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I spent Monday talking about making our first shaky steps toward a so-called deeper design ethics. I drew a distinction between generic professional or business ethics, and the special kind of ethical concerns we have as people who fill up the world with the stuff we make.

In that post, I specifically mentioned two types of advertising campaigns — those for Kellogg’s sugary breakfast cereals, and those for tobacco products — both of which were pulled from television and print media because of the consensus view that it is our duty to protect those members of our society who are so impressionable that they cannot be trusted to decide for themselves whether or not to use the harmful products that these advertisements were trying to sell them. Of course I am referring to children.

I used this fact on Monday to illustrate the point that there is clearly a normative set of ethical concerns that apply to designed objects: it’s not "anything goes." The logic of this argument is simply that if there is some empirical cultural hard-stop for conscionable design practice at play here, picking that out might give us a start-point for codifying our design ethics.

How do these particular moments of cultural prohibition cash out generally? In both cases, it seems we’re trying to protect the impressionable members of society from advertising tricks until they’re jaded enough to develop an ironic stance to the kinds of promises these ads make. This implies at least that we don’t find it conscionable when companies trick gullible members of our society into engaging in self-destructive behavior.

Now, the tougher part here is drawing the line about who exactly are gullible members of our society. I can fathom at least two candidate mentalities here. The first is that after some amount of legalistic soul-searching, we don’t find ourselves (mature adults) to be gullible in the relevant sense, presumably because we have adopted an appropriately ironic stance toward the standard-model advertising chicanery. The second is that we don’t feel that it is within our legal reach to legislate the ethicality of the free market.

Let’s give ourselves the benefit of the doubt viz. our own self-awareness here and assume that the culprit here is really the latter. I think proponents of this stance may have a point. It might just be the case that it’s not our place to legislate corporate broadcast/print messaging. That said, while I may be unwilling to prescribe a course of action for lawyers, policy types, and the citizenry at large, I do think that the former plus the latter offers us an interesting candidate principle for designers and advertisers — namely, if you’d want to protect your children from believing and acting on the promises you are making, maybe you shouldn’t be making them.