46 NAPOLEON M. MABAQUIAO JR. ETHICS OF BUSINESS ADS DIRECTED AT CHILDREN * Napoleon M. Mabaquiao Jr. De La Salle University, Manila This essay shows why children advertising or business ads directed at children cannot be justified on moral grounds. It is argued that while the persuasive intent of business ads in general does not always lead to the manipulation of consumers, children’s yet undeveloped or general lack of the capacity to make autonomous, rational, or free and informed buying decisions renders business ads directed at them necessarily manipulative. Accordingly, it is when ads are manipulative that they are unethical. And the absence of an internal mechanism in children to guard themselves against the possible manipulations of the ads directed at them renders the persuasive techniques of these ads as ways of taking advantage of their vulnerability. INTRODUCTION The ubiquity of business ads in our society and their undeniable significant effects on the preferences, decisions, lifestyles, and well-being of consumers render such ads as an appropriate object of ethical evaluation. As it still ultimately rests on the decisions of consumers whether or not to patronize these ads, the usual arguments for and against the ethics of these ads revolve around the question on whether or not these ads violate the autonomy of consumers or, more particularly, whether they enable or prevent consumers to make rational decisions on what goods to buy. Still another way of putting the question is, given the preferences, needs, goals, and financial capacity of consumers, do business ads help consumers make buying decisions that are in their best interests, or do these ads simply manipulate consumers thereby taking advantage of the weaknesses or vulnerability of these consumers to advance the economic interests of the companies whose products these ads are promoting? A significant type of business advertising, however, does not seem to be directly addressed by the usual type of arguments used to address the said question. This particular type of advertising refers to children advertising or to business advertising whose target consumers are children; and the reason why these arguments appear tangential to the ethical evaluation of children advertising is that they work on the premise that consumers already have the capacity to make autonomous and rational (or free and informed) decisions on which goods to prefer or buy, which children do not have yet or have not yet developed. Among others, children do not have clear concepts of money, of reality as opposed to fantasy, of what they want in the future, and of what will be good for them in the long run; Φιλοσοφια Φιλοσοφια Φιλοσοφια Φιλοσοφια Φιλοσοφια Volume 41, 1:2012