> 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.
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.
----
> 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.
----
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.
----
> 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.