> whatever is at stake in questions of advertising, surely it isn't moral
Wait what? No, of course it is, almost everything effects morality in some way.
> But you're also claiming there are definitely desires that are worse to have than others?
Yes? I'm not seeing the contradiction. Whether a desire is bad or not is unrelated to whether it's a "true" desire (or whether the idea of true desires makes any sense at all).
Dumb on-the-spot analogy: there's a bunch of silver metallic balls rolling down different tubes, the tubes are painted so as they roll the balls get colored different colors. Further down, the balls all get merged and then a robot destroys any red balls, and sorts blue balls into one box and green balls into another.
Being red is clearly worse for the balls (smoking is clearly bad for you, moral absolutism). But the balls didn't start out red, green, or blue, their environment molded them. If a blue ball gets painted green at some point in the future, it doesn't make sense to say that the ball is _really_ blue: the ball was metallic, all of its color was painted on one way or the other.
Wait what? No, of course it is, almost everything effects morality in some way.
> But you're also claiming there are definitely desires that are worse to have than others?
Yes? I'm not seeing the contradiction. Whether a desire is bad or not is unrelated to whether it's a "true" desire (or whether the idea of true desires makes any sense at all).
Dumb on-the-spot analogy: there's a bunch of silver metallic balls rolling down different tubes, the tubes are painted so as they roll the balls get colored different colors. Further down, the balls all get merged and then a robot destroys any red balls, and sorts blue balls into one box and green balls into another.
Being red is clearly worse for the balls (smoking is clearly bad for you, moral absolutism). But the balls didn't start out red, green, or blue, their environment molded them. If a blue ball gets painted green at some point in the future, it doesn't make sense to say that the ball is _really_ blue: the ball was metallic, all of its color was painted on one way or the other.