Advertising is Immoral

Peter Gildenhuys says many adverts are saturated with sophistry.

- By Peter Gildenhuys

The American burger chain Hardee's is frequently criticized for its ads featuring hyper-sexualized women. Using sex to sell burgers however is not the only way to go wrong when persuading people to buy things. All advertisers are persuaders, but it's possible to go about persuasion in either morally legitimate or morally illegitimate ways. Here I want to argue that nearly all advertisements are immoral.

Usually, when advertising is immoral, it is immoral in the way that lying is immoral. We say too simply that 'lying is wrong'. We mean that it is wrong by default. There are exceptions, but you've got to make the case for them. An individual act of lying may be morally permissible, even mandatory: one must lie to the Nazi officer about the Jews hiding in the attic. However, most advertising is immoral because most of it is sophistry, sophistry is generally wrong, and the circumstances of the production of this sophistry are unexceptional.