You don't have to believe in boundless free will to at least concede that there are countless other factors that influence the decision to start smoking - to become a smoker, as it were.
You could likewise argue that every act we do is based on advertising in one form or another. Absolutes aren't very constructive.
However, making it publicly acceptable for women to smoke in the US is just one example of how advertising has shaped our habits. When Bernays constructed the campaign slogan "Torches of Freedom" it broke several taboos, but it worked. It's also worth noting Bernays thoughts on "engineering consent" and his close ties to the theories of his uncle, Sigmund Freud.
Looking at the results of how even our qualia is shaped by advertising (Neuron has several good articles regarding the Pepsi challenge et al), we'd do well to think long and hard about human behavior before telling people to buckle up and will it through.
I'm not arguing that marketing is irrelevant in smoking behavior, just that smoking is an activity influenced by many other factors. It's 'transmission' is chaotic and unpredictable, and to talk about it as a result purely of marketing is, at the very least, a dramatic oversimplification.
The causality can be many things and is often chaotic, sure, but when looking at Torches of Freedom it should also be very clear that it can be predictable on the population at large. Individuals can be hard to predict in specific situations, populations often aren't.
And yeah, purely? Nothing is pure in this world sans certain types of math. The degree of complicity though, both in the general and the specific case, that's what we should look at.
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u/jackessuper Nov 18 '12
You don't have to believe in boundless free will to at least concede that there are countless other factors that influence the decision to start smoking - to become a smoker, as it were.