Business Ethics            Discussion Project: Analyzing an Argument against Advertising to Children

 In this project you will be analyzing the logical structure of Lynn Sharpe Paine's arguments for the claim that directing advertisements at young children is unethical.

Here is an outline of the argument in the first section of her article called "Children as Consumers".

1.  Children lack the ability to be reflective about their desires – to see themselves as having some desires that they wish to cultivate and others that they would rather suppress or modify.
2.  Children often lack the self-control required to act on such ‘higher-order’ desires, if they had them.
3.  Children have a very limited ability to understand time, to imagine themselves in the future, and to temper their short term desires in light of their long term interests.
4.  Children have not mastered the ability to calculate and thus to judge price and value.

Therefore, children do not have the basic skills and capacities required to make reasonable consumer judgments.  A defense of advertising that is premised on children’s being reasonable consumers is wrong.

Each group will be assigned one of the subsequent sections of the article.  Your job is to produce an outline of the argument in that section.  Use the outline above as a model.

The sections:

1.  "Veracity",  pp. 620-621

2.  "Fairness and Respect for Children", pp.621

3.  "Harm to Children", pp. 621-622.