Absolutely! We can say that, whatever the origins of our desires, advertising arises from the needs of advertisers and seeks to repurpose our attention and desires to align with those needs rather than our own.

I understand where you are coming from, as it sounds like you don't agree with this argument so much as you think it demands a robust answer. I think the key to having robust answer is in challenging the second piece of your comment: it construes human interests as basically interchangeable, with none being really any more better than any other. I do agree that you would have to believe something like that to defend advertising as fundamentally benign, and I also happen to think that's absurd.

Positive psychology, for all its flaws, is a systematic way of looking at human needs, desires, and fulfillment. And we really do need certain things: safety, security, to be understood, a certain degree of social cohesion, self actualization. To say that advertising is every bit as legitimate as any other human interests, you have to be willing to argue that whatever ads you see driving down a highway do more to reflect human nature than something like Maslow's hierarchy, and I think that's a really tough argument to make.

I also think it's a fundamental confusion baked into moral relativism as a philosophical view itself, which (correctly!) captures important aspects of decision making, psychology and subjectivity that are at play in how people engage with our own desires but mistakes them for a foundation to morality itself.

Lets take the most basic form of advertising as an example. If I put a couch in my yard with a price tag on it, I'm wanting people to notice and desire to buy it, but there's no malicious intent. I have a thing I want to get rid of, maybe someone wants to buy it. If I don't do that, no one will know it's for sale.

So I do think advertising is fundamentally benign, and despite what the original comment said, is absolutely part of supply and demand. People are supposed to generate supply and then sit around waiting for people to come see it?

Of course there's lots of bad stuff going on in advertising. Lies, inducing FOMO, unnecessary gathering of personal data, etc. But I'm not convinced that advertising is morally wrong in it's purest form.

"Selling" is simply informing people of the availability of one half of an economic exchange. Putting a notice up that says "Sofa, $50 ONO" is no different than putting a notice up saying "will pay 50$ for sofa".

"Advertising", on the other hand, attempts to persuade. It endeavours to use psychology to create a transaction when one would otherwise not have taken place. It's a sign that says "Sofa, $50. Incredible value!!". This is not ethical because if we assume that the market would have converged on the correct price in the absence of advertising, then advertising distorts the market and makes it less efficient.

Note that unadorned "buying" and "selling" are mirror counterparts, but there's no buyer's counterpart to "advertising". This is because the value of money is well known and non-negotiable, while the value of the good or service is subject to influence. This is an inherent bias that always works in favor of the selling party.

Additionally, you can argue there are many buyer's counterparts to advertising. At its most simple, the buyer has many tools to find items they want, i.e. search engines, etc. Additionally the buyer in many cases can inform the seller of an offer (generally below their desired pricing) and the seller can choose to accept or not. In some marketplaces, the buyer can effectively put out a request-to-buy, e.g. an open offer that many potential sellers can see and one may choose to fulfill.

Selling = Sofa is $999 and that is a good price for a good couch.

Abusive advertising = This sofa is so wonderful that hot women are going to seek you out to have sex with you.

When advertizging starts selling lifestyles is where it becomes abuse.

For example, my car's cooling system was leaking. I had a devil of a time trying to figure out where it was leaking.

It turns out there's a perfect product for it - a device that pumps air into the radiator. You spray some soapy water around, and where it bubbles is where the leak is.

So in 5 minutes I could have found the leak, rather than wasting a great deal of time because I did not know such a tool existed.

I'm sure there was a point in the past where something like this would have been taught in school in a classroom that had all kinds of tools and machinery in it.

I found out about the company I've bought several sets of sheets from because they were a podcast sponsor, I happened to need sheets, and I liked their designs more than other ones I was seeing at comparable prices. If I hadn't heard that ad, would I have still found sheets I liked? Maybe! But is that really a convincing moral argument against those ads?

In the front of the Mag between the articles you would have full page colour ads, some with skimpily dressed women selling boxed games, computer games etc.

In some of the mags, some of the articles were reviews of products, some of these reviews were obviously promotions, very much trying to sell the product. Very few were critical of the product under review.

There is a continuum in advertising from simple "this product exists" to "Will change your life". Far to many of the adverts we see today tend to the targeted "change your life" category.

Add to that that many of the ads on the internet have there own tracking built in that allows your existence to become a product that is sold without your knowledge or consent and you have a situation that has a bunch of moral questions to answer.

[edit spelling]

>the value of money is well known and non-negotiable

I wouldn't start with these assumptions since prices fluctuate on their own for somewhat unpredictable reasons. Just because advertising is immoral in some ideal world, doesn't mean it's immoral in a real one.

Perversely, the more expensive a product the more perceived quality a product has, its perhaps why German cars are so popular. People like to show off their wealth which is what makes designer brands popular.

There is little point advertising monopoly products like fuel though, any advert is just going to be brand awareness maintenance in those situations, which also helps to keep the media/newspapers onboard for PR reasons to keep the bad press at bay!

Can you cite that? I would like to test it against lies, manipulation and coercion.

If what you were saying were true, then it would not be economically profitable to lie to customers. However we see that lying to customers is more or less rife. Therefore we must conclude that it is profitable to do so.

The guy who taught my accounting class was a former used car salesman. We were talking once, and I asked him how to tell an honest dealership from a scam one. He said it's easy, the honest ones have been in business for more than 5 years. In 5 years, one runs out of suckers, and goes bust. An honest dealership makes bank by selling again and again to the same people.

These days, with Yelp and such, it's even harder to get by by defrauding your customers.

I don't want people pushing things at me that I'm 100% uninterested in in the off chance that 1% of those ads is actually interesting to me and I otherwise wouldn't know it exists. I do want to be able to search a database of vendors (with degrees of trust associated with them) with objective descriptions of available goods and services at known costs, either one-time or recurring. If I'm looking for something that's completely new, I should still be able to find it by using relevant terms and weightings (cost, materials, origin of materials, shipping distance, labor chain, etc.)

So, no, I do think someone using their front yard to sell a couch is bad provided we have the internet and a good marketplace built on top of it. Who wants to see human junk covering nature solely so it can impinge on others' field-of-view in order to be sold? I don't think it's bad for them to register the availability of said couch in the hypothetical regulated marketplace.

And, for those who consent, they can ask to have relevant categories of ads pushed at them. But leave people like me out of it. No such consent can be obtained when you just e.g. put it on a billboard.

Yes, I know what I'm saying is probably naive and would never work, or something, or that's where governance is supposed to come in, but it's a nice dream.

Exactly this. It's not necessarily wrong that advertising is justified on the grounds that it serves the interests of advertisers. But the attempt to justify it as beneficial to the consumer, well, every case where advertising is serving such a pro-consumer purpose is a case where a general purpose information directory would serve that same purpose better.

It's a process that by its nature perpetually transforming in the never ending race to compete for your attention, and the "bad stuff" is a reflection of the interests and incentives essential to the nature of what advertising is.

And you couldn't even allow third party mentions either as are fundamentally indistinguishable in terms of effects on artificial demands.

But hope isn't lost. A natural limit on advertising is completely eliminating surveillance capitalism. Even the kind enable by credit cards selling your purchase history. Or stores issuing loyalty cards.

It sounds like you're saying something like: "advertisers have their own desires that are different than ours, and so it's more likely that they'll get us to desire things that are bad for us"

This I think is a fair point. It's not especially unique to advertising as opposed to other forms of influence, though maybe it's most pronounced in advertising. Nonetheless, even if it applies to all forms of influence, it's a fair argument for why influence is categorically at least risky of being bad for us.

I think you're right of course that primal needs like Maslow's cannot really compare to needs or desires we create with advertising or other kinds of social influence. But I don't think that's what we're really talking about. I think it's more stuff like "I would have wanted to cook tonight but instead I saw a Dominos ad and so now I'm eating Dominos. This is a false desire!" Why? What makes the desire false just because it was created by an ad? You could have a genuine desire for Domino's created by the ad that you've now satisfied and feel good about.

To the extent that ads distract us from pursuing more basic human needs and cause us to be more consumerist, fair. I think that's a broader, different point about the nature of consumption period.

---

I don't think I'm making an argument for moral relativism here at all? I don't think I'd consider myself a moral relativist.

It is a rare but very satisfying experience to see yourself quoted and feel like you're being interpreted correctly. Yes, you are right, I'm saying that, more or less.

>I think you're right of course that primal needs like Maslow's cannot really compare to needs or desires we create with advertising [...] But I don't think that's what we're really talking about.

I take something like Maslow to be comprehensive, and so always implicated. I think your dominos example serves to suggest that there are cases that are mundane, harmless, or where nothing is at stake.

I think so far as something like that is concerned, I think that's true and those things happen. However, I think (1) even seemingly benign examples really do have important issues at stake. I think American consumers have trouble budgeting and a huge input into that is innocent-seeming habit of ordering out, which, over time, ads up in significant ways. Also (2) while we can contemplate one-off examples, I think the primary frame of reference should be a big picture, systematic look at the incentives. The system writ large serves interests of advertisers, not consumers, and the legitimacy of that lives or dies with systematic arguments about the incentives.

>I don't think I'm making an argument for moral relativism here at all?

I think the idea that our preferences are transient, that none are really more right than any other, and that therefore there's nothing really at stake in letting your interests be swapped out for different interests, is what I regard as moral relativism. You have to believe there's some underlying truth at stake and real interests being defended to make a case against ads.

I don't really see this as moral relativism at all? It's maybe a kind of psychological relativism, a la nature vs. nurture. And there, yes, I'm definitely skeptical of the idea that we have "true" underlying desires/preferences/values as opposed to "false"/influenced ones.

This is (maybe a bit ironically) sort of inline with Buddhist views of self. Though I don't think you have to go as far as saying that the self is an _illusion_ to at least acknowledge that the self isn't immutable.

That said I'm _not_ claiming that any desire is as good as any other. There are certainly desires that are worse to have (smoking, murder) than others.

These things all overlap, depending on what you are trying to emphasize. So it can be both. If you say it's psychological relativism, nature vs. nurture, whatever else I think there are senses in which those can all be true.

I think a pattern I'm seeing here, though, is to say that whatever is at stake in questions of advertising, surely it isn't moral. But morality isn't just trolley problems, it's everyday choices too. It's getting people to eat Dominos, getting people to smoke, getting people to accept credit cards with low introductory rates, it's getting people to pay more for Medicare advantage plans.

>This is (maybe a bit ironically) sort of inline with Buddhist views of self. Though I don't think you have to go as far as saying that the self is an _illusion_ to at least acknowledge that the self isn't immutable.

I think that's very commendable and good!

>And there, yes, I'm definitely skeptical of the idea that we have "true" underlying desires/preferences/values as opposed to "false"/influenced ones.

But you're also claiming there are definitely desires that are worse to have than others? And smoking (which is advertised!) is an example.

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.

This kinda assumes our own thoughts and desires aren't influenced by outside factors (bad habits, intrusive thoughts, etc), and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly way.

There could be an argument made that we face challenges for fulfillment from the inside out. Therefore objecting to one external force misses the forest for one tree.

Yes.

>This kinda assumes our own thoughts and desires aren't influenced by outside factors (bad habits, intrusive thoughts, etc), and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly way.

It doesn't assume that. It just assumes we're influenced by everything else other than advertising.

>and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly way.

This however assumes that advertisers are beneficial correctives rather than accelerants of adverse behaviors.

Rather than building an encyclopedia where every positive and negative case is examined, I'm suggesting that you zoom out and think about the underlying incentives in a systematic way. Advertising is in the interest of the advertisers, not the consumers. You don't have to assume that consumers never make mistakes in seeking their own fulfillment.

Advertising is bad therefore it's bad doesn't really prove anything. Is that what you are saying? A good business will provide for at least some interests of its customers, so it's not clear to me that advertising is negative.

I feel like people say this and then don't provide any decent examples. iPhones hold value and are usable much longer than most Androids thanks to Apple's willingness to support the devices.

HN loves to hate on Apple but I don't find these examples and arguments very compelling.

Really? How much? If you use your iPhone for two years, what would be the TCO?

> are usable much longer

Fairphone is supporting their devices for 5 years at a minimum. They promised 7 years for their latest model. And the Fairphone (who has the burden of promoting ethical manuafacturing, using only fair-sourced materials and fair pay to all their workers) still comes at less than half the price of the iPhone.

Or say that you don't care about ethics and you just want your devices to be as cheap as possible. You can buy "budget premium" Androids (Moto Gs, Nokia 6/7) that are very serviceable for less than €200. The Nokia I bought in end-2018 would still be in use today if I hadn't gone to /e/OS, so €180 bought 4 years of "phone". Economically speaking, there is no way that an Apple device can beat that.

One is a device made by a company with a minimal ethical standard, which is not willing to sacrifice those for profits.

The other is a trillion-dollar company that manages to convince billions of people world-wide that their products will make them smarter/more creative/just like the good guy on TV shows. This image and feel-good ads also gets them to convince people that is totally fine to pay hundreds/thousands of dollars to upgrade their devices while talking about "social good", "climate-conscious" and every fucking talking point of the "progressive/anti-capitalist" millenials. IOW, all the feel-good talk about issues gives them enough cover to get to exploit mass-scale consumerism.

I wonder how they do that? Perhaps it's this thing called "marketing"?

These are really interesting and I hadn't seen them before thanks!

Second, how was it that banks managed to operate for centuries and now there is the idea that people simply can not live without a mobile banking app?

Third, minority rule[0]: the best way to make sure that we can see apps being develop for other platforms (not just KaiOS, but Linux devices and even ungoogled AOSP-based systems) is for us to cultivate the intolerant minorities who simply will refuse to run iOS/Android.

Convenience is nice, but freedom is much better.

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Monzo comes to mind. Also possibly Revolut and Starling.

> people simply can not live without a mobile banking app?

The idea isn't that I'm not capable of banking without an app. An app offers concrete advantages such as being able to view your current account balance in real time, and view the amount of recent transactions. This lets you keep a handle on spending, possibly help with making ends meet if you are a student living on their own, or in poverty. Sure you can do it by hand, but only the most dedicated did it because it's a significant effort.

> cultivate the intolerant minorities who simply will refuse to run iOS/Android.

Good luck with that. I tried the dumbphone lifestyle, but ultimately not running Android or iOS will cut you off from basic services like Uber or public transit navigation/timetables (unless you are lucky), group chats with family and friends, and basic conveniences like said mobile banking.

> Convenience is nice, but freedom is much better.

With all due respect, no. We all have a threshold where it's just not worth it. I am not Stallman and I am not willing to put up with this much pain (or to rope my family and friends into my crusade by demanding they accede to my idea of "mobile purity").

Do you really need that? Did you ever get into a situation where you couldn't wait to see your bank statement? Couldn't you wait to get to an ATM or just get home to see in your computer?

How much of the things that are sold to us are really necessary? To get back to the topic: how much of the modern world is driven by manufactured demand?

> Sure you can do it by hand, but only the most dedicated did it because it's a significant effort.

False dichotomy. Plenty of budgeting/accounting software out there (free software, even) that you can use to connect to your bank account. They are just not made for mobile.

> basic services like Uber

Again, manufactured demand. There is nothing "basic" about Uber and we could go by in any big city without it before 2010.

> public transit navigation/timetables

There are free alternatives for Linux and ungoogled-android.

> group chats with family

Use Matrix, bridge it with whatever the others want to use.

> We all have a threshold where it's just not worth it.

Right. The problem is that you seem to be too quick to fold.

Yes. As I mentioned, students and people on the edge of poverty must keep a vigilant watch on their bank balance, lest they literally run out of money (or hit an overdraft, or an overdraft limit, and therefore have to pay banking charges) while shopping.

> how much of the modern world is driven by manufactured demand?

Rent is expensive, and rather essential.

> Plenty of budgeting/accounting software out there (free software, even) that you can use to connect to your bank account.

Majority of banks where I am don't expose an API. CSV exports don't cut it on GNUCash, and I tried it.

> There is nothing "basic" about Uber and we could go by in any big city without it before 2010.

Please realise that black cabs and taxis cost a fortune in some cities. An extensive public transit network doesn't help at all if you're stuck at the edge of a city, the transit network has already shut down because it's 2am, and you don't have any family or friends nearby to rescue you. This has happened more than once to me, and in the pre-Uber era, my only choices would be to eat the huge cost of a taxi or spend the night sleeping/waiting it out on a bench until things reopen.

> There are free alternatives for Linux and ungoogled-android.

You cannot assume that. Your city has this, it doesn't mean that mine does.

> The problem is that you seem to be too quick to fold

You think I'm too quick to fold, but have you considered that I spent over a decade trying to defend my privacy? That I gave up many, many things, to the extent that family and friends who don't share my beliefs would think I'm weird if they knew the full extent of what I've done? Having a pain tolerance makes me human, not weak. And it's already much higher than the average person's.

- Even if a bank does not have a mobile app, they still have a website which you can then access from any phone with a web browser. It does not depend on an Android/iOS app.

- Even if your city does not have an alternative app like Magic Earth (doubtful) you can just use the Google Maps website.

- Uber also does not require the app: https://www.uber.com/en-GB/blog/request-uber-online-without-...

I do have an iMac that's at least a decade old. I should install Linux since the OS isn't supported anymore, but it seems like it's had a good run.

Given that Google only updates Android for half as many years on a Pixel phone, there is planned obsolescence in play here, but not from Apple.

I've never seen anyone say their quality of life is worse with fewer advertisements; it's almost always the opposite is true.

All behavior evidence points to people viewing advertisements as something detrimental, and this detrimental behavior consumes an enormous amount of our society's resources. I can't see how we can view advertising in any way but as a net negative for society.

Also evidence for your position: the Computer Shopper (US, not UK) eventually bulked up to 1000 pages per month, almost all of which were advertisements by computer companies -- PC builders, parts suppliers, manufacturers, and so forth. But what it did was act as a catalog for all those companies, because you couldn't find them on the web back then. You can track the page count decline against the advent of ubiquitous Internet.

Those ad's were informative for those who were looking to see what services or products were available. Little or no possibility of creating demand where it did not exist. Internet ads are almost universally designed not only to create demand for a product, but also to feed the fear of exclusion if the viewer does not have the product.

Not really, or actually people hate excessive in-your-face advertising which unfortunately is the dominant form now online, but at the same time the loss in paper-based and other "traditional" advertising has plateaued, even during these times. In other words, there's indeed a tolerance point for most people for advertising, the online ad market however definitely crossed the line for a lot of people.

When people are paying extra to avoid something, it's a clear sign that they see it as detrimental.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDUttzlKLU

And how many have actually bothered to? The problem is that you're treating it as a black-and-white thing which is not true at all. It is true that there's a percentage of people who do prefer advertising, 17% in current online advertising (which shows that majority hate online advertising) and 54% in traditional advertising (both are for the US only, data tend to fluctuate but in general this holds nearly everywhere but Asia where they tend to view advertising as more favourable).

There is, of course, a balance where the majority of people will be fine. For example, European television and radio stations do have limits on advertising: it definitely helped a lot that it allowed them to know what new services and products are available. Coincidently, they have strong consumer protection - lies in advertising are actively patrolled and most people do get angry when the advertisement is misleading. Unfortunately, the US - which tends to have low-quality, clickbaity commercials - never saw a better alternative, and concluded that all advertising is bad. I'm not surprised that there's a backlash against advertising - they indeed lost the trust in people. Unfortunately, the American model served as the global model online, so here we are.

Hulu could have two premium options, one where you pay more for no advertising, and another where you pay more for extra ads. If what you are saying is true, every company is leaving money on the table by ignoring this demographic. I think it's more likely that this demographic doesn't exist in any meaningful way.

So you haven't touched industrial magazines. Explains everything.

Pre-internet, the way that you can actually get information in a field is to have a publisher collect advertisements from related companies and send it to you. That's beyond "hate", it's the opposite: you are interested in any offerings but are not sure of who will you go to.

This does not mean they would pay more for advertising.

There were markets - specifically classifieds and listings - where buyers did very much want to pay for ads. But those were very specialised, and it's debatable whether a personal sales listing (dating notice, pet offer, etc) is in any way similar to a corporate ad.

Realistically, absolutely no one was going to pay for a version of Computer Shopper which had zero independent content and was just a giant ad directory.

Just as absolutely no one [1] will pay money to view a movie presentation made entirely of ads. Or watch a TV channel [2]. Or listen to a radio stream. Or view a web site.

[1] It's possible there are a few individuals who would do this, but clearly not enough to support a viable market.

[2] You might think Home Shopping Network, but HSN is free to air not pay to view.

People tolerate it until they know they have an option.

> In other words, there's indeed a tolerance point for most people for advertising, the online ad market however definitely crossed the line for a lot of people.

The kind of advertising people will readily tolerate is the kind you expose yourself to. E.g. Seeing a sign in a store window or a flyer for a show on a community bulletin board and going to look at it.

Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood movie studios to include their brands in films. That's engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold millions of people suffering and dying.

But this is less of what bothers me about ads, because I do agree that desires are largely from social influence anyways. If you don't have the right skillfulness you're still subject to being influenced and lost in what Buddhism calls Tanha.

My main objection is advertising steals my attention without my consent and actively works against me in order to try and get me to pay attention to something that isn't what I'm trying to pay attention to. Say what you will about Banksy, but I'm always reminded of something he (they?) said about ads which resonates with me:

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."

In th 80s and early 90s I subscribed to several computer magazines "Creative Computing", "Byte", "Compute", "Wired" and a few others. I also subscribed to gaming magazines like "Computer Gaming World", "Electronic Gaming Monthly", "Joystik", "Edge", "Game Developer Magazine". I and everyone else bought them in part for the ads. It was how we found out what new games and products where available.

I don't like ads spying on me and I don't like intrusive ads but ad in general are not evil to me.

Another example, I actually enjoy reading ads in public transportation. I'd find out about museums, festivals, and even various interesting services and products I didn't know about.

The ads are pretty tightly focused on new technology companies, which I'm interested in. BizCoFoo with a new DB technology that turns stored procedures into pimento cheese sandwiches is not going to find a lot of traction on r/SQL except to generate a lot of noise from people who hate pimento cheese.

Ads aren't an "all this" or "all that" sort of thing. I'm not a fan of billboards, because I think they're ugly and hateful, but when I'm travelling in a place I'm not familiar with, it's handy to know that there's a BBQ joint in 17 miles, which may not be featured on Yelp or Foursquare or whatever.

Ads can be great if they directly inform you of something you want, need, or are interested in. The ad-tech companies, though, are terrible at doing this algorithmically; e.g., seeing ads for dishwashers everywhere right after you've bought a dishwasher. They're also terrible because the first instinct, when a Web site's ad revenue starts to falter, is to add even more ads from other networks to pump it back up.

One or two ads on a Web page is tolerable. Ads that show up every time you hit Page Down? Cancer.

There is so much choice now that you suffer from analysis paralysis unless you get recommendations on what to get, or know how to curate and ruthlessly filter down the firehose of choices down to a manageable trickle. Of course you don't need ads adding their 2¢ to that stream.

Maybe? I’m an old millennial and I never subscribed to magazines for ads. I found out about my interests in other ways, but I did have the Internet by the time I was maybe 12 (in 1996 I’d guess). The only magazines I got as a teenager was 2600 and adbusters.

> I don't like ads spying on me and I don't like intrusive ads but ad in general are not evil to me.

For me I find all advertising intrusive and manipulative. I’ve never owned a tv because I just can’t understand why anyone would want to watch ads like that. I don’t like thinking in moralistic dualisms like good and evil, but I will say I’d be all for a world where advertising doesn’t try to steal my attention and manipulate me.

As you more or less say in the next paragraph, you're answering a different question I think. Can advertising make you want things that are bad for you? Absolutely. But so can lots of things. I'm asking if the way a desire comes to be makes the desire good or bad, independently of whether the desire itself is good for you.

Currently (edit:some) prescription drugs are being advertised with mentions of side effects like death, but what’s being treated isn’t mentioned. That’s clearly not advertising the actual product being sold either, yet it’s also effective.

Are pills being sold by pretty ads that are required to tell people about risks AND required not to tell about what the pill is for?

AND those ads WORK?

Wow

Yes, I think. For example, if I develop a desire because someone lies to me or manipulates me, then the formation of the desire itself is bad (and potentially corrupting since believing lies or being subject to manipulation can lead to further cognitive problems).

As you say desires can push you towards both good and bad things. But we value not only those good or bad things, we also value autonomy and good habits of mind. So in various ways, ill-formed desires can be bad for us.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, you might find Vices of the Mind by Quassim Cassam interesting. It's more about belief than desire, but I think that the issues are closely related.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/quassim-cassam-vices-of-the-mind...

What's the original statement you think I'm defending? It sounds like you and a few others are responding to the claim "maybe advertising is completely fine all the time", which is not what I'm saying. I'm responding to one specific argument against advertising, namely the idea that "implanted" desires are fundamentally worse/different than "true" desires.

> We can attempt to nullify all harmful things by redirecting them with some philosophical meta-analysis, e.g.: harm is good because it leads to growth/development/character. Ultimately, that's an easy way to abstract your way out of recognizing facts.

It sounds like you're saying you're against this kind of low-level philosophical argument analysis? Like, if advertising is bad, we should only ever be talking about how advertising is actually bad and never talk about anything else?

If someone said "advertising starts with an A so it's bad" and another responds "are you sure? I think some things that start with A can be good", would you say that's a bad thing to say since advertising is bad overall, so why defend it in any way?

I think if you think advertising is bad and dangerous, it's all the more important to have robust, clear arguments on why exactly it's bad.

> If you want to be philosophical, a better position would be to view such as enslavement because that is the logical endpoint.

"If you want to be philosophical, a better position would be <my position> because <it's correct>".

I don't think there is such a thing as a good desire or a bad desire, they are just desire and all desires are something to work on bringing awareness to so they don't rule you.

This is just another version of people thinking that because something is offensive it should be banned.

Practically speaking what would banning advertising look like? Who gets to decide what is a "worthwhile" product. Sure banning smoking adverts most people agree on as it gives you cancer, maybe alcohol too. But saying if I invent something I'm not allowed to advertise anywhere because someone has decided they want the world to look at certain way, no thanks.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

Also would Time Square be better with no advertising? Another extreme example for comparison.

But we definitely should keep the guy that was wearing a mask that looked like it was from the Lion King musical, shirtless, ripped, doing bicep curls with resistance bands, blasting DMX at midnight. I'm here for that.

Me, I'm going to stay away from the galaxy-brain stuff and come down on the side of, "It's morally wrong to manipulate people to put money in my pockets regardless of how it affects them." In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy.

Man, when I'm trying to find products I can never find what I want because the websites - Amazon, urgh - don't expose the characteristics I want to search on.

Companies (with few exceptions) don't care if you want it, they care if you buy it. Often it seems things are made opaque on purpose.

Example, I was buying a house phone (aside: I imagine it's the last time I'll ever do that) and know I need answerphone, but with self-recorded message and with call monitoring.

Even BT, a phone maker and phone service provider only expose search at the level of "answerphone". Useless.

I had to download the manuals and read the usage instructions. And of course the sellers don't provide the manuals (in general, I mean BT didn't have the manuals for the lower priced BT phones, crazy).

Ebay are pretty good, not perfect.

Other example, buying graphics cards, you can't search for "8gb graphics card" on a bunch of sites, you gave to choose AMD or Nvidia cards first.

Then you get the search results and the most expensive cards are above your top-price and they're ordered by "recommended", argh.

Sure, in some cases people get trapped in patterns where if you ask them, they say they want to stay in them, but it's pretty well established that actually they'd be happier if they broke out of it, and the desire is probably not really genuine and more a result of fear/shame/etc.

The existence of cases like this doesn't mean we can just blindly apply this argument to everything. It can easily go wrong: "you say you want to be an artist but you're just being manipulated by your lazy friends. Trust us, you'll be much happier becoming an accountant like your dad"

> In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy.

Yeah this is more or less what I mean by the arms race argument.

My point is mainly that we should default to not manipulating people, especially when the manipulator has a conflict of interest, which includes the vast bulk of paid advertising. And that secondarily, it's ethically dangerous to cloud that over with a philosophical fog.

> especially when the manipulator has a conflict of interest

I think the conflict of interest argument is a good one for why advertising is generally dangerous.

> it's ethically dangerous to cloud that over with a philosophical fog.

Eh, fuck that noise. "Advertising is definitely bad so we shouldn't ever try to be clear about why exactly it's bad, since that might involve discussing some ways in which advertising is not bad, and we know it is bad."

I find TV advertising increasingly annoying, because (like me) most people skip TV ads; so they are pitches to the bottom of the barrel nowadays - ads for home equity withdrawal, incontinence pads, and charities. But I only see them if I'm too drunk or tired to skip. I dislike them, but I can avoid them. (I assume the charity ads are given away, because the slot didn't sell)

I do object to the invasion of public spaces with ads. It's reasonable to advertise in your own shop-window. But I object to billboards on highways, "I lost 20 kilos" ads on buses, ambulance-chaser ads on taxis and so on.

Advertising on web-properties: I dislike it, because it tends to distort the content on the website. When did you last read an online recipe that didn't start with a long and boring essay about "my grandma from Rome"? But I'm free to stay away from those sites.

Advertising on search-engines is harder to avoid.

I think advertising is in principle reasonable; it's hard to enter a market if you can't tell people that you're there. But most advertising isn't just telling people you're there; it's mostly shouty, intrusive brand advertising, trying to compete for attention with all the other shouty, intrusive brand advertising. That I can do without.

Yes. I'm susceptible to this. I became aware recently. I use and collect fountains pens & inks, and I collected a considerable collection. Unsubscribing from vendors mailing lists, and not visiting related sites reduced my desire to get new things and I enjoy what I have more.

It's same for Humble Bundle's books, and some other items too.

In short, I'm sure. Seeing less advertisements make me want stuff way less, and use what I have more.

At the end of the day, yes, advertisement is manufactured demand. Esp. with all the psychological research behind it.

If I have a product I know someone will want and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a good thing. If I have a product I know someone shouldn't buy and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a bad thing. If I don't give a damn what they want and attempt to sell it to them, the probability of falling on the "bad thing" end of the spectrum is very high.

This isn't a bad line of reasoning, but it prompts the question: is it good for amoral, profit-focused corporations to genuinely change what people want?

There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't absolve us from asking questions about whether they way they're being influenced is healthy and in their best interest. Instead, it prompts us to ask ourselves how to make that manipulation more ethical and how to tell the difference between re-engineering people in an ethical way and re-engineering them for selfish/unethical reasons.

Ideally, we want to give people some degree of agency over how they're influenced. At the very least, we want the people manipulating them to have their best interests at heart. Advertisers don't. If people genuinely want Pepsi, and the reason is that Pepsi made them genuinely want Pepsi, that isn't necessarily a better outcome. We still have to ask why Pepsi chose to do that, and whether some desires are healthier than others, and whether Pepsi should have that kind of power over a population?

In general, we view top-down control over people's actual personalities as dystopian-adjacent, or at least very dangerous and tricky to navigate. Most people on this forum would react negatively to the idea of a government brainwashing or even genuinely shaping people in a highly manipulated way so that they felt a stab of pleasure every time they voted for a particular political party. At the least, we would want to think about the long-term consequences of that manipulation. And a corporation isn't special, we should have the same fears about them.

Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money. It's worth asking whether or not that is a parasitic relationship, given that the implication behind it is that you could have also been manipulated to enjoy something that didn't require giving a company money. Under your theory, a company took steps to make sure that didn't happen. In the worst-case scenario, it's like engineering someone to enjoy cleaning specifically my house for free and then going back to their house to live in poverty. You can still argue that is an exploitative action, even if the end result is that they like what's happening.

Most of your argument hinges on the idea that there is an objective "best interest" that exists. Not all ethical (or religious) philosophies have this idea. There's a longstanding debate between the subjectivist (Hobbesian) view on ethics and the objectivist (Aristotelian) view on ethics, and this conflict arises often between non-Abrahamic religious ethical philosophies (which often can be varying degrees of subjectivist depending on the religion) and Abrahamic religious ethical philosophies (which are objectivist and rely on Divine Will to create the standard of goodness).

> Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money.

This too depends on the ethical philosophy. Your arguments are from the deontological view of ethics, the idea that consequences of some actions cannot justify their means. The opposing view, consequential ethics, often argues that the desires or values behind the choices have no bearing if the effect of the action, its consequences, are positive. To sum up, your view is deontological and objectivist, often views ascribed to adherents of what scholars today call Virtue Ethics.

All this to say that there is good reason for there to be debate in this space. A lot of folks angrily shout at each other when it comes to advertising and let their emotions do the talking. In reality advertising ethics often delve deep into longstanding unresolved ethical debates that several scholars over millennia have argued positions over.

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.

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.

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> Your arguments are from the deontological view of ethics, the idea that consequences of some actions cannot justify their means.

No, not at all. I'm arguing from the consequentialist point of view that it's bad to have a society where everyone has been wireheaded into getting a stab of pleasure every time they drink Pepsi. I'm arguing that the consequence is bad. I'm also arguing that the means (wireheading) are also dangerous and should approached cautiously, but that's not really the crux of what I'm saying.

And I really don't think that consequentialism or deontology comes into this, I think they're in agreement with each other on this point. If someone argues that it's bad to wirehead citizens for entirely amoral ends (particularly when they're being wireheaded to consume products that are objectively shortening their lives and that are objectively unhealthy), and that it's bad to do all of that purely so that people will be more loyal to a company -- you can argue that position from any moral framework.

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. We might argue (as some religious scholars do) that the abuser is sinning against themselves, or we might argue that the cat has inherent moral worth and is sentient. But the one thing all of those frameworks agree on is that it's bad to beat the cat. Similarly, we can argue endlessly about what the telos of a modern member of society is. However, pretty much all moral frameworks agree that manipulating other people for purely selfish ends without any consideration of whether there is any benefit to them is at least morally suspect if not outright morally wrong.

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I don't think I'm saying anything that is particularly controversial, either in Western society or in broader philosophies. I view the retreat into "how can we philosophically say that anything is right or wrong" as something of a deflection of that point. It conveniently sets up a world where we can't say anything about the outcome of any policy or criticize any system until we solve an unsolvable debate on the origin of ethics. And I think that's an ultimately a self-defeating philosophy.

Just to kind of flip this around:

> A lot of folks angrily shout at each other when it comes to advertising and let their emotions do the talking.

Who's to say this is bad? Maybe people shouting at each other over advertising is good actually, how can any of us say for sure? Maybe there's a religion somewhere that thinks yelling at advertisers is a moral end-goal. Would you say it's impossible to condemn ad-blocking without first solving these eternal ethical debates?

The problem with treating literally everything like it's unknowable, even when there's broad consensus that certain outcomes are bad, is that in the end you lose the power to condemn or advocate for anything. This is convenient for advertisers and existing structures/businesses that want to shut down conversations about their morality under the guise that it's impossible to have those conversations, and therefore everyone should just debate consequentialism and stop trying to change the world and stop being angry about anything that existing power structures are doing.

And reminder that we are talking about the idea that advertisers might manufacture a new urge in someone to drink Pepsi, purely because that makes them money. If you want to argue that wireheading people to drink Pepsi is good, pick a moral philosophy and argue that drinking Pepsi is a moral good using that framework. Don't just argue that it's unknowable.

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> In reality advertising ethics often delve deep into longstanding unresolved ethical debates that several scholars over millennia have argued positions over.

Just as one last aside, I want to push back on the idea that advertisers are sitting around talking through moral frameworks before they put out these campaigns. They're not.

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.

If advertising ethics are actually dependent on large ethical questions, then it does not follow that a board of directors at Walmart/Amazon are the best equipped people to tackle those questions. The advertising system that we have today exists without my consent or input. For some reason this is not viewed by advertisers as a problem; they don't feel that they need to get my sign-off on the ethics of the situation before they manipulate me.

Regardless of the morality of the situation, it's pretty simple to see that the advertising industry is not equipped to decide the outcomes of longstanding unresolved ethical debates and that it might be a bad idea to give them that power.

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.

For those of you reading who are against advertising, do you advertise your abilities and skillsets to potential employers that you wish to work for by sending them resumes and requesting meetings? Or do you just put your work on the internet and hope they discover it on their own? Perhaps for big-giant-recognizable names, the second method could work (just like Microsoft doesn't have to advertise Windows, I'm sure if John Carmack tweets an interest to join some startup, the startup would ping him), but for most people, including me, we have to rely on prettifying our resumes to catch the attention of employers.

The point about it being part of the hiring process seems to be pointing out that it is a codified and accepted process. If presenting ads are a codified and accepted practice (which I could argue it already is), does that make it acceptable?

Also, regarding unsolicited ads, it sounds like you will not send your resume to a company which does not list a position that fits you, regardless of how much you want to work for them. Which is fine, not everyone wants to take the extra effort. I have had companies create positions for me when I contacted them, even though they did not list an appropriate position originally.

Regarding companies creating a role, would that imply that ads as a response to a search would be acceptable?

One is a response to a request, while the other is unsolicited and usually explicitly undesired.

A better analogy to sending resumes in response to job ads would be a salesperson describing the features of a product I've gone into a store and explicitly asked for information about.

> Regarding companies creating a role, would that imply that ads as a response to a search would be acceptable?

Most of my searches are not for products, so it doesn't make sense for Google etc to shoehorn ads for products into the results. If I'm searching for a product, then yes I want to see some ads for those products.

> One is a response to a request, while the other is unsolicited and usually explicitly undesired. .. > If I'm searching for a product, then yes I want to see some ads for those products.

It looks like you find ads acceptable when it is relevant to your search (e.g. a search for a product), but not when it's not solicited. This would seem to imply that even if there is a company that you really want to work for, if they do not advertise a position that you would like to fill, you will not contact them hoping to find a fit. Which is fine, not everyone wants to do that. I personally have contacted companies which didn't have appropriate positions listed, and have had them create positions which fit me.

It arises here because we're trying to figure out whether people are paying for stuff they don't benefit from (or don't benefit enough to make it worth the price), which to many people seems intuitively the case, but it's quite hard to flesh out an argument for how it's could happen when we think people only pay for stuff that they want.

We might need to quantify wisdom.

On the other hand I am currently trying to help a local rural coworking space find an audience and customers.

So I plan to additionally to other means also employ search advertising targeting keywords that people use when looking for a coworking space. Locally targeted and so on.

Am I creating demand? Or am I trying to shift demand from potential others in the market towards my client?

I would say a bit of both. Because in targeting keywords I will probably also reach people not looking for a coworking desk right now, but are informing themselves. In them I might create the wish to try it. But others might look at the place and decide to give it a try instead of the place in the next big town.

So I am actually torn between both views.

Causing someone to internalize the later rather than the former could certainly lead them to enjoy a product while I have simultaneously ’manufactured’ a ‘need’ where there was/is none.

consider the standard alcohol ad showing a bunch of cool people drinking the product and having a great time. this does nothing to educate the consumer about the product and serves only to inspire FOMO. the implication is that you too could be cool if you drink bud light.

on the other hand, some ads do just sell the objective qualities of the product. one of the all time most successful ad campaigns at a previous employer was a factual comparison of features and prices between their product and that of a much larger competitor. it worked because it really was a better deal; people just hadn't heard of it yet.

This is a good point, because I think it surfaces the real problem with modern advertising, versus the kind of persuasive speech that has existed since the beginning of time. And that problem is scale: modern advertising is mass-produced on a scale unimagined when the first merchants cried out their advertising in open-air markets. The power to reach millions of people means that capital can be used to manufacture demand on an industrial scale, to the point where the underlying product or service is almost immaterial (see the bottled water industry for an extreme example). Since advertising drives sales, which generates even more capital, the modern media landscape creates a massive rich-get-richer marketing feedback loop. As capital competes more keenly for scarcer and scarcer consumer attention, more and more advertising is injected into the media stream. And by doing so, the winners accumulate more capital to push more advertising. It's a race to the bottom, and I don't believe this particular bottom is a very good place for society. Can I prove that society would be better off without advertising entirely? No, but I can make a pretty good case based on history that extreme wealth inequality is bad for society, and modern mass advertising contributes to rising inequality.

Once upon a time, at least some advertising was "Joe's store has cantaloupes". When cantaloupes were seasonal, you didn't know that unless you went into Joe's store and looked. Telling you that gave you information you didn't have before. It was useful. If you wanted cantaloupes, you went to Joe's store. If the thought of cantaloupes was appealing, you at least thought about it. If you didn't like cantaloupes, you ignored it.

Is that wrong? I would say no.

But advertising got a lot more sophisticated. Now it's more like a quote I read: "The goal of advertising is to make the person you are envy the person you could be with the product. In other words, the point is to steal your satisfaction and then offer to sell it back to you."[1]

Is that wrong? I would say yes.

How does advertising do that? When it shows how cool you would be if you used the product. Or how sexy. Or how you'd get the girl or the guy. Or how uncool/unsexy the people who don't use it are.

Watch ads on TV or Youtube or wherever for a little bit. How many are giving you information that something is out there? How many are trying to tell you that you'd be cooler or sexier if you bought their thing?

[1] I don't remember the source, or I would give credit where due.

In Buddhism, all wanting is "dukkha"--quite literally, suffering, dissatisfaction. Advertising is about as anti-Buddhist as you could possibly be. IMHO advertising is creating a fundamental source of dissatisfaction in order to reap a monetary reward. It is, at its base, a soulless and cruel thing.

I would like to plan my purchases (and time allocation) ahead for a week, it would involve more fruit and vegetables, more time in the gym and less buying snacks on the go.

Advertising tries to divert me from those "planned" goals. Yes that's what advertising is for - and as such it is antognistic to my "true" desires. Of course my true desires will chnage over time but the adverts for pension planning and kids ISAs line up with my "true" desires. Even if I don't particularly care which provider I use

I would additionally add that "wanting" is not good, in general. It's unavoidable, sure, in the same way that pain is. But to take someone from a state where they do not want anything, and convert them to a state where they do want something, is to lower their happiness. Unnecessarily inducing a state of dissatisfaction in someone should be categorized similarly to causing them pain. You have lowered their well-being.

Yes. Silently building user profiles with no consent, selling that info with no consent, leaving it unsecured for malicious actors to take, etc. are all wrong.

Granted, this is not the only method of advertising, but it is probably the most prevalent.

Those things are bad, but I appreciate that he’s trying to have a discussion just on ads.

Wants do not cause enjoyment. Desire is the root of all suffering.

P.S. I guess I am a unique snowflake!

P.P.S. Maybe it's because I'm a tightwad. I do not enjoy spending money. So I have to really want something to part with cash for it.

How much time do you spend researching a product today before buying it? There's definitely a process of seeking out reviews, going to many different sites, comparing and weighing results. How much of your time is spent wondering if a review is from a buyer, or from the seller? How long does it take to evaluate the search results, finding out which ones are truthful and which ones are carefully curated blogspam with active SEO? How much is your time worth, and whose fault is it for having spread that misinformation?

but at the level of society (and by extension, sustainable civilization).

There is strong signal everywhere that strong signals deeply shape not just individual behavior but individual understanding of it. This is in significant part what we mean when we examine "cultural difference" which many of us here know is very real and sometimes seems unbridgeably deep.

A question to ask then, aligned with the concern, is, "what do we want our society to be like?" I.e. what culture do we wish to live in and inculcate in ourselves?

This converts readily in to the question facing societies since before Aristotle, and this is why he was interested in the related question, "what is 'the good'?"

This problem–the problem of our consumpation-based, demand-manufacturing, resource-consuming culture–has been explicitly analyzed and critiqued for several generations now; and there are reasonably contemporary, reasonably sound models of how we might change course without e.g. wholesale Marxist revolution.

Of these I have always been fond of Paul Goodman's communitarianism, which is recent enough to address the real systemic pathologies of contemporary America, albeit of decades ago; but is in need of a total reboot wrt its reliance on hard data, and the language formal and "on brand" for the mechanisms it proposes for us to pivot.

TL;DR: communitarianism proposes humans find deepest satisfaction and contentment in contributing to a community in a tangible way, to the betterment of their fellows as well as themselves; isolation, cynicism, tribalism, and alienation are hence considered primary targets; the premise is that addressing these requires systemic (legal, political, economic, and infrastructural) change, not the "personal responsibility" which however drives that change.