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Guru |
Hah, well I guess I'm coming at it from more of a Libertarian perspective, but I think McDonalds or any other fast food company should be able to produce as much fattening, god-awful food as they want...if the people eat it and get fat it is their fault. Absolutely NONE of the blame belongs to the corporation. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but the definition of a corporation/firm is an entity that seeks to produce the maximum value for its shareholders through any legals means possible. If the executives think that can best be accomplished by feeding a bunch of fat morons pound after pound of fries till they explode, it is the fat people's fault, not McDonalds.
As for the doc itself, I think Spurlock sprinkled the blame around (a little to society fast food culture, a little to the people themselves, a little to the corporations). Fairly even-handed, made for entertaining viewing, although I still couldn't get over the fact that these people should KNOW what they're putting in their (or their kids') mouths. |
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"Forum Moderator" Jedi |
That's a pretty fair definition of the corporation, and slipping in "legal" is a nice move to defend your position. It's hard to criticize in that light. I think there are problems with what's "legal" (merely because industry lobbyists in various fields twist the game to their advantage) but I think the more interesting question (and my dissertation topic!) is how an individual justifies their role in the corporation. If the corporation can do anything legal to maximize profits, how does the PERSON (as employee) do so without some cognitive dissonance? Your second point is dead-on, in my book. I think parents should be far more aware of what they feed their kids...and people should be far more aware of what they are putting in their pieholes. I found the doc itself to be more entertaining then controversial. McDonalds comes off bad mainly because they won't be interviewed...it seems like they had something to hide, which is probably not fair. It was probably a standard McDonald's policy. But, that's just my perception of it. |
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Guru |
I'm not sure I see the problem...as long as the person/employee is doing something legal, why should their be any "cognitive dissonance"? Do you not remember what Gordon Gecko said: "Money is not won or lost, it is simply transferred." "Greed is good." If you accept these precepts, there's no reason you should have any moral problems earning money for your stockholders. If you DON'T accept these precepts, you should probably not be in business to begin with. I think the real problem is when the executives get too caught up in the short term stock price, and don't think about long term value. This is what happened with Enron: the execs got so caught up with the price of the stock that they did things that, while in many cases WERE legal, were not good for the company in the long term. |
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Slacker |
So then the question becomes what should be legal. Laws are not a steady state. Things that were legal in the past are illegal now and things that are legal now were illegal in the past. Western societies have been regulating food for a long time. Does that apply here? Should fast food be regulating? I don't think fast food should be regulated beyond what it is now but I do think people need to be made more aware of the dangers of relying on it. I also think that companies selling legal but unhealthy products should take care and learn the lesson's of the tobacco industry. |
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"Forum Moderator" Jedi |
The problem is this: can a moral person do what might be "permissible" by the law but morally ugly or repugnant? If you merely operate under the guise "I'm doing what's best for the company" or "I'm just doing what I'm told", you seem to push out the responsibility that you expect of people regarding their food intake. The cognitive dissonance is the difference between what you're willing to do as corporate employee (trying to turn a profit) and what you're willing to do as a moral agent. If there was no LAW against doing some activity that would, nevertheless, cause some level of harm to group of innocent people, but doing it would cause a huge profit increase, what prevents you from doing it? I don't take "greed is good" as an acceptable moral precept at the outset. I see greed as a vice, and Gordon Gecko as vicious. Businesses can have a social conscience, and act responsibly in cases where they could "legally" do otherwise without being failures. I've got a friend who makes a nice living managing "socially responsible investments." The fact that his attitude is not "money at all costs" hasn't caused him to fail. |
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Guru |
I'm not sure people need to be told that fast food is bad for them. That has just always seemed like common sense to me. Eating at McDonalds or Taco Bell every once and a while is fine, but doing it everyday is not...I just figured this was common wisdom. I agree there ARE people who eat at these places everyday, but that is their fault, not the corporation's, and I don't necessarily think more government intervention would affect their behavior, just like seatbelt laws don't magically make everyone wear seatbelts.
Where I do think government intervention might be needed is in advertising to kids. Kids' TV shows are filled with ads for candy and fast food, and these kids will inevitably spend their pre-adolescence thinking these foods are perfectly fine and normal. Although it is the parents' responsibility to feed their children, I can see how 7/8 year olds could get into bad habits at a young age regarding diet if they thought that "milkshakes" and "Skittles" are actual food groups. And pE... If greed becomes overwhelming and controlling, indeed it is a vice. However, if you simply define greed as executives/employees wanting to make as much money as possible, I don't think it is a vice. Making as much money as possible and being socially responsible are not always exlcusive. As for the question "can a moral person do what might be permissible by the law but morally ugly or repugnant?" I think the answer is "Absolutely." In a free market/capitalistic system everyone has a different role to play. The corporate executive/employee has a responsibility to make as much money for his stockholders as he can, while it is the government's job to make/enforce the laws. Would you want to be the owner/stockholder in a company that went out of its way not to hurt anyone, despite losing profit? I certainly wouldn't. Also I will add that people in the business world do things for profit that harm people all the time...it is not an abstract question. I read this book about the rise/fall of Enron, and in business school Jeff Skilling (eventual Enron CEO) was asked what he would do if he ran a company that was producing a dangerous product that, while profitable and not yet illegal, could potentially harm many people. Skilling replied that he would continue making the product as long as it was profitable/legal. |
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"Forum Moderator" Jedi |
Given the size of the pile of papers I have to grade by the end of the week, I'm afraid I can't adequately respond to your reply right now, Pax. But I will, in time.
I will say that I think what is "common wisdom" for you and I isn't always common wisdom for all. Education and information aren't universally distributed. What seems common sense for us now regarding smoking wasn't at all common sense years ago. The old cigarette TV commericals promoted the HEALTH BENEFITS of smoking!!! Advertising can make people beleive false things (sorry, Jackie!). I have footage of an advertising meeting focusing on advertising to small children where advertisers discuss how to "play up" small health benefits while downplaying the detriments. In the same meeting, a toy advertiser says "anti-social behavior between children in pursuit of a product means we've done a good job." That's not illegal, but I find it reprehensible. I fail to see how that should be accepted as merely the market at work. It's more than that...it's an encouragement of bad behavior between children. |
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Guru |
I don't really see the problem with your example of corporations encouraging bad behavior among children...it is their responsibility to make money, and the parents' responsibility to teach their kids to behave correctly. So?
I agree what may be common wisdom for me is not common wisdom for everyone...there are people in the world who think that using a special type of soap will prevent AIDS, and that marijuana helps you drive better. Do we really need to go out of our way to educate these people? I wouldn't think so since they seem to have no common sense to begin with. |
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Jedi |
I don't see how we cannot blame corporations for things such as obesity. We could go deeper and say that this is really an issue of American society, but businesses play a big part of our society. I would say two things are true: 1)People, in general, are stupid individuals who follow trends and obide by unwritten rules without question. 2)Corporations try to get the most profit possible by ANY means they can get away with. Some of their tactics are questionable at best. With these two truths in mind I would say that corporations are munipulative entities that hold no concern for their customers. I would also say that if people did not think that the percieved benefits of purchasing something outweigh the negative consequences, the consumer would not buy it. Together this creates a point in which corporations are destructive to society if left to their own devices. Everyone knows that smoking is bad, but not many actually succeed in quitting. Why? Because cigarrette companies continually tell people that smoking is okay. I say that if something is harmful it should be looked into. Sure warning labels might seem obsurd, but without them millions of people are dying from clogged arteries. Your idea that it is a corporation's responsibility is correct, but at what cost? Is the death of millions acceptable simply because a business was fulfilling a "Responsibility?" |
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Guru |
[QUOTE]Sure warning labels might seem obsurd, but without them millions of people are dying from clogged arteries.QUOTE]
Mike...You really think warning labels prevent people from smoking? Do you think someone who has been smoking all his life, or someone who has never smoked but wants to try it because his cool friends are doing it, will really buy cigarettes but then at the last second not smoke them because they see a warning label? That just seems ridiculous to me. I don't have any exact numbers, but since the mid-1960's when cigarette advertising on TV became extinct because of government guidelines and warning labels started popping up on packs/magazine ads, the profits of big tobacco companies have not decreased at all!! People still smoke, despite all the labels and warnings...probably, as you said, because some people are stupid and/or value the short term gains from smoking over the long term losses. This choice may seem absurd to the non-smoker, but it is their choice to make: the government should not intervene and tell corporations what to sell or consumers what to buy. You also said corporations are manipulative entities that hold no concern for their customers...in some cases this may be true, but so what? What does this have to do with the corporation's duty of making profit for their stockholders? You do admit that "if people did not think that the percieved benefits of purchasing something outweigh the negative consequences, the consumer would not buy it" so why should we not let them make this choice? Of course if the corporation LIES or does something ILLEGAL with regard to their hawking items to the public, the government must get involved, but until there are laws against eating fast food or smoking cigarettes, I don't think we should forbid them from trying to sell their product. In general (and tell me if I'm wrong pE) the purpose of advertising is not to increase the total consumption of a good, but simply which brands consumers prefer over other brands. In other words, if McDonalds/Taco Bell/Burger King/etc stopped advertising, the number of customers each chain had would not be significantly affected, only the consumers' preference for each various chain. And the same has proven to be true of cigarettes. |
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"Forum Moderator" Jedi |
The person who claims that making kids anti-social is his goal wouldn't want his OWN child to act that way, would he? If he's willing to do something to others but wouldn't be willing to allow his own child to do it, it strikes me that he's a bad person. It's at that point that your argument just seems to fall back on "all greed is good." I certainly wouldn't put all the blame on corporations if children misbehave, but when the advertisement ENCOURAGES them to do so, doesn't it make it that much harder for parents to teach their children to do the right thing? Children aren't just products of parental influences, are they? It seems a little callous to assume that people who believe differently than you don't have common sense to begin with. I certainly wouldn't think that the libertarian faith in the market that you have (and I don't share) means that you lack common sense. Studies have shown that people who live in low-income areas have considerably less exposure to the relevant facts about smoking cigarettes. If you aren't exposed to anti-smoking campaigns (or at least facts about the dangers) AND you're around lots of people who smoke, why is it a failure of YOUR common sense that you don't realize smoking is harmful? |
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"Forum Moderator" Super Bad-Ass Jedi |
Yeah, pE, show your class that commie flick The Corporation. You gotta do it. I watched part last night, and I'll finish up tonight. After that, I'll post later.
"Naked Woman, Naked Man Where did you get that nice sun tan?" |
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Jedi |
You said that, then you later said that it can and should restricts things it deems wrong. They are two totally seperate things. I'm sure there is a nice international market for nuclear missiles, but that doesn't make it okay to sell them. I have no solutions, and you have a point about cigarrette warning labels, but what could it hurt by having warning labels on food? It seems irrational to say that a company shouldn't be held responsible for deaths associated with its product, simply because it wants to make money. I am really not sure how many people are aware of how many calories are in some of those "Meals" offered at fast-food places. Eating one of those things amounts to all 2,000 calories of the suggested calorie intake. I don't want to come off as one who is completely against business, however. Because, as you would say, corporations do not shove the food down the consumer's throat. This is a matter of education, those without the proper information and education on particular things such as smoking, dietary habits, and the like are more likely to make bad decisions which harm them. Letting people make their one choices without telling them the consequences is similar to giving a gun to a child, it is simply a bad idea. |
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Guru |
I just don't see the similarity between cigarettes/fast food and giving guns to children. A cigarette every now and then is fine, a cheeseburger every now and then is fine, but one bullet can be deadly. To both pE and Mike...do you really think people don't know the consequences of fast food? Do you really think they believe fast food is healthy? Do you really think people in "low-income" areas believe smoking is good for them? I simply don't see how any of these examples could actually be the case, I put more stock in people's ability to make the decisions that are best for them.
pE...It is not the corporative executive's job to make parenting easier; although parental influence is not the sole factor in determining how a child will turn out, it certainly should be the primary one. I would classify an employee who makes a successful product/advertisement that might encourage unruly behavior, yet doesn't let his own son partake in such behavior, as a good executive and a good father. I'm not saying people who don't believe the same things as I do have no common sense, but I AM saying that people who eat cheeseburger after cheeseburger everyday then complain about how a corporation is making them fat do lack common sense. There is a difference between people's belief systems and their irrational actions. When I said the government shouldn't restrict what consumers buy and companies sell, I meant when the business being done is legal. Usually less government interference is better for everyone, as it allows people to make the best choice for them presented with the most options. |
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"Forum Moderator" Jedi |
Every human being has a responsibility to every other human being to not harm them. If you do something that will cause someone else harm, then you are doing something bad. There can be no doubt whatsoever that advertising works, that whatever you tell people to do in advertisements, many of them will actually do. Say you are an executive at a tobacco corporation. Let's say that if you advertise for your cigarettes 1 million more people will become smokers and the company will make 10 million dollars as a result. Let's say that of those 1 million people who start smoking because of your advertisements, 100,000 will lose 20 years of their life. They will also have spent more than 10 million dollars for the privilege of dying early. What is the net result of all this? Well, on one side 10,000 stockholders will make an average of 1000 dollars each. Hooray! On the other side, 2 million years of life have been lost along with more than 10 million consumer dollars that could've been spent on something that enhances their quality of life. Now granted, some of that blame must be put on the 1 million who allowed themselves to be deceived into smoking, but remember, without the manipulative advertising they would not have become smokers. A similar argument can be made with regard to fast food. It seems like everyone here agrees that advertising harmful things to children is bad, but we shouldn't forget that advertisements also target and work on adults. When you take something that decreases quality of life and present it as something that increases quality of life (as most advertisements do), then you are engaged in immoral deception, if not outright lying. I, for one, would like to see some severe restrictions on advertising. I agree with you that it doesn't seem logical that a warning label would deter someone from eating junk food, but just because it doesn't seem logical doesn't mean it doesn't work. Warning labels are much like advertisements, if not quite as effective. Yes, people know fast food is bad for them, but if they don't hear it that often, they are not going to act on that knowledge. I see this all the time in politics. If you repeat something long enough and hard enough, people will believe it whether it is true or not. On the other hand, if something is true but you don't hear it very often, you won't remember or act on that information. If you ask people if they should base their decisions on what to eat, what to buy, what to wear, or who to vote for on advertisements they would say, "Of course not." Yet, most people do base their decisions largely on advertisements. It is not logical, but it is the way things work and it has real effects on real people. I don't think it should be ignored or condoned. -------------------------------------------------- Anatomy to me is a homesick stomach and a broken heart |
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Guru |
This is an interesting discussion on the effects of advertising. I have always believed (and I think this is overall an accurate statement) that advertisements DO NOT increase the number of consumers that actually partake in a certain activity. This may sound ridiculous at first, but it makes sense. Think of car advertising...if there were a law that said no car advertisements could be shown anywhere, would people quit buying cars? Of course not. Conversely, if there were a law that said ALL advertisements had to be for cars, would that increase the number of people who bought cars? I don't think it would, not significantly. The purpose of advertising (for cars, cigarettes, fast food, political campaigns, etc) is not to make people go buy that product, but to make people remember that particular brand more than they remember another brand. Another example is campaign bumper stickers/buttons...Does seeing a "Kerry-Edwards" sign really persuade you to vote for Kerry-Edwards? Of course not, but it does make you remember their name and think about that particular side of the ticket (or brand in the case of corporate advertising). My point is that as long as there are cigarettes out there, people will smoke them, no matter how the executives choose to market it. If a company chooses not to advertise their product, or to advertise it in a less aggressive way, the only thing that will change is that more people will go buy another brand of cigarettes. If NO cigarette companies were allowed to advertise, people would still smoke, except that they would be uninformed about what type of cigarette they were smoking (which would lead to a lack of incentive for the producer to make a good product since no one can tell what product comes from what company).
And when it comes to "doing harm to other human beings," I'm not really sure manufacturing a cigarette constitutes doing harm to another human. There are many people who smoke only occasionally and will never become addicted. There are also many people who smoke 2 packs a day for forty years and still live into their 80s. Same can be said with fast food...simply making fast food does not constitute "harming another human being." If you start outlawing or limiting products that could potentially be harmful, the list might never end! Why not ban alcohol (20000 drunk driving deaths a year), airplanes, or cars? The fact that tobacco companies make so much money tells me that society (or at least the smokers) value the benefits of cigarettes more than they regret the consquences (dying). To say smokers don't know that cigarette smoking is harmful (especially in 2005) is ridiculous, let them make their own cost-benefit analysis. |
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"Forum Moderator" Jedi |
I don't really study advertising, but I'm pretty sure that advertising does increase the use of a product, not just lure consumers away from other companies (though that is a large part of it.) Why else would pharmaceutical companies advertise drugs that they hold a patent for? No one else can produce it, so it stands to reason that their advertisements are not just to gain an advantage over an opponent. Also, I think you would see some covert collusion, where companies tacitly agree not to advertise very much so long as other companies hold to the agreement. Obviously, that is not the case. I wish I could present more concrete evidence, but I'm not an expert or anything.
While I do understand that everyone bears responsibility for their choices, these choices are not made in a vacuum. There are elements of human nature that we have little control over, and businesses have learned how to manipulate those elements. A small number of executive decision makers can wield enormous power over millions, and I do not think it is entirely fair to place all the blame on the consumer. Yes, the consumers ultimately make the decision to eat something, but if someone is pulling their strings in just the right way to induce them to do something that will harm them, I think that person is very much to blame as well. -------------------------------------------------- Anatomy to me is a homesick stomach and a broken heart |
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Jedi |
I disagree. If there were no car advertising, people would still be purchasing cars, but not the same ones as they previously did. Advertising's main goal is to "Get the word" out on a particular product and, in the process, get more people to puchase it. Let's take an oligopoly for example, if Budweiser has the choice of not advertising and Coors has the same choice why don't they just stop advertising. The reason is because if one company advertises and the other does not they company who "Saved their money" by not advertising loses money because people purchase more of the other beverage. "Collusion" is when both of the companies decide not to advertise with a popular product such as beer, the sales do not change much so they save all of their advertising fees but the main setback to this is, since collusion is illegal, that one company cheats. Generally, what we have been talking about are inferior goods, things that when income goes down people purchase more of it. Tobbacco is more common in rural or poor areas, as is fast food purchasing. People who make less money are generally less educated than people who make more money. Therefore, it is safe to assume that people purchase these products because they are not as well informed as others. Pax, Lassiez-Faire is a common theory of management but the least effective. It is the reason that the Great Depression happened and it is the worst of all of the management practices. When you leave things to themselves corruption runs rampant. |
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Guru |
Mike I'm confused...you say you disagree, but then you turn around and in the next sentence make my exact same point just in a different way. My point (I'll say it again) is that a huge increase or decrease in the number of ads for cars would not signifcantly affect the number of cars sold, but it would affect the types/brands of cars sold. Isn't that what you were saying too?
Your second point, about collusion, describes classic game theory/Nash equilibrium, which is taught in any beginning economics class. If the situation you described happened (Bud and Coors decided to collude but could not secure the collusion agreement in any binding way), both companies would cheat on the agreement and advertise anyway. It is the Nash Equilibrium. If you don't know what that is, I'd be happy to explain. Your "inferior goods point" makes sense, I agree. I don't really see what the problem is though, you're basically saying "poor people are dumber than rich people and will therefore make worse decisions." Should companies realize this and be clearer and speak slower when explainging their products to poor people? Usually when things like the Enron scandal and the Great Depression occur, far-left people jump on the anti-capitalist bandwagon and blame greed/lassiez-faire/etc, but the real failure in these situations are the regulatory bodies that are supposed to be neutral watchdogs. When the success of these regulatory bodies is tied up with the success of the companies they're supposed to be regulating, bad things happen. The answer to me is not regulating the private sector more, but just doing it in a more effective manner that takes away the incentive for regulatory commissions to turn a blind eye to corruption. |
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