> To quote somebody somewhere that I've forgotten, "there's no right way to write a song, but there are wrong ways." We do not need to come to a consensus about the best possible outcome for the world to understand that some states of the world are preferable to other states.
Sure but you're _not_ going to find consensus here. Just look at the whole thread. There _isn't_ consensus and getting emotional about it isn't going to help.
> I would challenge you to find any Hobbesian or Arisotelian philosophy, or any non-Abrahamic religion that concludes that making companies money is the ultimate telos of humanity. Certainly the Buddhists are not running around advocating that priming people for consumerism is good.
This framing comes off as juvenile to me. A "company" isn't some abstract philosophical evil. And many, many ideologies are absolutely fine with large agglomerations of human enterprise used for means outside of the individual's benefit. Just read through a couple chapters of Machiavelli's The Prince or any work by Georges Sorel. Several Jacobins, Marxists, and fascists have argued in the past that all forms of organization should flow from one unified state and that humans exist in symbiosis with the State.
> Morality is complicated, but that doesn't mean that we can't say anything about morality. There are outcomes and processes that pretty much everyone agrees are bad. If we look at someone beating a cat to death, we might argue deontologically that this is inherently bad because all violence is wrong, we might argue from a consequentialist position that it's a bad outcome for the cat and for society overall.
Again I don't think you can find this consensus. There are entire schools of modern economics that disagree with you.
> Companies are amoral, they exist in a system designed to make money. I like free markets, but to the extent advertisers broadly are thinking about morality within free markets, they are thinking about it through whatever moral framework is immediately available to them, and through whatever moral framework most easily justifies the decisions that benefit the company's bottom line. Independent of your philosophy on wireheading and manipulation, it is very important and relevant for us to question whether companies are the best people to make these moral decisions.
Yes and this question is as old as political philosophy itself is. Again, I'm not sure if you're just in a bubble or you're just extremely passionate about your own views, but the idea of who should own the telos of humanity, and of whether _any one person or group of persons_ should even decide on the telos of humanity itself is an open philosophical question. The question of how society should be organized and who should own its decision-making is one of _the_ oldest questions, Rousseau has one view, Burke has another, Bakunin has another, John Stuart Mill yet another, Marx a different one, Bentham a different one still.
> The advertising system that we have today exists without my consent or input
Ah I'm glad we got to the heart of it. The thing is, it doesn't matter what _you_ (or I) think. The West has a longstanding tradition of individualist thought, that the government should take a light touch and guarantee fundamental human rights of individuals. Social consensus in the West treats corporations as, well, unions of individuals with a limited liability structure. There still is broad support in Western societies for limiting the rights of the State. You can work within this framework to advocate for the harms that corporations provide, but your current position seems to be weirdly out-of-touch, and only really common on the Internet from what I've seen.
Sure but you're _not_ going to find consensus here. Just look at the whole thread. There _isn't_ consensus and getting emotional about it isn't going to help.
> I would challenge you to find any Hobbesian or Arisotelian philosophy, or any non-Abrahamic religion that concludes that making companies money is the ultimate telos of humanity. Certainly the Buddhists are not running around advocating that priming people for consumerism is good.
This framing comes off as juvenile to me. A "company" isn't some abstract philosophical evil. And many, many ideologies are absolutely fine with large agglomerations of human enterprise used for means outside of the individual's benefit. Just read through a couple chapters of Machiavelli's The Prince or any work by Georges Sorel. Several Jacobins, Marxists, and fascists have argued in the past that all forms of organization should flow from one unified state and that humans exist in symbiosis with the State.
> Morality is complicated, but that doesn't mean that we can't say anything about morality. There are outcomes and processes that pretty much everyone agrees are bad. If we look at someone beating a cat to death, we might argue deontologically that this is inherently bad because all violence is wrong, we might argue from a consequentialist position that it's a bad outcome for the cat and for society overall.
Again I don't think you can find this consensus. There are entire schools of modern economics that disagree with you.
> Companies are amoral, they exist in a system designed to make money. I like free markets, but to the extent advertisers broadly are thinking about morality within free markets, they are thinking about it through whatever moral framework is immediately available to them, and through whatever moral framework most easily justifies the decisions that benefit the company's bottom line. Independent of your philosophy on wireheading and manipulation, it is very important and relevant for us to question whether companies are the best people to make these moral decisions.
Yes and this question is as old as political philosophy itself is. Again, I'm not sure if you're just in a bubble or you're just extremely passionate about your own views, but the idea of who should own the telos of humanity, and of whether _any one person or group of persons_ should even decide on the telos of humanity itself is an open philosophical question. The question of how society should be organized and who should own its decision-making is one of _the_ oldest questions, Rousseau has one view, Burke has another, Bakunin has another, John Stuart Mill yet another, Marx a different one, Bentham a different one still.
> The advertising system that we have today exists without my consent or input
Ah I'm glad we got to the heart of it. The thing is, it doesn't matter what _you_ (or I) think. The West has a longstanding tradition of individualist thought, that the government should take a light touch and guarantee fundamental human rights of individuals. Social consensus in the West treats corporations as, well, unions of individuals with a limited liability structure. There still is broad support in Western societies for limiting the rights of the State. You can work within this framework to advocate for the harms that corporations provide, but your current position seems to be weirdly out-of-touch, and only really common on the Internet from what I've seen.