Final Exam

The final exam is at 4:50 p.m. on Monday, December 15th. It's in our normal classroom.

The Car That Gives You That Warm Feeling

Here are some links about consumer safety and the Pinto:

• So what exactly was dangerous about the Pinto?
• Here's a law review article debunking some of the misconceptions about the Pinto court case.
• Here's the full version of the 1977 Mother Jones investigative report on the Pinto that we read for class.
• Ralph Nader came up a few times in this section of our textbook. He first became known for his consumer safety advocacy and his book on car safety.
  
• Is it inappropriate to put a dollar amount on the value of life? Well, it's been done for a while, there's a whole field devoted to it, and it turns out that the amount varies from job to job and industry to industry.
  
• There are still some Pinto enthusiasts out there.
  

Finally, here are some videos. First, here's an actual Pinto bursting into flames after a rear-end collision:

Second, here's a fictional version of an exploding Pinto from the comedy Top Secret!:

Intellectual Honesty

An important claim I make in class is that, although it has many benefits, advertising is a fundamentally intellectually dishonest medium. So here's a little rant on the topic of intellectual honesty to help explain what I mean.

A simple goal of this class is to get us all to recognize what counts as good evidence and what counts as bad evidence for a claim. I think we're getting better at that. But it's not clear that we're caring about the difference once we figure it out.

Getting us to care is the real goal of this class. We should care about good evidence. We should care about it because it's what gets us closer to the truth. When we judge an argument to be overall good, THE POWER OF LOGIC COMPELS US to believe the conclusion. If someone likes an arg, but still stubbornly disagrees with its conclusion, she is just being irrational.

This means we should be open-minded. We should be willing to let new evidence change our current beliefs. We should be open to the possibility that we might be wrong. This is how Todd Glass puts it:


Admitting when we're wrong, or simply ignorant, is a very important step in intellectual honesty. Here's an excerpt from a podcast I listen to called Jordan, Jesse GO! about owning our ignorance:


Here are the first two paragraphs of a great article I just read on this:

Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."

I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.

Ironically, having extreme confidence in oneself is often a sign of ignorance. In many cases, such stubborn certainty is unwarranted.

After These Sponsors...

Here are some links on advertising ethics.

• The first is about the underlying intellectual dishonesty in even the most honest of ad campaigns.
  
• By the way, if you're into advertising, that entire blog is great. I'm a bit biased, though, since I used to work with the guy who writes it.
• Here's a radio interview with the director of FactCheck.org, a great website devoted to debunking claims in political ads.
• I also used to work with the guy who interviewed FactCheck's director. Yup, I'm a pretty big deal.

Finally, here's a recent Saturday Night Live skit on the distortions of political ads:

Extra Credit: Mom's Clippings

Since I started teaching business ethics, my mom has sent me a bunch of articles that she thinks would be helpful for the class. So I thought I'd use her gifts to create an optional extra credit assignment, due at the beginning of class on Wednesday, December 10th.

Below are links to these articles. (As you can see, she reads a lot of Newsweek.) The assignment is to write a short (about one-page) response to one of these articles. The response should include the following:

• A brief summary of the article (no more than a paragraph).
  
• An explanation of your opinion regarding the ethical issue the article brings up.
• A defense of your opinion. Support your opinion with good reasons!
  

The response doesn't have to be typed. You won't be graded on your opinion. You'll be graded on how well you DEFEND your opinion. This assignment is worth up to 25 points.

Mom's Clippings
-How Much Privacy Do You Have at Work? (Newsweek)
-Humane Fast Food? (Newsweek)
-Salmon Fishing Crash (Newsweek)
-The Business Behind Niagara Falls (Newsweek)
-The Financial Crisis Disproves Libertarianism (Slate)
-The Invisible Hand Still Works (Newsweek)
-David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster (Gourmet)
-Nudge: Government Paternalism (Chronicle of Higher Education)
-You Don't Deserve Your Salary (San Francisco Chronicle)
-How Obvious Was Enron? (New Yorker)
-Free Market for Organ Donations? (New York Times Magazine)
-Company Rewards Workers... with Its Profit! (MSNBC)