BEYOND TRUTHFULNESS: A KANTIAN APPROACH TO ETHICAL ADVERTISING

บทคัดย่อ

Contemporary advertising has evolved beyond overt falsehoods toward increasingly sophisticated forms of implicit deception, including digital “dark patterns” and semantic manipulation through “clean label” claims. These practices exploit consumer cognitive biases and circumvent rational deliberation, raising ethical concerns that existing regulatory systems often grounded in the “reasonable consumer” standard are ill-equipped to address. While utilitarianism and virtue ethics can criticize deceptive tactics, both frameworks remain limited in offering a consistent and principled condemnation of manipulation that may still generate short-term satisfaction or economic benefit. This article proposes a Kantian deontological framework as a robust alternative for evaluating ethical advertising, emphasizing that the fundamental wrong of implicit deception lies in violating consumer autonomy and dignity by treating individuals merely as means to corporate ends. Using hermeneutical analysis of Kant’s moral philosophy alongside contemporary deontological scholarship, the study develops a “Kantian Audit” based on the Formula of Universal Law and the Formula of Humanity to assess real-world advertising practices. The audit is applied to three case studies non GMO salt labeling, Amazon’s “Project Iliad,” and the hybrid transparency model of Pang Dong Lai demonstrating how implicit deception fails tests of universalizability and respect for humanity. The findings support a normative shift from a narrow focus on “consumer protection” toward a broader principle of “autonomy preservation,” with recommendations for legal reform and corporate policy standards designed to uphold rational agency in modern markets.