How often have you received an advertisement that seemed to be a perfect fit, or thought that your phone seemed to know what you desire better than you do? Today, advertisers have access to information about our online habits and media consumption, and use it to tailor advertisements to our individual wants and desires. How worried should we be about this increasingly personalised form of advertising? We have good reasons to be wary of what is going on behind the scenes and critical of what we are really buying into, because our autonomy is at stake: our ability to form our own desires and make choices for ourselves. Ethicists have been debating the possibility that advertising undermines this capacity since the 1980s.
Are your desires your own?
In 1987, Roger Crisp wrote, “all forms of a certain common type of advertising are morally wrong, on the grounds that they override the autonomy of consumers.” By this, he meant that advertising has the power to create desires in consumers, through techniques like subliminal suggestion, puffery and repetition. One way this might happen is when we make a purchase based on a connection an advertiser has made between their product and our unconscious desires. Imagine a billboard for sunglasses which features a model who meets your society’s standards of beauty. In this case, you might buy the sunglasses not because you particularly want them, but because the billboard has conflated your desire to be beautiful with a desire for that product. To explain why this matters for autonomy, Crisp refers to Harry Frankfurt’s hierarchy of desires.
First-order desires are shallow, in the sense that they are desires for objects or actions. In the example above, this would be, “I want those sunglasses.” Second-order desires are one level deeper, and are desires about desires. Think, “I want to want those sunglasses.” However, if you reflect, you might realise that you don’t have a good reason for wanting the glasses, since the ones you were wearing when you saw the billboard are just as good. At the same time, you might possess an existing second-order desire not to be manipulated by others unknowingly, as many of us do. The incoherence between your first-order and second-order desires creates a problem for your autonomy. In this sense, the billboard has hijacked your desires: upon reflection, you realise that a desire to be beautiful is not a good basis for the purchase and that your choice was therefore non-autonomous.
While Crisp captures an aspect of how advertising can violate our autonomy, his account may underestimate the seriousness of the threat. What happens when we are exposed to advertising every day, on our televisions and roads, in our public spaces, and on our phones?
What do you value?
According to Andrew Sneddon, “[a]dvertising turns out to be a big deal, morally speaking, because it compromises our deep autonomy.” Deep autonomy is characterised by “having and exercising control over one’s life,” or, in other words, “self-rule.” What advertising does is inhibit our ability to perform the activities which allow us to be self-ruling subjects. So, to possess deep autonomy, it is not enough to strive for coherence between first and second-order desires. We must also be able to examine whether our first-order desires are consistent with our values, as well as assess whether our values themselves are desirable.
To assess the consistency between our desires and our values we need to have a sense of the background structure of our lives: our commitments, relationships, projects, and ideals. Then, to assess whether our values are themselves desirable, we must assess the background structure of our lives against other possible ways of living. We do both through a process called strong evaluation.
Strong evaluation involves making “discriminations of right and wrong, better or worse… 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.” In other words, strong evaluation allows us to step back from what we happen to want and ask whether it is actually worth wanting. This is hard, and we can become better or worse at it. Importantly, to do it well, we must be open to a variety of ways of living. This is part of what it means to have deep autonomy.
What does this have to do with ads?
According to Sneddon, advertising restricts our openness to other ways of living in several ways. First, it restricts our ability to know of other ways of life by encouraging homogeneity, both in the sense that it insists that large groups adopt the same purchasing behaviour, and in the sense that it reinforces the values of consumerism while making other ways of social and economic organisation invisible.
Advertising can also restrict our willingness to compare our desires and values against other ways of life. It does this by delivering an ideology which dictates, to some extent, standards of being, what we ought to desire and what a good life looks like. There are ideas carried by ads, like the idea that we ought to desire what the market can provide, that these products have the power to quell our dissatisfaction, and that we can measure ourselves against others based on our purchases. Repeated exposure to these ideas can influence our self-perception such that we think of ourselves primarily as consumers.
So the ideology carried by advertising assumes a consumerist conception of the human good which is an obstacle to both imagining, and accessing other ways of life. In turn, this stifles our ability to perform strong evaluation: the process of questioning and evaluating our own conception of the good life. Without that, our deep autonomy is compromised.
Personalised ads
Sneddon’s paper was published two decades ago, and advertising has changed a great deal since, but his analysis remains relevant. Today, our exposure to advertising is almost ceaseless. Not only do we receive commercial messaging on posters, on billboards, over broadcast media and in the post; we are also bombarded with advertising when we use our computers, tablets and phones. Social media, search engines, news websites, games, and podcasts are all littered with various forms of digital advertising which blur the distinction between content and commercial. This development has allowed advertisers to repeat their messaging more frequently, thereby eroding our “willingness to resist” the ideological aspects of advertising.
In addition, much of the advertising we receive is no longer targeted at broad demographics but tailored specifically to us as individuals. This has further restricted our exposure to other possible ways of life, even within an ideology of consumerism. If we are not exposed to other ways of behaving as obedient consumers, or cultivating our identities through the pursuit of non-autonomous desires, how can we be expected to conceive of meaningful alternatives beyond this consumption? Such is the power of data-led customer profiling, behavioural advertising, digital echo-chambers, and individualised algorithms in hindering the process of strong evaluation necessary for deep autonomy.
Are we asking too much?
One concern with Sneddon’s picture of deep autonomy is that it asks too much of the individual. Anne Cunningham claims that to require the healthy functioning of strong evaluation for deep autonomy is too restrictive because it limits the possession of autonomy to the small community of people who actively reflect upon their values, ways of life, and consider other options.
Additionally, Cunningham argues that Sneddon’s notion of deep autonomy commits us to a view whereby any institution that endorses a set of beliefs is in the business of undermining autonomy, including systems of education, governance, and religious organisation. Since an ideology presents “an integrated system of values and beliefs to account for human life and culture,” its acceptance entails a tendency not to look for other options, and to not question the institutions built upon it.
Rather than throw out Sneddon’s conception of autonomy, however, I think it is worthwhile instead to see how the ideology behind advertising is more malicious than others. The ideologies that form the basis of educational or governmental institutions do offer certain belief systems. However, we consider those institutions to be functioning well when they are under constant questioning. Educational institutions constantly undergo review at all levels in order to progress and adapt, and, in democratic societies, governments are put under public scrutiny every time there is an election. What is troubling about advertising is that it is designed not to be questioned. Of course, there are some regulations placed upon advertising. However, in an age in which advertisers have greater power than ever to target us personally and algorithmically, and in more ways than ever before, it is time to reconsider whether this is an arrangement we are willing to accept. Until then, advertisers want you to take their messages at face value, and, as far as they are concerned, the best consumer is a non-autonomous one.