Passive Dishonesty

Misleading the customer or client in a passive way. Marking products in a supermarket with signs that appear to be associated with the product in the vicinity, but are not. People associate proximity and words wrongly in a predictable way thus a dishonest merchant can take advantage of the buyers confusion and impulse to just grasp the merchandise to make a profit. Merchants do not always view such practices as unethical. First they see deceiving customers in this way as a customary practice that has existed for thousands of years. What they do comes under the category of customary ethics. Second, they view buying and selling in terms of tooth and claw darwinian terms or enlighten darwinian terms. Either way human folly and incompetence cannot be outlawed. This means many see a learning curve to buying and selling. Business transactions can be very complex. It takes decades of learning to buy houses for example, to avoid bad deals, bad contractual concessions and a host of other pitfalls and danger that can only be learned with time. Diluting good fruit with bad in a supermarket may legitimately require some deception. A farmer sellers bad fruit to a wholesaler who sells it to a distributor who then sells it to a supermarket. If the supermarket makes every effort to buy good fruit one cannot easily expect them to throw out marginal fruit. Some shoppers really do not care others have sensitive and refined tastes.

When a merchant promotes a product with the word "free" making the buyer to believe they are getting something for nothing, they are appealing to human greed. Here, the buyer shares some of the blame. By the time a person is an adult they should know that rarely anything is free. They should have some idea that low prices may be low because the product or service is shoddy or the warranty covers little. So in addition to greed there is a very real demand on shoppers to think about what they are buying and compare prices. In a modern era of many educated people it is interesting to watch people let promotions and advertising do their thinking. Consumer ignorance only tempts merchants to entice people who should know better with deceptions. So the study of ethics in this area can be very complex. So the question victims of soft deception should be asking "did they learn anything being cheated?" If they learned something such knowledge "inoculates" them in the future from being exploited in very expensive ways when they buy a car or a house. So, soft deception as a culturally acceptable method of doing business is ethically wrong but it does great good in teaching people to be wise shoppers. This is essentially the Enlighten Darwinian philosophy espouses. At some point people must be self reliant and take responsibility for their lives. Very successful and wealthy business people for the most part developed an alertness to the business environment that allowed them to succeed where others failed. Thus, there arises in their thinking a political philosophy that there are limits to government regulation.

• Leading the Client to False Expectations
• Deception
• Eristic