Visual Arguments and Moral Causes in Charity Advertising: Ethical Considerations

Social advertising often employs persuasive imagery in support of a morally laden cause. These visual arguments can take the form of veridical representations of the given situation or the form of purposeful visual blends. Both visual routes to persuasion have serious ethical issues to confront. In what concerns the purportedly veridical images, controversies about picture retouching and framing have cast many doubts on their success in offering unmediated access to a given reality. Editorial interests have proven far too influential on the destiny of what and how is presented to the audience from the amount of visual material available on a topic. Even when the audience is certain that photos are not doctored, the use of veridical images may be seen as unethical. Their disproportionate affective impact may lead the audience to hold biased opinions, since other concerns may be impossible to capture in a vivid picture. Visual blends may be the answer to this problem, employing the fictional or the figurative to help the viewer grasp the moral anatomy of a given situation. Their generous use of figurative meaning may be seen as their strength and their weakness at the same time. It makes them less likely to face accusations of distorting reality, because they do not claim to be windows on reality per se. At the same time, it makes them vulnerable to interpretations that miss their true point – one might appreciate the artistry of a visual metaphor or a visual pun and fail to consider the statement it makes about a given situation. Contemporary philosophical approaches to the place of visuals in moral persuasion inform my analysis of the use of visual arguments in charity-oriented advertising

What is Probable Cause, and Why Should We Care?: The Costs, Benefits, and Meaning of Individualized Suspicion

Taslitz defines probable cause as having four components: one quantitative, one qualitative, one temporal, and one moral. He focuses on the last of these components. Individualized suspicion, the US Supreme Court has suggested, is perhaps the most important of the four components of probable cause. That is a position with which he heartily agree. The other three components each play only a supporting role. But individualized suspicion is the beating heart that gives probable cause its vitality

Self-Referential Optimal Advising When Reactions are Delayed

Like social predictions also advices addressed to the relevant agents may influence their subject and consequently may be liable to self-referentiality effects. It is a well-known phenomenon that decisionmakers tend to delay the execution of a given advice the more the less urgent the underpinning arguments appear to be to them. Particularly, this can be observed in economic and in environmental policy. What should a professional adviser do? It is the purpose of this study to provide an analytical framework in which a professional adviser's objectives are analyzed. Naturally, his first objective is to choose such an advice and such underpinning arguments that the advice really will be taken by the addressed agents (argument justification objective). This is closely related to the problem of the predictability of social events which for the first time has rigorously been analyzed by Grunberg and Modigliani in 1954. The adviser's second objective of being right with his underpinning arguments and his third objective, i.e. his potential self-interest in the ultimate outcome, will be taken into account in this study by means of a subjective utility function. This approach can be seen as complementary to the literature on strategic information transmission and credibility. --delayed reaction function,self-referentiality,argument justification,social reputation