This paper critically evaluates Robert Arrington's 1982 essay "Advertising and Behavior Control," in which Arrington attempts to defend the advertising industry from charges of manipulation and exploitation by appealing to four philosophical concepts of autonomy: autonomous desire, rational desire and choice, free choice, and control or manipulation. The paper argues that Arrington's analysis is shallow and tendentious, identifying two major weaknesses: his failure to account for advertising's role in shaping harmful cultural norms such as body image standards, and his inability to anticipate the manipulation of children as consumers. The critique concludes that Arrington's autonomy framework, derived largely from Friedrich von Hayek, is insufficient to address the full ethical scope of modern advertising practices.
The paper demonstrates sympathetic reconstruction followed by targeted rebuttal: it first accurately summarizes an opponent's argument before identifying the specific premises or omissions that undermine the conclusion. This technique shows intellectual fairness while making the critique more persuasive, since the author cannot be accused of attacking a straw man.
The paper opens with a summary of Arrington's central claim and his four-part autonomy framework, including a brief critique of each concept as it is introduced. The second major section challenges Arrington's narrow view of advertising's harms by raising the culturally induced body image standards promoted through advertising. The final section introduces the child-consumer problem as a structural gap Arrington's framework cannot address, using the historical example of cartoon tobacco advertising to underscore the point. A brief conclusion ties together the two lines of critique.
Robert Arrington's "Advertising and Behavior Control" attempts to defend the advertising industry, and the practice of a company's exaggerated verbal claims, from the charge of "manipulation, exploitation or downright control" (283). Arrington contends that approaching this issue depends upon the philosophical concept of autonomy, a "complex, multifaceted concept" which requires an understanding of four things: "autonomous desire," "rational desire and choice," "free choice," and "control or manipulation" (285).
The first of these concepts is apparently derived from Friedrich von Hayek, who "argued plausibly that we should not equate nonautonomous desires…with those which are culturally induced" (286). In other words, suggestion is not compulsion. The second concept anticipates a line of criticism which states that advertising "leads us to act on irrational desires or make irrational choices," but Arrington concludes that this leads to no "infringement of autonomy" in the sense derived from Hayek (286).
The third concept of "free choice" asks about situations in which one might have an instinctive or compulsive reaction to advertising, and concludes that on some occasions advertising "may" impinge upon autonomy by playing upon the "subconsciousness" (288). By the time Arrington reaches the discussion of his final concept, "control or manipulation," his own subconscious slips into open revolt with a sneer directed at "teachers (at least those of the liberal persuasion)" who attempt to "influence" their students — an act which, in his view, is not stigmatized as a form of "control" (289). He then wraps up with a hasty conclusion, using the concept of autonomy — which he established to frame the inquiry into whether advertising constitutes "manipulation, exploitation or downright control" — to decide that advertising is none of those things.
Arrington's analysis overall is shallow and tendentious. The problem with "culturally induced" desires is not so much that they impinge upon autonomy as that they may have other unintended consequences by affecting culture as much as they reflect it. Take the question of body image issues in young women. These are clearly culturally induced, as there are plenty of societies in which being rail-thin like a runway model is hardly a cultural ideal of beauty. The ideal of beauty must therefore be learned from somewhere, and that somewhere is culture.
If we could safely attribute the disorders of anorexics and bulimics to some extent to an exaggerated standard of beauty promoted in advertising's images of women — admittedly a significant assumption — then does this not present a very different picture of what kind of impingement upon "autonomy" advertising may entail? The worst effect that Arrington can imagine from an extremely persuasive advertisement would be a "subliminal technique which drove us all to purchase Lear jets" instead of food, essentially living beyond our means. That framing strikingly understates the potential harm.
Arrington's analysis ultimately fails on two fronts. His autonomy framework, drawn from Hayek, cannot account for advertising's role in producing harmful cultural norms — such as unrealistic body image standards — nor does it address the exploitation of children as consumers, a group to whom the concept of autonomous choice cannot meaningfully apply. These omissions are not mere oversights; they point to a fundamental inadequacy in using a narrow philosophical concept of autonomy as the sole criterion for evaluating the ethics of advertising.
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