Ethical Issues In Marketing

“Ethical issues in marketing of Children an Utilitarian perspective.”
Introduction
Meaning and Definition
The word “ethics” is extracted from the Greek word “ethos”, which refers to the nature, guiding values, principles or ideals that are spread through a group, community or people. Each and every individual is responsible to his community for his behaviour.
Ethics is group of norms, or code, or value system, devised from human reason and experience, through which free human actions are determined as right or wrong.
According to the Josephson Institute, “Ethics is defined as standards of conduct that indicate how one should behave based on moral duties and virtues”.
According to Webster, “Ethics is the discipline dealing with what is

Like several authors, Beauchamp (1980) divides the major philosophical trends in ethics into two large categories: the utilitarian approach and the deontological approach. Under the utilitarian approach, the notion of ethics is closely related to the consequences of an action. According to this approach, the manager will attempt to produce the greatest possible amount of positive value or the smallest possible amount of negative value for the persons affected. In opposition, the deontological approach, largely based on the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Kant, considers not so much the consequences of an act as the manner in which the act is performed. This approach is based on the notion of categorical imperatives and, consequently, is more normative in nature. For Kant, a course of action is not ethical unless the person who adopts it would see nothing reprehensible in its adoption by all others and unless this practice does not threaten the survival of society. Following this logic, lying or stealing are unethical practices, no matter what their consequences. In other words, in deontology, one cannot assume that the end justifies the

The most striking feature of this definition is its almost entirely utilitarian aspect. This characteristic is typical of marketing whose central theme, ever since its very first definitions, has been the satisfaction of the needs of consumers. Now, since the satisfaction of consumers’ needs is the final objective of marketing, one would be inclined to believe that the ethical approach which dominates is, for the most part, utilitarian. Furthermore, since the satisfaction of the needs of one’s fellow man is in itself a practically indisputable ideal, marketing people tend perhaps to concern them less with the way in which this ideal is attained, thereby neglecting the deontological aspect of their