"Rhetorical Analysis of a Corporate Website: Philip Morris, Ethos, and Ethics"

Effectiveness, Ethics, Argument

After reading the website, I believe smoking would remain appealing to those who are already hooked. An anti-smoking campaign created by a company whose livelihood depends on the purchase of cigarettes is quite a paradox. Back when the tobacco companies were using cartoon characters for their cigarette advertisements, they demonstrated Gorgias’s willingness to employ any means possible to get to the desired end. In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates comes to realize over the course of their dialogue that Gorgias believes, “There is no need to know the truth of the actual matter, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.” With the government’s MSA in effect, Philip Morris has taken a turn towards Socrates’s and Plato’s idealistic, more truthful views: the prescriptive “ought.” This is to say that they use an optimistic tone and depict positive situations of what a smoker ought to do: quit smoking. Socrates and Plato still probably would not agree with Philip Morris’ example of ‘digital culture’. According to Connors, “The enemy for both Socrates and the younger Plato, was the authoritarianism of one-way discourse, whether poetic or rhetorical” (104). One can understand why they would feel so bitter towards this rhetoric after analyzing how contradictory hidden and blatant appeals are scattered throughout the entire website with no chance for the audience to ask questions about the company’s ultimate purpose.

Aristotle described three types of oratory for rhetorical situations such as the one at hand: political, forensic, and ceremonial. In Rhetoric, they are each defined as such,

The political orator is concerned with the future: It is about things to be done hereafter that he advises for or against. The party in a case at law is concerned with the past…The ceremonial orator is, properly speaking, concerned with the present, since all men praise or blame in view of the state of things existing at the time, though they often find it useful also to recall the past and to make guesses at the future.

Each type of oratory has its own and distinct end in view. Philip Morris mostly takes the form of the political orator because they are urging us to take some sort of action: to smoke or not to smoke.

According to Rhetoric by Aristotle, “The political orator aims at establishing the expediency or the harmfulness of a proposed course of action; if he urges its rejection, he does so on the ground that it will do good; if he urges its rejection, he does so on the ground that it will do harm…”. By this standard, the Philip Morris company is outwardly being ethical to the community because they are technically giving fair warning about the harmfulness of their products. However, the site could still be viewed as unethical for being less than completely persuasive as the site tries to discourage smoking. Selling tobacco products that might give a customer cancer could be considered comparable to McDonald’s selling junk food that can make Americans obese and ultimately ill with heart disease. The one difference between the two that could make Philip Morris’s business seem unethical is the addictive substance, nicotine, they put into their products to keep consumers coming back for more. In times of economic hardship, a habit like smoking can become very costly. With no addictive properties, many people may just give it up and spend the money on more practical necessities. In order to divert from the topic of addictive substances, large blocks of text (like in the “Ingredients” section as mentioned earlier) are utilized so that readers will skim through or skip over them. This is an example of how new technology affects both a writer’s articulation and a reader’s comprehension. Philip Morris probably loses a majority of readers at the long sections focused around the negative aspects of tobacco because they are not easily scannable. Kathleen Welch discusses in Electric Rhetoric that new technology alters communication so that the images on the site become as important as the words (if not more), and the difficult navigation of the site limits the amount and quality of information a reader receives. These elements of website communication allow Philip Morris to emphasize and articulate some ideas much more than others. Very few readers are willing to read every line of a webpage, especially when it’s presented to them through an unappealing format. Therefore, most readers never receive the full message about the risks of smoking.

The issue of expediency comes into play here because obscuring negative information in long blocks of text and hard-to-find pages, though ethically dubious, is extremely important for the company’s survival and growth. Philip Morris is a very expedient business, in that they seem to care most about what is advantageous to them. It is in no way beneficial for them to explain all the benefits of quitting or to explain that quitting completely is a realistic goal because their business relies on the purchase of tobacco products. Therefore, the presentation of that information is not as clear and concise as it could be. The employees at Philip Morris cannot possibly want everyone in the world to stop smoking unless they also want to lose their jobs. 

Stephen Katz notes in “The Ethics of Expediency”, “For Aristotle – at least in his discussion of deliberative rhetoric – there seems to be no distinction between ‘practical wisdom’ and ‘moral virtue’, between expediency and the good, as long as rhetoric serves its end, that is, expediency is the necessary good that subsumes all other goods, and becomes the basis of virtue itself” (191). As the passage suggests, for some, expediency seems ethical because what is advantageous and what is ethically right may be regarded as one in the same. Perhaps Philip Morris believes that it is ethical to have multiple messages for multiple audiences, including one that supports smoking. If someone wants to smoke, Philip Morris asserts that the individual should have the right to make that decision. They also may come to believe they are ethically right based on how long they have been around the company and how much practice, or praxis as Aristotle would call that type of expert knowledge, they have in selling tobacco. Sometimes, expediency, ethical concerns, as well as personal beliefs can all be blurred together to create appropriate corporate mentality.