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by charlespwd
4099 days ago
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I understand where you're coming from. But that's kind of a slippery slope argument. It is based on the premise that manipulation is evil. Manipulation isn't evil. Let's consider for a minute an event where persuasion psychology is used to have someone buy services from a personal trainer. This PT helps the lad. She becomes healthier, happier, and fit as a result. Isn't manipulation good, in this case? What if your product is awesome and makes people's lives better. Isn't it your moral imperative to market it to people? Isn't it moral to manipulate people into using and buying it if it makes their lives better? Am I trying to convince myself here? Maybe. But I was reading "The Ultimate Sales Letter" this morning and there's a passage in it which says > "ALL Successful Selling is by Nature and Necessity manipulative" That's just how the game is played (?) |
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I don't think I would agree with the universal that all market transactions are manipulative. But even if we granted that, it would come to your distinction: what kind of manipulation is it? Who benefits from the manipulation, and is anyone taken advantage of? Beyond the singular instance, does the sum of individual actions taken together constitute something good?
There's theoretical instances where strong manipulation may benefit the manipulated (PT? Medicine?), but this too is a slippery slope towards a justification for paternalism. I'm sure that the business, in whatever form of cognitive dissonance it can muster, may think that the prospective consumer will benefit from its product. A great example of this are the people who sell healing water and crystals. What we want is for consumers to be informed and we want a healthy society (friends, family, neighbors, society) to encourage people to make choices that have clear indicators that they will benefit. We don't want the crystal seller to be the one educating the consumer on crystals - just as we would rather have a person choose for themselves to get physical therapy than be coerced into it. (The difference between societal encouragement and education versus marketing is overtness, necessary in hypothesis for us to call it manipulative).
There's also the other question you didn't touch on. In the aggregate do we want a market system that competes on being better salesmen or one that competes on making better products and manufacturing them more affordably? Recognizing here that these are not mutually exclusive which do we want to be emphasized?
I don't think that the above argument is grounded on the premise that all manipulation is evil. A more reasonable interpretation I think categorizes the type of manipulation being done in the instance, and the motivations for it, as being selfish and underhanded - the sort of thing we might think about condemning. Furthermore it suggests that the type of manipulation being done on a larger scale is not a healthy economy make.