20 Mar autonomous desire and rational choice

Please read the attachment and write according the requirements below. 

Set out Crisps arguments concerning autonomous desire and rational choice which purport to show that repetitive advertising and puffery* are both kinds of advertising which subvert autonomy. Identify any important differences between the cases and explain how they affect his conclusions.

* Dont get confused: Crisp uses this term in an extremely non-standard way.

Explanation

At the beginning of his paper, Crisp says that he will show all forms of a certain common type of advertising are morally wrong[because] they override the autonomy of consumers. He identifies 3 varieties of this type of advertising: subliminal suggestion, puffery, and repetition (end of last full paragraph on p.413). However, thats the last we hear of repetition in the paper.

Sometimes this is fine. Suppose Im arguing that smurfs are awesome. There are a lot of smurfs. It would be tedious to go through them one-by-one (Handy is awesome because. Papa Smurf is awesome because.). The better thing to do is to pick a representative smurf, show why that smurf is awesome, and then argue that those reasons generalize to other smurfs.

But now the game depends on whether the smurf Ive chosen is in fact representative. It might be that the reasons Smurfette is awesome (e.g., her impeccable choice in footwear) dont generalize. Thus the danger of this strategy is that its an easy way to mislead your audience (or yourself!). The argument might only work for the one example and not translate to the others.

Analogously, Crisp implicitly asserts that the reasons puffery is problematic also apply to repetitive advertising. Thus what Im asking you to do is figure out whether his arguments about puffery really do apply to repetitive advertising.

That means you need to, at the very least, (1) explain why he thinks puffery undermines autonomy; and (2) explore whether the same reasoning shows the same thing about repetitive advertising.

You can approach this serially do (1), then do (2). Or you can approach this in parallel do (1) and (2) for the argument about autonomy, then do (1) and (2) for the argument about rational choice. Both approaches can be fine. Personally, I prefer the serial approach; the parallel approach makes it easy to get mixed up about what Im supposed to be discussing. But this is personal preference. Do what works for you.

Other notes

I want you to focus on the arguments concerning autonomous desires and rational choice (pp. 414-15). However, you will want to read the rest of the paper, since some of the things he says later on make it easier to understand his thinking (e.g., the paragraph starting A more convincing account p.416)

As always, the standard for completeness is that someone who hasnt taken the class could read and understand your answer. In this case, since autonomy is a technical term, you cant assume the reader knows what youre talking about. Make sure you give a brief explanation of what autonomy is and why we care about it.