’s criticisms of Mill’s proof of the principle of utility. Visibility and actually seeing something are not analogous to desiring something and the desirability of that item. 9 The roots of Taylor’s idea are the vast body of hermeneutic work on interpretation and identity. Besides Taylor’s work, see Gadamer, 1976 and
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Ricoeur, 1981. For discussion of these ideas and some of their moral implications, see my 1998 and forthcoming. 10 I take there to be no general tension between the criteria of rational choice and the demands of personal choice. To recognize something as rational is, I take it, to recognize it as laying a claim on all rational beings, including oneself. Qua rational being, such recognition is a way of pursuing authenticity. Moreover, I take the interest in plumbing the depths of oneself in the name of living one’s own way to be partly an interest in seeing what sort of life for oneself seems to be best supported by reasons. This is rational activity. 11 This being said, it is possible that some individuals could do exactly that – walk away from consumerist living and take up something radically different. Think of Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in Walden. 12 I qualify this because, as Waide argues, the sort of life that comes with the ideology of advertising is quite easily seen as incomplete. Even if one chooses it through the exercise of deep autonomy, it could be the case that such a choice is in fact irrational because self-defeating – more on this below. 13 Obviously, we sometimes desire things which are not consistent with our values, and vice versa, but the point still stands. 14 This tendency manifests itself in many ways. We should all be familiar with narrow-mindedness, both of ourselves and others. We should also recognize the affective manifestation of this phenomenon – the experience of unease, either mild or intense, when witnessing ways of living that are different from our own. This point has extra implications for the raising of children. It is one thing to expose adults who purportedly have control of their lives to the influence of commercial advertising. It is quite another thing to subject children who are still developing the powers of autonomy, both shallow and deep, to institutionally embedded ideological forces which pose a threat to the exercise of deep control over one’s identity. 15 Capitalist values, of course, are not all bad, and some ways of living can be threats to the good aspects of this ideology. Besides Phillips, discussions of the pros and cons of capitalism are legion. However, the ideology of capitalism is visibly limited – this is the central point of John Waide’s discussion of advertising. Moreover, it is reasonable to think that some other ways of living are more conducive to strong evaluation than the combination of capitalism and advertising is. And since self-rule seems to be a genuine
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value, this makes some other ways of living preferable on this score.
References Arrington, Robert L.: 1982, ‘Advertising and Behavior Control’, Journal of Business Ethics 1, 3–12. Chomsky, Noam: 1984, ‘Disinformation’, in Disinformation: The Manufacture of Consent (Part of an exhibit at the Alternative Museum, March 2–30, 1985, Geno Rodriguez, Curator). Crisp, Roger: 1987, ‘Persuasive Advertising, Autonomy, and the Creation of Desire’, Journal of Business Ethics 6, 413–418. Frankfurt, Harry: 1971, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy LXVIII, 5–20. Gadamer, Hans-Georg: 1976, ‘On the Problem of Self-Understanding’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics (ed. & trans. David E. Linge, University of California Press, Berkeley). Huxley, Aldous: 1958, ‘The Arts of Selling’, in Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Row, Inc, New York). Phillips, Barbara J.: 1997, ‘In Defense of Advertising: A Social Perspective’, Journal of Business Ethics 16, 109–118. Ricoeur, Paul: 1981, ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation (ed. & trans John B. Thompson. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Rodriguez, Geno: 1984, ‘The Artist as Catalyst’, in Disinformation: The Manufacture of Consent (Part of
an exhibit at the Alternative Museum, March 2–30, 1985, Geno Rodriguez, Curator). Sneddon, Andew: 1998, ‘Corn-Flake Hermeneutics’, Kinesis 25(2), 60–82. Sneddon, Andrew: forthcoming, ‘Ethical Particularism and the Hermeneutic Circle’, De Philosophia. Taylor, Charles: 1985a, ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’, in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Taylor, Charles: 1985b, ‘What is Human Agency?’, in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Taylor, Charles: 1985c, ‘Atomism’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Taylor, Charles: 1989, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts). Taylor, Charles: 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts). Thoreau, Henry David: Walden. Waide, John: 1987, ‘The Making of Self and World in Advertising’, Journal of Business Ethics 6, 73–79.
Department of Philosophy, McGill University, Leacock Building, 855 rue Sherbrooke, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 2T7 E-mail:
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