Advertising Ethics: the bounds of deceptiveness and the endless virtues of rhetorical strategies

Is there any correspondence between advertising and ethics? Advertising is a persuasive speech technique to persuade and to sell something (an idea, concept, product, service or brand); it uses effective means and strategies of communication and it is primarily engaged to achieve this objective without worrying too much with the way to do it. Therefore, ethical concerns may be seen as an obstruction to this achievement. But there are fallacious, immoral, and unethical or anti-ethical advertisements. As a public speech, advertising messages requires ethical caution, because the ends (the persuasive and commercial achievement) do not justify the means. Advertising should take an ethical dimension, especially when it follows a cunning, fallacious or deceptive strategy. Facing the increasing profusion of epidictic and apodictic messages in contemporary Western societies and industrialized cultures, this chapter focuses on a critical analysis of ethics in such public discourses aiming our consumption, satisfaction, pleasure, comfort, happiness, or social success. Following a reflexive methodology, based on a theoretical research, the main objective of this chapter is to answer the previous question and to understand how rhetorical strategies and techniques are more and more improved and able to develop new visual and popular forms of life, demonstrating the so-called secularization is all about the increase and excess of everything (products, goods, services, brands brought by advertising messages, also in excess) and the fading of ethical concerns and moral principles.