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 mis-
understanding 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 adver-
tising, 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 dis-
cusses many other writers who have examined
advertising on this matter. The paradigmatic
Journal of Business Ethics 33: 15–28, 2001.
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Andrew Sneddon*
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 movie-
screen. 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 adver-
tising 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 consid-
erations. In the case of subliminal advertising, the
movie-theatre patrons are exposed to the adver-
tisement 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
16 Andrew Sneddon
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 experi-
ence 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 com-
promise 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 under-
whelmed 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 adver-
tisements 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 partic-
ularly 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 uncomfort-
ably 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 exer-
cising 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 inter-
estingly, 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 partic-
ular aspects of medical care. This autonomous
person could relinquish control over some deci-
sions, 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 adver-
tising 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 char-
acteristics 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 neces-
sarily to address a serious moral issue; it is cer-
tainly not to address the most serious moral issue
surrounding autonomy. Moreover, showing that
advertising either cannot or does not compro-
mise 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.
17
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 char-
acteristics 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
18 Andrew Sneddon
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 con-
sidering 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 prof-
itably 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 some-
thing 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 rea-
sonable 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 rela-
tionships. 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 reason-
able 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 theo-
rists 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 sub-
sequently 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-consider-
ation in the workings of autonomy. However,
I am inclined to think that Frankfurt and
Arrington are correct to think that there is a dif-
ference 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
19
person is a legitimate one, and that existing dis-
cussions 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 char-
acterized by what Charles Taylor calls strong
evaluation. To throw light on the exercise of deep
autonomy, and to start to get us back to adver-
tising, 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, desir-
able/despicable, our desires themselves” (Taylor,
1985a, p. 65). Elsewhere he says that strong eval-
uation 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 char-
acterized so as not to be limited to the evalua-
tion 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 pref-
erences, the broader type of strong evaluation
20 Andrew Sneddon
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 evalua-
tion: “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 dimen-
sion 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 hedonisti-
cally, 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 charac-
teristics 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 evalua-
tion 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 charac-
teristics 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 dis-
cussion. 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 cor-
respond 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 irrele-
vance. “. . . 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 sacri-
fice 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
21
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 per-
formed well, strong evaluation requires concep-
tual richness, especially regarding the background
of standards of significance against which we can
judge the structure of our own lives. This con-
ceptual 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.
22 Andrew Sneddon
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 evalua-
tion/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 rea-
sonably 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 sig-
nificantly 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; com-
petition 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 adver-
tising 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 non-
consumerist 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 com-
pletely,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 insti-
tution 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 delib-
erate) 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 infor-
mation 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 alter-
native to the values reinforced by commercial
advertising.
(b) Advertising also works against the willing-
ness 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 some-
thing 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 insti-
tution 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
23
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 con-
ditions are hardly autonomous in the ideal sense.
More deeply, Waide notes that constant
exposure to the ideology of commercial adver-
tising 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-perpetu-
ating. 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 adver-
tising, according to Waide, leads one to seek
market solutions to desires/interests which can
24 Andrew Sneddon
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 devel-
oping skills and character traits that also cannot
be bought or sold (Waide, 1987, p. 75). For
instance, developing friendships involves devel-
oping 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 under-
take 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 represen-
tations of one kind of living in gross dispropor-
tion 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 con-
ception 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 homog-
enization 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 eval-
uation 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 togeth-
erness. 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 articu-
late 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, atten-
tive conversation. If advertising works against the
development of the sorts of relationships in
which such conversation takes place, then adver-
tising 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 dis-
cussion of (B) are also necessary for (A), (A) is
also threatened by advertising. However, (B) is
threatened more. It is threatened more because
25
it is more difficult to accomplish. This is ironic
because (B) is more important than (A) in exer-
cising 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 them-
selves.
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 discus-
sions 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 democ-
racy. 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 infor-
mation. If individuals are incapable of making
such choices, then, despite superficial appear-
ances, 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
26 Andrew Sneddon
do the work to make such choices. Advertising
subverts democracy not by manipulating partic-
ular choices – not through interference in shallow
autonomy – but by dissuading people from devel-
oping 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 democ-
racy in its fullest sense.
These sorts of concerns have their contempo-
rary 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 democ-
racies. Chomsky thinks power is controlled in
democracies through the blocking of under-
standing (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 interpreta-
tion of aggression as self-defense. In general,
understanding is blocked by control of the frame-
work of possible thought:
Democratic systems are quite different [from total-
itarian 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 rein-
force this system by tacitly accepting these princi-
ples . . . (Chomsky, 1984, p. 16)
These goals and methods are the same as those
identified in the present examination of adver-
tising and deep autonomy. Since strong evalua-
tion 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 under-
standing 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 rela-
tions 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 self-
rule 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 inter-
ested 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 par-
adigmatically problematic types first and foremost.
2
I talk of students here, but this is convenient short-
hand 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 non-
consumer 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 dif-
ference to my use of Phillips’ work in what follows.
However, she risks overlooking the special connec-
tion between advertising and capitalism. It is reason-
able to think that advertising is not a neutral tool for
the dissemination of information, but has internal ties
to ideologies centred on consumption and, conse-
quently, selling. Aldous Huxley notes this close con-
nection 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/manipu-
lation, but this is not directly relevant to the present
discussion, so I shall omit it.
8 15
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 anal-
ogous 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
27
Ricoeur, 1981. For discussion of these ideas and some
of their moral implications, see my 1998 and forth-
coming.
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 individ-
uals could do exactly that – walk away from con-
sumerist living and take up something radically
different. Think of Henry David Thoreau’s experi-
ment 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 pur-
portedly 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 institution-
ally embedded ideological forces which pose a threat
to the exercise of deep control over one’s identity.
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 evalua-
tion than the combination of capitalism and adver-
tising is. And since self-rule seems to be a genuine
28 Andrew Sneddon
value, this makes some other ways of living prefer-
able on this score.
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Department of Philosophy,
McGill University,
Leacock Building,
855 rue Sherbrooke,
Montreal, QC,
Canada H3A 2T7
E-mail: asnedd@po-box.mcgill.ca