Exploiting people’s well know psychological weaknesses and then calling it a failure of personal responsibility is exactly how ad execs managed to sleep at night after getting kids hooked on a substance that shattered millions of lives and cost the US alone hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare costs and lost productivity.
This is why I was talking about it being a balance.
How do you pick that balance? When do you say something is exploitation and when do you say something is personal responsibility or choice?
One logical extreme is only being able to eat government approved meals. Obviously that is ridiculous but you have to know the extremes to pick a reasonable moderate choice.
My position involves maximizing personal choice as long as the truth is accurately represented.
> When do you say something is exploitation and when do you say something is personal responsibility or choice?
This is not difficult. When one group is disproportionately impacted by a net-negative outcome due to a product’s overuse, it’s obvious there is exploitation.
We can measure health outcomes. We can model when children’s brains have developed sufficiently to make choices. We can look at the documents the companies themselves drew up and understand very clearly their intentions to exploit people and leave them to die.
Accurately representing the truth is not enough. Humans are a mess of impulses and biases, not logical thinkers who act out of reason at every step.
>You can't legislate what's obvious and ignore the middle.
That is done successfully all the time. It's nice to have the legal boundary match the line exactly all the time, but if the line isn't known then there's no harm in placing the legal boundary on the conservative side as an interim solution while you work the details out.
> Accurately representing the truth is not enough.
So what is? Even if not conned into it by advertising, people still might buy stuff that's contrary to their interest. This is backed by your own statement that humans are "not logical thinkers who act out of reason at every step." Witness narcotics as an example: the sinaloas have never run a prime-time tv ad, but sell plenty.
