Marketers are guided by a longstanding mantra: Consumers preferences are king. In many ways, to be the best marketer is to create products and services that are directly aligned with consumer preferences. This paper focuses on the potential ethical issues associated with blindly catering to consumer preferences. The preoccupation with consumer preferences leads marketers to prioritize them, even if the preferences are perverse. This preoccupation can trigger a kind of cultural, group based harm. Marketers and business ethicists alike have historically understood consumer harm narrowly. Traditional accounts of marketing and business ethics have used the theories of John Rawls to argue that certain practices are unethical because they harm individuals. (Rawls 1971) This paper seeks instead to use Iris Marion Young’s criticism of John Rawls to expand the scope of harms to which businesses should be attuned. Her account focuses on harms that reinforce cultural norms while stereotyping minorities, females, the LGBT community and other under-represented cultural groups — so called “cultural imperialism.” (Young 1990). Turning our attention to this kind of group-based harm has two ethical implications for marketers. First, marketers should not cater to customer preferences in ways that create these harms by reinforcing social hierarchies and stereotypes. And second, marketers may even have a positive obligation to counteract and mitigate this kind of cultural harm by promoting cultural diversity in their marketing activities, even if this means going against consumer preferences. The article concludes with a working applicable framework for marketing managers to analyze the potential cultural harms of their activities.
{"title":"Marketing’s Ethical Blind Spot: Catering to Consumer Preferences","authors":"Suneal Bedi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3441359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3441359","url":null,"abstract":"Marketers are guided by a longstanding mantra: Consumers preferences are king. In many ways, to be the best marketer is to create products and services that are directly aligned with consumer preferences. This paper focuses on the potential ethical issues associated with blindly catering to consumer preferences. The preoccupation with consumer preferences leads marketers to prioritize them, even if the preferences are perverse. This preoccupation can trigger a kind of cultural, group based harm. Marketers and business ethicists alike have historically understood consumer harm narrowly. Traditional accounts of marketing and business ethics have used the theories of John Rawls to argue that certain practices are unethical because they harm individuals. (Rawls 1971) \u0000 \u0000This paper seeks instead to use Iris Marion Young’s criticism of John Rawls to expand the scope of harms to which businesses should be attuned. Her account focuses on harms that reinforce cultural norms while stereotyping minorities, females, the LGBT community and other under-represented cultural groups — so called “cultural imperialism.” (Young 1990). Turning our attention to this kind of group-based harm has two ethical implications for marketers. First, marketers should not cater to customer preferences in ways that create these harms by reinforcing social hierarchies and stereotypes. And second, marketers may even have a positive obligation to counteract and mitigate this kind of cultural harm by promoting cultural diversity in their marketing activities, even if this means going against consumer preferences. The article concludes with a working applicable framework for marketing managers to analyze the potential cultural harms of their activities.","PeriodicalId":269585,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Commercial Transactions (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125853018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Platforms that connect users to one another have flourished online in domains as diverse as transportation, employment, dating, and housing. When users interact on these platforms, their behavior may be influenced by preexisting biases, including tendencies to discriminate along the lines of race, gender, and other protected characteristics. In aggregate, such user behavior may result in systematic inequities in the treatment of different groups. While there is uncertainty about whether platforms bear legal liability for the discriminatory conduct of their users, platforms necessarily exercise a great deal of control over how users’ encounters are structured—including who is matched with whom for various forms of exchange, what information users have about one another during their interactions, and how indicators of reliability and reputation are made salient, among many other features. Platforms cannot divest themselves of this power; even choices made without explicit regard for discrimination can affect how vulnerable users are to bias. This Article analyzes ten categories of design and policy choices through which platforms may make themselves more or less conducive to discrimination by users. In so doing, it offers a comprehensive account of the complex ways platforms’ design choices might perpetuate, exacerbate, or alleviate discrimination in the contemporary economy.
{"title":"Designing Against Discrimination in Online Markets","authors":"K. Levy, Solon Barocas","doi":"10.15779/Z38BV79V7K","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38BV79V7K","url":null,"abstract":"Platforms that connect users to one another have flourished online in domains as diverse as transportation, employment, dating, and housing. When users interact on these platforms, their behavior may be influenced by preexisting biases, including tendencies to discriminate along the lines of race, gender, and other protected characteristics. In aggregate, such user behavior may result in systematic inequities in the treatment of different groups. While there is uncertainty about whether platforms bear legal liability for the discriminatory conduct of their users, platforms necessarily exercise a great deal of control over how users’ encounters are structured—including who is matched with whom for various forms of exchange, what information users have about one another during their interactions, and how indicators of reliability and reputation are made salient, among many other features. Platforms cannot divest themselves of this power; even choices made without explicit regard for discrimination can affect how vulnerable users are to bias. This Article analyzes ten categories of design and policy choices through which platforms may make themselves more or less conducive to discrimination by users. In so doing, it offers a comprehensive account of the complex ways platforms’ design choices might perpetuate, exacerbate, or alleviate discrimination in the contemporary economy.","PeriodicalId":269585,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Commercial Transactions (Topic)","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128750280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The question of group-based human rights for older people, rooted in recognition of their specific vulnerabilities, has come under the spotlight in recent years. The emergence and intensification of an international debate concerning the role of human rights norms in addressing difference and discrimination linked to ageing has culminated in the campaign for a new international convention on the rights of older people, to mirror existing group-based conventions relating to the rights of women, children and people with disabilities. At the same time, the demographic and socio-economic implications of the ‘ageing society’ have coincided with a political and policy context rooted in asset-based welfare to generate a new environment of risk around property transactions that utilise housing equity after retirement. These parallel discourses invoke competing images of the older person as a vulnerable legal subject and as a self-responsible autonomous consumer. While these tensions have to some extent been played out in debates concerning public service provision, the domain of private, market-based property transactions to liquidate housing equity (which now dominates welfare provision for older owners) has been almost exclusively underpinned by a narrative of self-responsible individualism. This paper explores the issues surrounding differential vulnerabilities as they affect older owner’s housing equity transactions, and reflects on alternative strategies to develop a coherent theoretical framework for older owners’ legal subjectivity.
{"title":"Ageing, Difference and Discrimination: Property Transactions in the Crucible of Human Rights Norms","authors":"Lorna Fox O’Mahony","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2165360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2165360","url":null,"abstract":"The question of group-based human rights for older people, rooted in recognition of their specific vulnerabilities, has come under the spotlight in recent years. The emergence and intensification of an international debate concerning the role of human rights norms in addressing difference and discrimination linked to ageing has culminated in the campaign for a new international convention on the rights of older people, to mirror existing group-based conventions relating to the rights of women, children and people with disabilities. At the same time, the demographic and socio-economic implications of the ‘ageing society’ have coincided with a political and policy context rooted in asset-based welfare to generate a new environment of risk around property transactions that utilise housing equity after retirement. These parallel discourses invoke competing images of the older person as a vulnerable legal subject and as a self-responsible autonomous consumer. While these tensions have to some extent been played out in debates concerning public service provision, the domain of private, market-based property transactions to liquidate housing equity (which now dominates welfare provision for older owners) has been almost exclusively underpinned by a narrative of self-responsible individualism. This paper explores the issues surrounding differential vulnerabilities as they affect older owner’s housing equity transactions, and reflects on alternative strategies to develop a coherent theoretical framework for older owners’ legal subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":269585,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Commercial Transactions (Topic)","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114498365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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