Ethical perspectives on the postmodern communications Leviathan

ABSTRACT. Advertising and other forms of pro-motional activity have proliferated to such an extentthat they may constitute a form of social pollution(Kitchen, 1994). The quantity and tone of commu-nications to which consumers are exposed may havea subtle but pervasive effect on the social ecology ofthe developed world. Not only are MarketingCommunications delivered in unprecedented quanti-ties (Kitchen, 1994); but their tone is increasinglydifficult to categorise in the Postmodern Marketingera (Brown, 1994). Notably, there has been very littleresearch conducted on this seeming “Leviathan”(Kitchen, 1994, after Hobbes, 1651) effect. Ethicalconcerns of professional marketing bodies such as theMRS and CIM are focussed on the conduct ofprofessionals with regard to law and notions of moraldecency in human exchange relationships (see MRScode of conduct, ASA and IBA guidelines). There is

less emphasis on the ethical implications for societyof the totality of Marketing Communication activi-ties. This paper examines the distinctively Postmodernconcept of the Communications Leviathan and dis-cusses contemporary ethical issues, drawing perspec-tives where possible from Postmodern critical theory,Enlightenment philosophy, cognitive psychology andclassical ethical works of Plato and Aristotle.

Introduction: The nature of the marketing communications “Leviathan”

Kitchen (1994) argued the case for an emergent“Communications Leviathan”, an entity ofcolossal size made up of a multiplicity of mar-keting communications messages and which mayconstitute a form of social pollution through thepotentially damaging and unintended effects itmay have on consumer decision making (seePollay, 1986). The concept of the Leviathan asapplied to contemporary marketing culture drawson the Hobbesian (Hobbes, 1651, pp. 46–48)notion of a political and ideological constructwhich reaches into the lives and minds of thepopulation. Hobbes’ (1651) main concern waswith the growth of Government power. Today,a similar concern might be expressed with regardto the more subtle growth of a marketingideology, as manifested in multiple, intrusivemarketing communications, and the extent towhich exposure to this Leviathan might circum-scribe the moral development of citizens. Thispaper seeks to explore the concept of the com-munications “Leviathan” with regard to itsethical implications for marketing professionalsand for society as a whole.

The proposition that citizens in the developed

Ethical Perspectives on the Postmodern

Christopher E. HackleyCommunications Leviathan Philip J. Kitchen

Journal of Business Ethics 20: 15–26, 1999.© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Christopher Hackley is Senior Lecturer in Marketing atOxford Brookes University, Oxford, U.K. His researchinterests include advertising and marketing communica-tions, marketing education, marketing theory, and psychological and ethical perspectives on all the above.His work has been published, or will be published in1998, in Creativity and Innovation Management,Management Learning, the European Journal ofMarketing and Marketing Intelligence andPlanning.

Dr. Philip J. Kitchen is Senior Lecturer in Marketing atStrathclyde University, Scotland, United Kingdom. Hispublications concerning corporate and marketing com-munications have appeared in leading U.K. and U.S.A.journals, among them the Journal of AdvertisingResearch, Journal of Marketing Management,International Journal of Advertising, EuropeanJournal of Marketing, and the Journal of MarketingCommunications. His research interests are focussedon marketing communications, promotional management,and corporate communications.

world are currently subject to a historicallyunprecedented barrage of marketing communi-cations is not controversial. Consumers in thedeveloped world may be exposed to up to 2000promotional messages in a day (Kotler, 1988).Total expenditure on U.K. promotional activitiessuch as advertising, public relations, sales pro-motion and sponsorship in 1992 has been esti-mated in excess of £10,000 million.1 Literacyand access to printed media is high. In 1992, 96per cent of the U.K. population owned or hadaccess to colour television sets: access to cablesystems, satellite provision and the Internet is alsoburgeoning. Similar statistics obtain in otherdeveloped Western nations. Soaked in this culturalrain of marketing communications, consumersface increasing demands on their decision makingfaculties, demands which may have an ultimatelydebilitating effect on their ability to make rationaland morally coherent buying decisions. There hastaken place, and will continue to take place,exponential growth in the extent to which thegeneral population are exposed to commercialand non-commercial persuasive messages,designed by educated specialists, and sponsoredby competing international organisations.

The suggestion that this communicationsLeviathan has a Postmodern character seemsappropriate in the light of the emphasis muchPostmodern writing places on electronic com-munications as a primary cultural influence (see,for example, Brown, 1994). This influence hasnotable epistemological and moral dimensionsin the sense that Postmodern media productsare characterised by relativism, irony, selfreferentiality and hedonism. Furthermore, thedistinction between marketing culture and enter-tainment communications such as movies isbecoming increasingly blurred (Brown, 1994). Inthe light of this view the construct of the com-munications Leviathan is invoked here as ametaphor of Postmodern consumer conscious-ness with its attendant difficulties of moral andepistemological relativism, the pre-eminence ofcircular, self referential meanings and the subtlepresence of ideological meta-narratives of pos-sessive individualism.

The concern of this paper lies primarily withthe normative dimension of this issue. If the con-

struct of a marketing communications Leviathanseems plausible as a metaphor for distinctivefeatures of contemporary culture, what are themoral implications for decision making on thepart of both consumers of marketing culture andmanagers of the marketing process? In this regardthe paper is a form of address to the fundamentalquestions of ethics from a marketing perspective:what is the good life, and how should we behaveto sustain a good life within the pervasive influ-ence of a marketing communications Leviathan?How can these questions be framed in the lightof the effects which marketing communicationsmight have on the moral sensibility of thoseimmersed in this culture (both as consumers ofit, and as managers within it)?

In the U.K. there is currently a largely vol-untary system of regulation for marketing andmedia communications which operates withina broader legal framework. U.K. marketingprofessional and regulatory bodies such as theMarket Research Society, the AdvertisingStandards Authority and the Chartered Instituteof Marketing have sets of ethical guidelinesapplying to certain issues. Communicationsprofessionals often feel that such guidelines arevery detailed, in particular with regard to themarketing and advertising of, for example, food,medical and alcohol products. But while thereare some specific rules (for example alcoholdrunk in TV advertisements must be sippedrather than gulped) the industry guidelinesemphasise general requirements of decency,legality and honesty concerning the truthfulnessof advertising claims and the means by whichthese claims are presented. Crucially, these reg-ulatory criteria are culturally and historicallyrelative. What was unacceptable in U.K. adver-tising in the 1950s is acceptable today. What isacceptable in the U.K. may not be so in othercountries, while much advertising in continentalEurope is too sexually liberal for U.K. media.Marketing messages might consist of productclaims juxtaposed with images which engenderfeelings of fear, social inadequacy or sexualstimulation in the consumers at which themessages are aimed. The way these juxtapositionsare presented in advertisements is circumscribedby the social mores of the time and the place.

16 Christopher E. Hackley and Philip J. Kitchen

The professional regulation of marketing com-munications in the U.K. is largely reactive,depending upon complaints received. Thecriteria of “legal, decent honest and truthful”used by the ASA are not defined in any greatdetail. Thus, from a managerial point of view,the boundaries of what might be claimed and theways the claims can be presented change overtime as cultural norms change. Furthermore, theglobalisation of communications renders regula-tion increasingly difficult and subject to crosscultural influences. But not only are marketingcommunications ethical guidelines difficult toformulate and police because of scale and culturalvariation. They are framed by the culturalphenomenon of the Leviathan itself and conse-quently they may carry implicit assumptionswhich exclude consideration of the Leviathan asan ethical issue. In particular, the guidelines seemto presupposes a particular view of ethical socialrelations. The ethical regulation of marketingcommunications seems to rest upon an assump-tion that the ethical dimension of a marketingcommunication is vested in the extent to whichit is like a face to face human relationship. Themarketing professional is conceived of as beingengaged in a one to one dialogue with a pro-spective consumer and this dialogue may bedishonest, coercive or inconsistent with currentmores of decency regarding, for example, sexu-ality or profanity. There is no consideration ofthe moral effect of the totality of marketingcommunications and the effect this may have onthe autonomous decision making ability of theconsumer. Neither is there any consideration ofthe effect of the burgeoning volume of marketingmessages on society more generally or on themoral sensibility of those working within thisindustry. Thus the U.K. (voluntary) regulatoryframework positions marketing/communicationsprofessionals in a sealed bubble with a channel ofcommunication to targeted consumers who arealso in a sealed bubble. Ethical issues are consid-ered in this social vacuum and are framed by acognitivist discourse which excludes broadersocial and cultural considerations.

Thus the construct of a possible marketingcommunications “Leviathan” seems to falloutside the scope of existing considerations of

marketing ethics. The next section seeks toexplore this apparent deficiency by examiningthe psychological presuppositions behind theLeviathan and the ethical implications which mayfollow.

Reflections on the morality and psychologyof advertising

The point that advertising does not, in general,seek to promote the advancement of humanmoral sensibility, is not new: Kitchen (1994)quotes Lasch (1978) on the ethics of advertising:

Modern advertising seeks to promote not so muchself indulgence as self doubt. It seeks to createneeds, not to fulfil them: to generate new anxietiesinstead of allaying old ones . . . It addresses itselfto the spiritual desolation of modern life andproposes consumption as the cure. (Lasch, 1978,p. 180).

Lasch’s (1978) main hypothesis gains supportfrom work conducted in consumer researchwhich explicitly uses the motive force of sub-jective feelings of guilt to try to manipulatehuman behaviour through guilt inducing adver-tising themes (Burnett and Lunsford, 1994).More generally, advertisements “intend to makeus feel we are lacking” (Williamson, 1978, p. 8).This explicit fostering of consumer doubt andanxiety has ethical implications. While a certaindegree of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware)is appropriate in a free society, at what point doesthe influence of marketing communicationsbecome insidious? The question is partly a psy-chological one: if there are indeed groundssupporting what could be termed “a Com-munications Leviathan”; it could be asked, towhat extent are consumers passive processors ofdata inputs? Such passivity implies moral sub-servience to marketing communication designers.To marketing communications professionalsconsumers seem very far from morally sub-servient and this is reflected in informationprocessing consumer behaviour models whichvery clearly resonate the idea that exposure tomessages alone is insufficient to have any impacton consumer choice behaviour.

Ethical Perspectives on the Postmodern Communications Leviathan 17

And yet, many models purporting to explainor predict consumer choice behaviour have aclear relationship to Hobbes (1651) as developedby Kitchen (1994) that consumers are “compli-cated automata influenced by internal materialperceptions of an external material world(Hobbes, 1651, p. 52). This general view ofhuman beings is also expressed in David Hume’s(1739) “A Treatise of Human Nature”. Hume(1739) sought to develop moral philosophy as abranch of epistemology and grounded his epis-temology in a psychology of concept acquisition.He worked out a cognitivist scheme of howindividual humans apprehend the world (throughsense “impressions”) and form conceptualthought (“ideas”) from the sense impressions.Hume (1739) is perhaps best known for histheory of causation as a human construction:“the efficacy of causes lie in the determinationof the mind” (Hume, 1739, p. 218). We mayassociate one idea with another if there is someresemblance between them, and if they arecontiguous in time or place. Through this dualassociation, we may infer a causal relationbetween the ideas and the “one idea is easilyconverted into its correlative” (Hume, 1739, p.338). The source of ideas is the self and thesubjectivity of experience leaves us alone in theuniverse to construct meanings through ourinterpretations of our own sense experience. Weunderstand the world in terms of our own senseexperience and communications media offer usa theatre of our own imagination.

Any thing that gives a pleasant sensation, and isrelated to the self, excites the passion of pr ide,which is also agreeable and has self for its object(Hume, 1739, p. 340).

On Hume’s (1739) scheme, we infer causal rela-tions from temporal and spatial juxtapositions ofadvertising images and we make these ideasmeaningful through reference to our own senseexperience. For example, Hume (1739) empha-sises the human predisposition to sympathy,by which he means our subjective emotionalreactions to external stimuli. We see televisionpictures of starving children in Africa and wesympathise, partaking in a diluted version of the

child’s own emotions and those of its parents.Simultaneously, we may experience smugnessthat neither we nor our children are in such aposition. By the same impulse, we see advertisingimages of affluent consumption and partakevicariously in the emotional scenario of materialgratification. However, our experiential realitymay not match the image of affluence and theresult is a subjective feeling of dissonance, or astate of felt deprivation.

. . . the cause . . . excites the passion connectedwith it, and that passion, when excited, turns ourview to another idea, which is that of the self(Hume, 1739, p. 330).

For Hume (1739), the association of one ideawith another forms a relation in our minds, and,if the association is compelling enough, after anumber of repetitions the two ideas may appearnecessarily connected. In the context of con-temporary marketing, brands may, by repetitivejuxtaposition of the product concept, logo andbrand name with certain evocative images,generate emotional responses relating to ideas offreedom, power, attractiveness, status. These asso-ciations may reflect primitive anthropomorphictendencies: we are predisposed to extend humanqualities to non-human products or brands. Thepopularity and symbolic power of particularproducts of marketing demands theoreticalexplanations which examine how we makemeaning in our worlds.

The emotional response to marketing productsmay sometimes seem logically prior to consid-erations of technical product quality in consumerbuying behaviour. Effective marketing commu-nications often seek to combine emotional andrational appeals. The importance of the role ofthe consumer’s affective response to marketingcommunications is well documented (Westbrookand Oliver, 1991; Kuhl, 1986; van Raaij, 1989).The consumer’s primary affective reaction to amarketing communication is the key to moti-vating and influencing consumer behaviour: theaffective reaction has a strong influence onmemory and decision making processes (vanRaaij, 1989). The consumer may rationalise abuying decision a posteriori, but the brand may


only be permitted to enter the consumer’s evokedset of consumption choices if the productis “invested with real emotional values”(Rothschild, 1987).

For the purposes of this argument, the abovediscussion seems to support the Hobbesian/Humean notion of a consumer as an entityforming internal perceptions subject to externalinfluences. The argument that “advertising hasno affect on me” would seems to place improb-able confidence in human autonomy, and con-tradicts considerable weight of philosophical andpsychological analysis of human perception andbelief. Therefore, it may be conceded that theproliferation of marketing communications andthe consumption of marketing messages by thegeneral population constitutes a major unprece-dented, undocumented, and under-researchedexternal influence on perceptions with whichtwentieth century citizens of the developed (anddeveloping) worlds have to contend. However,while individual perceptions of products andbrands are influenced by particular marketingcommunications messages, it is still necessary toexamine the impact on consumers and societyof the totality of these marketing communica-tions messages. For this task we seem to need away of modelling the interaction betweenconsumers and marketing communications. Twoissues arise at this point: one is a psychologicalone regarding the cognitive capacity of humansto process marketing data (a subset of environ-mental data). This question may be addressedthrough the Cognitive Information ProcessingModel which represents humans (and consumers)as “complicated automata” (Kitchen, 1994) whoprocess data serially through a sequence ofdiscrete, computer-like operations. The other,related, question concerns consumer response todata overload. Do consumers respond to dataoverload with confusion, existential despair, andloss of moral identity? Or do they adapt con-structively to the Leviathan and become intelli-gent, cynical, streetwise, circumspect PostmodernConsumers who are just as savvy as advertiserswho are trying to persuade them? For enlight-enment we will look firstly at the CIP model,secondly at the Postmodern perspective onconsumer psychology.

The CIP model and the Leviathan

For Lasch (1978 above), advertising seems tobe a source of evil in itself. Notwithstandingcounterarguments to this view, it may be arguedthat Lasch’s (1978) position is weakened by amajor assumption he makes concerning theway consumers process marketing messages.Specifically, Lasch’s (1978) argument assumes thatconsumers take note of marketing communica-tions, that the seductive overtures of advertisingreach receptive and attentive audiences. Kitchen(1994) addresses this point by referring to theCognitive Information Processing model ofconsumer behaviour. Marketing has borrowedthis model from Cognitive Psychology and itderives particularly from the work of DonaldBroadbent (1958) and Newell and Simon (1972).The CIP model views human beings as limitedcapacity information processing entities.According to the model, data enters the cogni-tive system through the senses and is processedin linear fashion. Linear processing impliescapacity limitation: conscious attention has arelatively narrow focus limiting human capacityto process data. For example, a well-establishedand replicated finding from memory researchindicates that the maximum capacity of shortterm or working memory is about seven itemsof information (see, for example, Miller, 1956).This clearly implies a limit to processing capacity.The inference is that consumers do not have thecognitive capacity to process all the marketingcommunications information to which theyare exposed. The linearity of the CIP modelimplies the possibility of a bottleneck occurringat the point of exposure to data. Assumptionsabout the way consumers react to this bottleneckare central to the argument that theCommunications “Leviathan” constitutes aform of social pollution. Advertising apologistsmight contend that advertising can do no harmprecisely because consumers selectively, andconsciously or unconsciously, reject the greatmajority of marketing communications to whichthey are exposed. Does this selective attentionprocess, which has presumably evolved bynatural selection as a survival mechanism, notimply damaging consequence when subject to


information overload? As Kitchen (1994)writes,

Assume that many advertising or promotionalmessages actually reach unintended audiences –that is, audiences which may not be in the marketfor particular products or services . . . The constantbombardment of messages – indicating productconsumption in lifestyle settings – may provide thefoundation for a culturally constituted world inwhich materialism is encouraged and psycholog-ical dissatisfaction engendered. (Kitchen, 1994, p.22)

The intuitive appeal of this argument is clear.Consumers live in a world of Marxian “com-modity fetishism” (Marx and Engels, 1846), inwhich labour worships it’s own product in aself alienating parody of spiritual fulfilment.Advertising and other forms of marketing com-munications embody this fetishism by investingproducts with emotional values, i.e., associatingthem with personal qualities/attributes. Not tohave the product is not to have the attribute. Butdoes this line of reasoning take advertising andcontemporary culture too seriously? Perhaps thetotality of marketing communications do form apervasive environment of trivial stimulationswithin which daily lives go on, but are con-sumers equipped with the moral sensibility todeal with these challenges? The informationprocessing model implies that consumers canfilter a proportion of promotional messages outof conscious awareness. Consumers, after all, arenot obliged to watch many hours of television aweek. Even where they do, many adopt adver-tisement avoidance strategies such as “zipping”through advertisements by fast forwarding thevideo through commercial breaks, “zapping” thepause button so as to record a show or moviewithout the advertisements, and “nipping” ortaking in small, momentary samples of manytelevision channels using the remote control(Kitchen, 1986). However, notwithstandingavoidance strategies, we have still to deal with thepossibility that marketing communications dataoverload could elicit a state of unconsciousconfusion in consumers, disarming critical andevaluative faculties, and impairing the presumedmoral and economic quality of buying decisions.

Buyers can easily become overwhelmed withinformation (see Keller and Staelin, 1987;Kahneman, 1973; and Miller, 1956). Does thisstate, prolonged, result in the disablement ofcritical faculties concerning buying decisions, ordo people react to the Leviathan by adapting andevolving into hyper-critical Postmodern con-sumers?

The Postmodern consumer

Postmodern critical theorists such as Lyotard,(1984), Derrida (1991), Baudrillard and Foucault,have exerted major influence on the developmentof the social sciences. A significant number ofMarketers are now using Postmodern perspec-tives on knowledge to generate insights intoMarketing phenomena. Stephen Brown (1993)writes,

Postmodernism, as its advocates frequently empha-sise, has much to contribute to Marketing discourse. . . (it) helps to conceptualise some of the dramaticchanges that are taking place in the marketing arenaand provides an insight into the current crisis ofconfidence in the discipline. (Brown, 1994, pp.45–46).

Brown (1993), while acknowledging the coun-terpoints to this view, emphasises the influencePostmodernism has had on the development oftheories of buyer behaviour in Marketing (see,for example, Foxall, 1984; Venkatesh, 1992;Nyeck, 1992). This influence is derived from theway Postmodern theory emphasises the inter-pretation of knowledge through metaphor, con-structed truth, semiotics, and symbolic realities(see Brown, 1993, p. 31). This abandonment ofsubject and object, of objective reality and ofliteral in favour of symbolic modes of commu-nication is particularly significant for consumersgiven the increasingly blurred distinctionbetween Marketing Communications andpopular cinematic culture. The advertisingindustry is a training ground for aspirant filmdirectors and television advertising reflects this inthe prevalence of abstraction and surrealism asopposed to literal descriptions of productfeatures. Explicit product placement promotional


strategies in television and film make it difficultto distinguish between storyline, film stars, andglobally branded products. These trends areamong many other features of a CommunicationsLeviathan. The sense of the collapse of certaintyinto cultural, moral and epistemological rela-tivism feeds directly into every home through thetechnological telecommunications revolution.Brown refers to Baudrillard (in Poster, 1988) inasserting that,

For many, this inexorable fragmentation of modernlife, the widespread belief that “anything goes” andthe apparent loss of a fixed point of societal refer-ence cannot be divorced from latter-day advancesin telecommunications, informatics and the massmedia . . . this ceaseless parade of vivid images hasdenuded people’s ability to discriminate betweenimportant and trivial, past and present, global andlocal, and fact and fiction, other than in terms ofthe nature and intensity and drama of the imagesthemselves. (Brown, 1994, p. 36).

The postmodern consumer is represented asa . . .

. . . restless, cynical, world weary, self obsessedhedonist demanding instant gratification and ever-increasing doses of stimulation . . . (postmodernconsumers are) a “moronic inferno of narcissistscretinized by television” (Lasch, 1978; Callinicos,1989; in Brown, p. 36).

This jaundiced model of the consumer is not thatof a rational, decision making entity. It is that ofan entity without moral sensibility or criticalfaculties. An analysis of the ethics of MarketingCommunications based upon such a model of theconsumer might conclude that MarketingCommunications professionals should affordtargeted audiences the same level of ethicalconsideration as they might pet rabbits. Whileacknowledging the rapid pace of social andcultural change and the decline of absolute valuesof morality, the Postmodern model of theconsumer represented above may be consideredpessimistic. It also begs the question of whetherMarketing Communications professionals shoulddefine their own standards of professional ethicsby those of their consumers. This question is sofundamental to ethics that it is now appropriate

to look at some ethical perspectives drawn fromthe philosophers of ethics who have influencedcontemporary conceptions of morality and socialjustice.

Philosophical perspectives on thePostmodern Communications Leviathan

Bertrand Russell (1945) saw philosophy as . . .

. . . an integral part of social and political life: notas the isolated speculations of remarkable individ-uals, but as both an effect and a cause of the char-acter of the various communities in which differentsystems flourished. (Russell, 1945, preface p. ix).

It is, in the light of this view, appropriate to takea philosophical perspective on the ethics ofcontemporary Marketing Communications sincethis Leviathan arises from, and is an integral partof, contemporary social and political life. Indeed,it may be considered very odd that so muchspeculation on general business ethics does occurwithout the underpinning rigour and timelessinsight provided by the theorists who haveshaped our very conception of the notion ofethics.

Plato’s (reprint 1955) perspective held somestriking parallels to those of contemporaryphilosophers of the ethics of mass communica-tions. His work was produced in a time ofpopular democracy in Athens, and politicalpower was won, when not by force, by sophis-tical rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion. In thenon-representative democracy of fifth and fourthcentury Athens all 45,000 voters2 were entitledto vote at the law making mass meetings of theAssembly. Even the law courts were under itspopular control. Plato was deeply influenced bywhat he saw as the weak ethical standards andsocial instability engendered by this system. Hiscontemporary, Thucydides,3 described Athenianpopular democracy as a matter of “committingthe conduct of state affairs to the whims of themultitude.” That the multitude was not equippedwith the education and experience to make wellconsidered decisions was evident in the politicalturbulence and social instability of the times.Plato railed against “sophistry”, the insincere but


superficially effective forms of argument he sawas one of the principal evils of the time, andwhich was taught by professional travellingteachers to any young man who could pay (seePlato’s Gorgias, reprint 1960). Sophisticalargument dominated the Assembly and thispre-technological Communications Leviathanwas heavily influential in the daily experience ofthe typical Athenian. Plato saw this influence asmalign and, in his idealised “Republic” (reprint1955), took a radically authoritarian position onpolitical and social freedom, advocating strictcensorship and rule by the minority. Under-pinning Plato’s ethical view was his theory ofknowledge.

For Plato, the temporal world is imperfect andconsequently all knowledge gained from sensedata is also flawed. He used the simile of the caveto illustrate this idea, portraying the masses ofthe population as limited beings content to beamused by the shadows on the cave wall, unawareof, and perhaps indifferent to, the triviality anderror entailed in such false images of “knowl-edge”. Plato regarded epistemological error as thesource of ethical wrong. People would always actin the right way if they knew what it was: theproblem as he saw it was that most people would,could, never attain true knowledge because oftheir innate limitations. They were destined tolive perpetually in a shadowy world of error andtrivial amusement. He felt that these people, themajority, should have their lives controlled by thefew who were capable of attaining true knowl-edge through education and reflection: the“Guardians”. True knowledge and ethical cor-rectness were one and the same – to know theright, is to do right. Education was the key andthe corrupting influences of popular drama,poetry, and personal property would have noplace in his idealised society. Plato’s view ontoday’s Marketing Communications Leviathan iseasy to infer: he would see it as a wasteful andcorrupting force for evil incompatible withstability and social justice.

Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, carries quite a con-trasting tone in his main ethical work, the“Nicomachean Ethics” (reprint 1976), writtenfor his son, Nicomachus. Attempts at social andpolitical control are much less evident. Aristotle’s

collected lecture notes reflect on what he saw asthe principle ethical problem, the problem ofhow an individual is to live the “good life”.Aristotle saw happiness as an ethically suitableultimate objective in life, although he rejectedthe hedonistic forms of sensual “happiness”advocated by other philosophical schools of thetime. Unlike the Stoics who were, with Plato,to be so influential in the development ofChristian notions of ethics, Aristotle’s work heldthe psychological insight that even self denial isa form of self affirmation. His “Golden Mean”doctrine was a call to self regulated behaviour asa kind of subjective moral absolutism: ethicallycorrect behaviour involves self knowledge aboutone’s own appetites and predispositions, and the“right” course of action given a particular cir-cumstance may be different for every individualbecause virtue and vice are relative not toexterior standards but to internal predispositions.While the highest good is considered to be thereflective life, Aristotle’s work regards an“adequate” supply of external “goods” to be aprecondition of happiness. Aristotle’s ethical man,therefore, the “Eudaimon”, is neither the self sac-rificing ascetic of Platonic, eternally mindedmedieval Christianity, nor the transcendentlyminded mystic of Eastern religious philosophy.He is an individual who seeks personal happinessin this world as if life is a skill to be mastered,and a sense of deep responsibility toward othersis as inherent a part of such a man as is a senseof responsibility towards himself.

Aristotle’s ethical position places ultimateresponsibility for the individual’s moral develop-ment not on the state but on him(her)self. TheMarketing Communications Leviathan would,therefore, simply constitute another of life’sdilemmas to be negotiated carefully and thought-fully by the emotionally and psychologicallymature “Eudaimon” of Aristotelian ethics. It isperhaps worth remembering that Aristotle waswriting for his son and for his students: whetherhe thought the “masses” equal to such responsi-bility is another question. In more recentphilosophy thinkers have sought to integratenotions of moral responsibility within a civilsociety with the principle of personal freedomfor all, a principle that was alien to the ancient


Greeks, who took for granted the existence of aservile underclass of slaves and the non-contri-bution of women to public affairs. One suchthinker, highly influential in political philosophy,was John Stuart Mill (1859).

Mill’s thought evolved in the influence of thatof his father James Mill and the Utilitarianphilosopher Jeremy Bentham. The politicalphilosophy espoused in “On Liberty” is notwithout contradiction but its central thesis is thatfreedom of speech, thought and act is a sine quanon of human development: human potential cannever be fulfilled, according to Mill, if privatebehaviour is constrained either by the State, orby the “tyranny of the majority” imposing theirown conventional mores on individual behaviour.People should be free to conduct their “experi-ments in living” so that possibilities may beexplored and progress made through a processof dialectic. Thesis is met by antithesis and thefree and uninhibited interaction of each resultsin a new synthesis of ideas or of action. Mill’sguiding principle was expressed thus:

. . . The only purpose for which power can berightfully exercised over any member of a civilisedcommunity, against his will, is to prevent harm toothers (Mill, 1859, p. 68)

Mill’s implicit position on censorship seems clear.Those Postmodern consumers would simply haveto regard the Communications Leviathan as anopportunity for personal development. In aprocess of cultural laissez faire, some would failto cope and be “cretinized” by the mass com-municators: others would evolve into morallymature, critically aware individuals who mightnot have done so without the intrusive andchallenging presence of the MarketingCommunications Leviathan. Some of thelimitations to individual freedom Mill lists seemanachronous to contemporary mores: forexample he suggests that the freedom to pro-create is one which may legitimately be inter-fered with by the State. The power of men todetermine the lives of their families is also to belimited, as is the economic power of individualsto indulge in vices such as drink (through Stateimposed consumption taxes). Notwithstanding

the contradictions in Mill’s position, the modernworld is one of greater complexity than “OnLiberty” assumed. The Marketing Communica-tions Leviathan may well have constituted aspecial case for State Intervention for Mill, sinceit is clearly not a case of individuals privatelyindulging their idiosyncracies to no social illeffect: it is a very public phenomenon with socialramifications that Mill may well have found aninstrument of oppression rather than one ofliberty. For Mill, the “tyranny of the majority”may well have been embodied in the Leviathaneffect with its glorification of popular culture andits tendency to address people as group membersrather than as individuals. However, theLeviathan is also an inherent feature of democ-ratic capitalism in its function as the medium ofthe market: market information is not “perfect”in the sense classical microeconomics attaches tothe term, but the extent to which it is propa-gated at all is due to the CommunicationsLeviathan. Arguments opposing the free actionof the Leviathan would, it seems, have to be onsocial and ethical, but not economic, grounds.Thus, this postmodern phenomenon may falloutside the scope of Mill’s nineteenth centurytheme.

Concluding comments

This paper has attempted to address the ethicalimplications of a Postmodern MarketingCommunications Leviathan, an entity to whichconsumers in the developed worlds are exposedon a daily basis. These ethical implications havebeen examined from a primarily normativeperspective. The cumulative influence of thisphenomenon on consumer buying decisions andon society has not been researched to any notice-able extent. The possibility that the Leviathanmay degrade consumer decision making facul-ties and impair the moral development of indi-viduals raises many ethical questions concerning,for example, the regulation of marketing com-munications and the education of consumers.Perspectives on the questions of regulation havebeen explored by drawing selectively on classicalphilosophy and Postmodern critical theory. The


arguments may be summarised in the followingway. On the one hand, a laissez faire approachto individual ethics consistent with the thoughtof Aristotle and John Stuart Mill would place theMarketing Communications Leviathan aboveState control and beyond the self regulation thatalready exists within the professions of thedomain. Marketing Communications specialistscould not be held responsible for social ills: theburden of responsibility would lie on individualconsumers notwithstanding the difficulty ofdealing with the intrusive and complex chal-lenges the Leviathan presents. On the other hand,a Platonic approach and one more consistentwith Western Christian ethical traditions wouldplace some collective social responsibility on theState for regulation of the Leviathan. This col-lective control might relate to the content or tothe quantity of Marketing Communications, butit would imply that those who prove unequal tothe challenges posed by the mass of MarketingCommunications in the consumers’ environmentrequire some protection from this PostmodernLeviathan, even though such protection wouldconstitute an interference with individuallydirected moral development, and a limit onpersonal freedom.

The approach of this paper has been toexamine classical ethical perspectives on theLeviathan in the light of a psychology of adver-tising communication. Taking a lead from DavidHume’s epistemological moral philosophy, thepaper attempted to discuss the possible cumula-tive effects of the Leviathan in terms of cogni-tive information processing models of consumerbehaviour. This cognitivist psychological positionoffers one fruitful basis for an ethical treatmentof marketing communications but there areothers which might offer directions for futureresearch. For example, the critical but neglectedquestion of the normative in marketing andmanagement education is deeply problematic andany attempt to deal with the ethical issues ofmarketing within management education have toaddress this (Hackley, 1988a). The managementof business processes are necessarily social activ-ities involving managerial influence over and/orinvolvement with, the lives of others. How, then,can ethical issues be dealt with in schemes of

business education which have no coherentphilosophy of practice? Furthermore, any attemptto educate managers to be experts in marketingmust deal with the tacit dimension of practicalknowledge (Hackley, 1988b). Any given situationin the social world has an experiential aspectwhich can only be apprehended as experience.Can normative treatments of business ethicsembrace situational particulars, given the par-ticularity of every problem situation which amarketing communications professional is likelyto face? Finally, from the consumer point of view,there are ways of attempting to understand howadvertising and marketing communications workwhich fall outside the information processingparadigm. For example, semiotic approaches tounderstanding how advertising works (Hackley,1988c), social constructionist perspectives in thesocial psychology of marketing communications(Hackley and Kitchen, 1988; Hackley, 1998d)and attempts to examine the phenomenology ofthe contemporary consumer experience (Hackleyand Kitchen, 1997) all offer counterpoints to thetraditional, and dominant, cognitivist schemes ofmarketing communication. These approachesmight offer bases for the development of theethical dimension of marketing managementwithin general business education, based on asounder understanding of the social psychologyboth of marketing communications, and ofbusiness management education.

But the effects of the totality of marketingcommunications in relation to society as a wholeis an issue the ethical dimensions of which seemto go beyond social psychology, and indeedbeyond moral philosophy. For marketing com-munications and the ethos of possessive individ-ualism which runs as a sub text within themmight be seen in ideological terms as the pro-motion of values which maintain, and sustain, asystem of institutionalised social power relations.Such an analysis would seem to fall within thescope of a political science of marketing com-munications. However, whether the promotionof such capitalist ideologies is benign in and ofitself, or is simply an unavoidable component ofbusiness discourse, the practical ethical issuesremain pertinent. These concern the intellectualbases for the construction of normative ethical


approaches concerning the formation of the legalframework for marketing communications, theconduct of professionals within the industry indesigning marketing communications strategies,and the role of the Leviathan in framing thebehaviour and values of the Postmodernconsumer. This paper has attempted to discusssome of these issues on the basis that theCommunications Leviathan represents an histor-ically unprecedented cultural context for theindividual moral development of citizens, andthat classical ethical perspectives retain a con-temporary relevance in the task of conceptual-ising and re-conceptualising business ethics in theera of the Postmodern CommunicationsLeviathan.

Notes

1 This estimate is derived from calculations made byKitchen, 1994, op. cit.2 V. Ehrenberg, The Greek State, p. 30, and A. H.Jones, Athenian Democracy, pp. 8–11, in Lee (Trans.)p. 263 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. R.Warner, Bk. 11, p. 65 (Penguin Classics).

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Christopher E. Hackley,Oxford Brookes University School of Business,

Wheatley, Oxford, OX33 1HX, U.K.E-mail: [email protected]

Philip J. Kitchen, University of Strathclyde,

Department of Marketing,Stenhouse Building,173 Cathedral St.,

Glasgow, G4 0RQ, U.K.E-mail: [email protected]


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Ethical perspectives on the postmodern communications Leviathan