The whole sugar/candy industry is unethical in my mind. It may take some decades for society to catch up, but eventually eating sugar the way we do today will be seen like smoking and the tobacco industry.

Why not extend this to basically everything not essential to life? Traveling to tropical destinations is clearly harmful for the world, living in big homes spaced out from each other is another one that causes unnecessary pollution. Selling alcohol, foods high in saturated fat (butter), etc.

If one course of action that does not even add more options of products to buy, just pushes them in a different way, contributes to worse health outcomes across a population, and you know it’s doing so, yes, that’s super unethical.

Targets have a Starbucks selling 10x as much dissolved sugar 25 feet away from checkout aisles. Are those unethical? How about in a separate Starbucks building, but on a pad site in front of the store with a drive thru?

Seems like an arbitrary place to draw the unethical/ethical line.

This is not, cannot be, and shouldn’t be math. Yes, it’s all “arbitrary”. Unhealthy impulse-items at the checkout are going to be regarded as quite unethical, by a lot of people, for really obvious reasons. The approaches you’re trying to use to “disprove” that isn’t how any of this works.

Many things are bad. Some are worse than others. Ones that are intentionally manipulative, as the impulse-buy aisle is, and greedily pushing high-margin products that are also unhealthy? Yeah, that’s an extremely shitty thing to do, no matter how common. The motivation is 100% greed, not delivering a better experience (as simply making candy and soda available in some normal aisle might). And in the Year of Our Lord 2023, every person choosing to create impulse-buy areas knows exactly what they’re doing and the effects it has.

The Starbucks bottles in the checkout aisle are, similarly, bad. The Starbucks that you have to walk over to, look at the menu with calories printed right next to each item while you choose what to buy, then stand in a second line, check out again, then wait at to get the drink, isn’t bad in the same ways. It might be bad in different ways, and to a different degree! But it’s not the same, and you’re not going to be able to construct some proof that requires I condemn those equally or else condemn neither, because that’s nonsense both in the specific terms of what we’re writing about, and also because it’s not a useful way to analyze or discuss these sorts of things in general.

>But it’s not the same, and you’re not going to be able to construct some proof that requires I condemn those equally or else condemn neither, because that’s nonsense both in the specific terms of what we’re writing about, and also because it’s not a useful way to analyze or discuss these sorts of things in general.

I think it is useful when ideas about government regulation start coming in (like the poster who I responded to wrote). I do not want leaders to (completely) capriciously determine what is and is not allowed.

Using people as a means to an end qualifies here and is generally considered unethical.

I don't understand what "using people as a means to an end" means here. Sounds like selling something to people to earn money, but that would describe all business.

Using people as a means is a reference to Kant[1].

> that would describe all business.

What if it does? Should we avoid an honest conclusion because it has profound consequences?

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/persons-means/

Yes, because unless there is an alternative proposal to feed and house the 8B people on this planet, then it is a waste of time to complain about the current solution being imperfect.

We don't need M&Ms in the checkout aisle to feed and house 8B people on this planet. Don't conflate what I'm saying with a general anti-business sentiment.

There are many kinds of economic transactions that occur. The best kinds are the win-win transactions. I have an excess of X and a dearth of Y, you have the opposite, and we swap them to our mutual benefit and walk away happy in the long term thinking that we both made a good deal, and even a third party analysis by experts would agree it was a good deal. This is basically the kind of transaction that happens when I swap $2 for a bunch of fresh cilantro at the market, to cook a meal with. Or when I pay a skilled mechanic a reasonable fee to do maintenance on my car that I can't do myself.

Then there's the other kinds of transactions: the exploitative ones. One person substantially and noticeably wins and the other person equally loses. There is no upside for the loser in the bigger economic picture of our lives. Lots of basic examples of this are common, and some are borderline fraud. An example would be the mechanic who charges 10x what he really /needed/ to make a healthy margin, because he's the only mechanic in town and I'm immobilized by my failed car, and I'm poor, and I'm putting it on a credit card because I don't have the money but have to get the car working to keep my job.

I'm positing that, in a larger holistic sense, the transactions for the candy in the checkout aisle (all the advertising that goes into it as well!) are like that. They're not so much economically harmful: it may in fact be a "good deal" in a basic math sense to pay $2 for the candy's ingredients and manufacturing process. But at the end of the day, they're turning a profit and you're continuing an unhealthy sugar addiction and eventually dying of diabetes. It's a transaction that's explicitly designed to exploit you and harm you for their collective profit. This is not a win-win, at least not in a larger, holistic sense.

Let me see if I'm understanding you correctly. You answered in the affirmative that if something is too hard then we shouldn't consider the ethics of it?

Yes, if the thing you are finding unethical is as broad and pervasive and undergirding as "business".