I believe, hopelessly, that this morality should be extended much more widely; this idea, this kind of scientific morality, that such things as propaganda should be a dirty word.
– Richard Feynman
The philosophy of science is concerned mainly with a search for truth. Science provides a method to find the truth. At his core, a scientist is someone who seeks to bring his beliefs in line with reality by doing experiments to test his beliefs.
The truth is a scientist’s most sacred quality, and anything that hides the truth or confuses it is immoral. Looking around myself at the world that I live in, I see a lot of instances of people hiding the truth, or purposefully confusing an issue, or phrasing things in a misleading way. It’s clear why people seek to hide the truth. If you convince people to do something, you can make a lot of money or get a lot of power. But while this may be good for you in the short term, it seems like it’s bad for society and the world in the long term. Decisions get made not on the basis of what’s best, but on the basis of what has the best propaganda.
Politics and advertising are the two main fields that focus on distorting truth or obscuring it with rhetoric. This means that tasks as simple as choosing toothpaste and as complex and important as choosing a national leader are far more difficult than they need to be. My solution has generally been to avoid all kinds of ads and propaganda, and look for actual data before making a decision.
It would be nice to live in a world where this kind of conscious avoidance of ads wasn’t necessary. We already have social and cultural moral systems that prohibit bad behavior. I propose that we work to incorporate prohibitions of advertising and propaganda in these already existing systems. It won’t even be very hard: just treat advertisers and marketers the same way you treat people who are rude or smell bad. The social stigma will eventually push people away from propagandizing.