Page 199 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Ethical Issues of Social Marketing and Persuasion 191

Analyzing Ethical Issues

Moral philosophy provides theories, models, and frameworks that enable
social marketers to analyze ethical issues in systematic, sophisticated, and
nuanced ways. Following are presented five approaches to analyzing ethi-
cal issues and discussion of them in the context of social marketing. The
first four cover the major philosophical theories that can be applied to
social marketing decisions: utilitarianism, duty-based ethics, virtue, and
the social contract. The fifth approach—religious models—pertains to the
theological underpinnings of ethics that are implicitly used by some social
marketers. All of the approaches have strengths and weakness, and there
is no “magic bullet.” The authors’ recommendation is that social marketers
facing an ethical issue first identify the theory toward which they are natu-
rally gravitating in analyzing the issue, and then prompt themselves to
apply other approaches as well. Often, multiple approaches lead to similar
conclusions about the “ethicalness” of a given action, but at times, they
diverge. When the conclusions diverge, social marketers must be prepared
to defend the approach (or approaches) to moral reasoning that they have
chosen.

Utilitarianism
Probably the most widely understood and commonly applied ethical the-
ory is utilitarianism (Mill, 1861/1979). Essentially, this theory states that a
decision concerning social marketing conduct is proper if—and only if—
that decision produces the greatest good for the greatest number of indi-
viduals. “Good” is usually defined as the net benefits that accrue to those
parties affected by the choice. Primarily, all of the stakeholders affected by
the decision should be given just consideration. Utilitarianism deals with
outcomes or end goals, and reasoning that “the end justifies the means” is
one classic implication of utilitarian thinking. In social marketing, utilitar-
ian thinking could justify using coercion or some other problematic ap-
proach to achieve the end goal of motivating many people to adopt the
desired behavior, which creates positive outcomes. Using utilitarian rea-
soning, the Georgia anti-obesity campaign’s harsh approach that perpetu-
ated stereotypes of overweight children, who accounted for 40% of the
population, could be justified if it motivated the remaining 60% of chil-
dren to avoid gaining weight. As discussed below, this is not acceptable
using other ethical theories.
Consequentialist or outcome-based approaches such as utilitarianism tend
to be popular approaches with commercial and social marketers because they