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c) Advertising and Social
Responsibility
17.
Social responsibility is such a broad
concept that we can note here only a few of the many issues and concerns
relevant under this heading to the question of advertising.
The ecological issue is one. Advertising
that fosters a lavish life style which wastes resources and despoils the
environment offends against important ecological concerns. "In his desire
to have and to enjoy rather than to be and grow, man consumes the resources of
the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way. ... Man thinks
that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to
his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given
purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray."29
As this suggests, something more fundamental
is at issue here: authentic and integral human development. Advertising that
reduces human progress to acquiring material goods and cultivating a lavish
life style expresses a false, destructive vision of the human person harmful to
individuals and society alike.
When people fail to practice "a rigorous
respect for the moral, cultural and spiritual requirements, based on the
dignity of the person and on the proper identity of each community, beginning
with the family and religious societies," then even material abundance and
the conveniences that technology makes available "will prove unsatisfying
and in the end contemptible."30 Advertisers, like people engaged in other
forms of social communication, have a serious duty to express and foster an
authentic vision of human development in its material, cultural and spiritual
dimensions.31 Communication that meets this standard is, among other things, a
true expression of solidarity. Indeed, the two things — communication and
solidarity — are inseparable, because, as the Catechism of the Catholic
Church points out, solidarity is "a consequence of genuine and right
communication and the free circulation of ideas that further knowledge and
respect for others."32
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