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I ended Wednesday saying that I find the WOMMA’s "Honesty ROI" to be correct, consistent, and almost totally uninformative. Obviously, I implied, we’d like to have an ethical code that is deeply informative, one that can give us useful guidelines for handling a variety of situations in satisfactory ways. While the WOMMA are right (as we have long attested) that not telling lies is a correct ethical guideline for marketers to follow, we’d like to see a code that gives us a little bit more.

Of course, it’s one thing to merely criticize, and quite another to make some positive steps toward a code like that. The latter is our objective today.

Which means that you’re going to have to pardon me, because I’m about to get a little philosophical.

Immanuel Kant thought just about as hard as anyone about promises

Fans of German philosophy (like myself) may recall that Immanuel Kant, in his various writings on practical reason, used promise-keeping as a paragon moral activity for one of his four types of moral duties. Kant’s considered promise keeping a perfect duty to others, which means that he meant it to be a constitutive goal (rather than the regulative imperfect duties) toward our fellow human beings. It is our duty, Kant suggested, to keep our promises, because the formal moral law that underwrites all specific moral duties is that we ought to act in such a way that our actions are universalizable. This means that we only ought to decide to do something if we can reasonably abide by the world that would result if everyone did it.

So, we are obliged to keep our promises precisely because if everyone broke their promises, the entire system of promise-making would collapse in on itself, and promises would cease to have any of the attributes we commonly associate with promises.

Some years later, in his famous critique of Kant in the Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel wrote that while Kant’s moral law was correct, it was wholly uninformative. This is because, he said, that while the moral law could tell you that keeping promises was moral, it could only do so by relying on certain normative practices which the moral law could not validate. To wit: While the moral law can tell us something about keeping a promise, it can only do so by assuming the value of the system of promise-making in general, about which it can tell us nothing. Hegel thought, and I agree, that the (unanswered) latter question was the interesting one, ethically.

This is an incredibly nuanced question when approached in the wider context of total human ethicality, but, I want to argue, this critique can probably be deployed here with significantly less difficulty. Adopting the maxim not to tell lies in a marketing situation may be consistent, but it is only consistent inside the contingent premises of the marketing world in general. And, for my part, I think that any good code of ethics for a particular domain will have something to say about the domain in general. This is a significantly easier situation than the aforementioned, because here we have the wider set of normative ethical guidelines with which to critique those of the practice of (e.g.) marketing.

After all, as we approach this domain of ethics, it is important to remember that we are not designers (or advertisers, or technologists) first. First, we are human beings who design.