Tobacco, Aristotle and Star Wars
A dive into 'Industry Documents' made public by UCSF
This last point, a brutally realistic one, implies that, with a general lengthening of the expectation of life we really need something for people to die of. In substitution for the effects of war, poverty and starvation, cancer, as the disease of the rich, developed countries, may have some predestined part to play. The argument is obviously not one that the tobacco industry could use publicly. But its weight, as a psychological factor in perpetuating people’s taste for smoking as an enjoyable if risky habit, should not be under-estimated.
—‘A Public Relations Strategy for the Tobacco Advisory Council Appraisal and Proposals Prepared by Campbell-Johnson Ltd’, 1978. This document is available at https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/#id=ngdl0201, page 5.
I was once told by a friend of my parents that there are two views of politics: Aristotle and Star Wars. The Aristotle view is that political disagreements are about different ways of solving shared problems, and that disagreement is a matter of method, rather than about fundamental rightness or wrongness. The Star Wars view is that there is a good side and a bad side—the light and the dark.
This view seems very nuanced and grown up, but after a few moments of interrogation it proves to be wrong. There are clearly so many cases in politics where the two (or more) sides do not agree on what the problem is in the first place. We would not agree that the economic problem in 1920s-1940s Germany lay with an insufficiently vigorous embrace of racist eugenics, and that we simply feel the National Socialists went about it with the wrong frame of mind. There is no common ground to be found with the National Socialists on worldview or ‘problem-diagnosis’.
Indeed, that is also an example where there was a right and a wrong side of politics. We should not leap to this conclusion in all instances. We should, I think, act initially with the charity of this supposedly Aristotelian position, and assume people are acting in good faith. Unfortunately, in the world, not everyone acts in good faith. Sometimes people are working with sets of ideas that are inimical to human rights. For example, they might ‘sincerely believe’ that women do not deserve agency or identities, education or bodily rights. They might ‘sincerely believe’ that a neighbouring country is not a country but a confused province that needs to be brought back into the fold through violence.
When beliefs are morally reprehensible, their ‘sincerity’ doesn’t make them any better. It makes them worse. But morally reprehensible beliefs are not the only thing that gets human beings to act in dangerously immoral ways.
Sometimes incentive structures, indoctrination, and beaurocracy can slowly push individuals into acting in ways that are clearly unethical to an outsider, but they have been slowly inured to what they are doing (something like Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ hypothesis). Sometimes, humans might not need much pushing: the weight of self-interest is so strong that people will, in the words of Nike, ‘just do it’.
Here I return to the ‘Truth Tobacco Industry Document’ quotation I began with. The many, many (14 million files) that are held by the University of California, San Francisco archive and accessible to the public are special records in history. They are special for the specific information they contain about the marketing of tobacco for several decades. But they are also special as moral insights into the behaviour of people.
What is particularly notable about the files is that most of them were never intended to be circulated to the public. The documents, therefore, show us what the industry was saying to itself during a protracted crisis. The authors of each document, generally, did not think the critical eye of the public would ever be cast over their work. They were internal memoranda and guidance notes from public relations companies, scientists, and others, asking the question: how do we deal with the idea that tobacco is harmful?
At times, the documents seem to be at least consistent with the industry’s public approach. That approach was to confuse the public as much as possible, to deny evidence, to suggest that it was not compelling. Thus we find at many points aggressively argued passages where the tobacco lobby was clearly ‘drinking its own kool-aid’, trying to reassure itself that maybe it wasn’t so bad. Those passages are quite interesting.
What is more interesting is the passages where the terrible truth about tobacco smoke seems to be admitted by the very tobacco merchants themselves. Thus, the “brutally realistic” point made in the quotation above. Struggling to find any morally sustainable reason to promote cigarettes, they arrive at the conclusion that maybe their positive role is to kill people. Yes: that is really what the quotation is saying. No amount of context can change the fact that the author really is likening to their product to “war, poverty and starvation”. The author therefore reached a level of motivated reasoning so powerful that they thought they should commit this sentiment to the page. Perhaps death is a good thing. Perhaps “war, poverty and starvation” are necessary elements (they do not even try to explain why) to keep things going in some beautiful “predestined” order.
Immediately after writing this down, some level of perspective seems to have returned to teh author of this industry document. They admit “this argument is obviously not one that the tobacco industry could use publicly.” For me, this is one of the most striking parts of this paragraph. At this moment, the author is aware that what they are saying is — like the cigarrettes themselves — unfit for human consumption. It cannot be said out loud. It cannot be admitted. It can only be written under the cover of corporate confidentiality.
Once someone admits that what they are saying must be confidential, it often means that they shouldn’t be saying it at all. This is clearly one of those instances. Yet, again, to borrow the slogan, they ‘just did it’. The apocalyptic nature of the reasoning (the ‘predestined’ aspect is very Calvinist in some way) echoes the apocalypse the industry was facing. They were desperate.
Unfortunately, the industry still exists. An industry with no good justification, riddled with nihilism and confusion, kept going. Part of the way they did this was to go even lower than we might expect. They targeted children, explicitly, in their own documentation. One report reads:
It is important to know as much as possible about teenage smoking patterns and attitudes. Today’s teenage is tomorrow’s potential regular customer, and the overwhelming majority of smokers first begin to smoke while still in their teens. In addition to the ten years following the teenage years is the period during which average daily consumption per smoker increases to the adult level. The smoking patterns of teenagers are particularly important to Philip Morris […] (Philip Morris USA Research Center, 1981 https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/#id=lrvf0021 )
The line “are we the bad guys?” should be ringing in your ears. Even if the lethality of smoking was unclear at this point (which it definitely wasn’t), any person acting in good conscience should have resigned on sight of these lines. The specific targeting of children to addict them at an early point, which is what they are euphemistically referring to, is appalling.
Back to Aristotle and Star Wars, how can these documents be read charitably? They cannot. When it is no longer possible to have a charitable reading of something, what we are dealing with is bad-faith action, unambiguously unethical action. Bad behaviour. Sometimes in life, an adversary is simply acting badly because of bad ideas or bad incentives. It can be that simple, though it is not always that simple.
We should wait until we see good evidence for bad faith before jumping to conclusions. However, many of the documents referred to above are only available because the companies holding them were legally forced to make them public, years after the fact. When we do not have the evidence to say someone is wilfully acting in malign ways, we should approach them with just a little cynicism: all humans act in accordance with their own interests.
Wish this could be a newspaper article or at least on Facebook as a "share.," so more people could read the UCSF documents. What a travesty.