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What is a Brand A Philosophical Definition. Are People Brands?
June 1, 2010 Leave a Comment Edit This
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This article was written with the assistance of Dr. Sidney J. Levy (University of Arizona). The article was written for a senior-year philosophy class at the University of Lethbridge (Lethbridge, Alberta).
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NO BRAND IS AN ISLAND:
A Philosophical Investigation of Brands as Persons and Persons as Brands
Philosophy 3990: Brands and Persons
University of Lethbridge
Submitted by: David Howse
Submitted to: Ardis Anderson
August 17, 2008
Contents
INTRODUCTION.. 1
Defining Brand.. 2
PERSONS IN A STATE OF NATURE AND IN A COMMONWEALTH.. 6
NIETZSCHE AND THE PERSON.. 9
HOBBES, NIETZSCHE, AND GAME THEORY.. 10
The Necessary and Sufficient Definition of a Person - A Reductionist Challenge 15
THE BRAND AS A PERSON.. 19
IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH.. 19
APPENDIX 1 Conversation with Sidney J. Levy (Apr-Jun 2008) 20
Levy, June 9. 20
Howse, June 8. 21
Levy, April 28. 23
APPENDIX 2 Conversation with Sidney J. Levy (Aug 2008) 23
Levy, August 13. 23
Levy, August 12. 24
INTRODUCTION
Through argument, it can be demonstrated that a Person is a brand. This is not the say that the flesh covered sack of bones that we refer to as Human is a brand, but the identity called Person, is, categorically a brand. Though, to call a Human a brand would be a very simple argument and would read; if a brand is anything used to make a physical or psychological impression on something else then, we can easily say that knuckle prints on someone's face is the brand of the human delivering the punch. If some thing can brand then that thing is a brand by virtue of its branding capacity. Therefore, a human is a brand. The word 'brand' is derived from the old Saxon/Norse/French word for sword.[1]" The fist brand (from the example above) is no different in means of branding than a brand on the back side of a cow. In my argument, I will explore the Person, as distinct from the Human, as a brand and, a more difficult argument, the Brand as a Person.
In making broad analogies between the age-old question, Who and what am I, who and what are we?" and the seemingly recent question, What is a brand, am I and are we brands?" it is important to lay the context of such questions before making observations and creating arguments to a conclusion that may lack relevance. Through the exploration of the Person and branding, issues of morality and ethics arise. Particularly, issues of moral judgments regarding a proper definition of a person occur, in this paper, as well as the issue of whether that definition means more respect ought to be given to persons in light of modern marketing practices. For the purpose of objectivity, Nietzsche and Hobbes will be used to make arguments suggesting that humans brand things as a form of [url=http://www.par5club.com/louboutin.php]louboutin pas cher[/url] domination or control (respectively), while Rawls and Game Theory will be used to argue that brands enable justice and provide the ability to increase collective dividends (respectively). What is interesting is that the ideas of Nietzsche, Hobbes, Rawls, and those of Game Theory are so tightly intertwined that, on their own, no one perspective provides an adequate foundation for understanding the relationship between the Person and the Brand but, when woven, these four camps provide a reasonably acceptable analysis of such a relationship.
This paper is both a philosophy paper and a marketing paper. It is my belief that a sufficient overlap of conceptualization occurs to understanding each discipline. The core difference in philosophy and marketing is that philosophy, by practice, is an exploration of what is true while marketing is a practice of wielding the context of truths for a predetermined ends. Thus, the more knowledgeable one is in matters of philosophy, the more knowledgeable one could be in matters of marketing. A paradox, much like that of the Philosopher King, may develop out of such exploration; the pursuit of the perfect lie (an undetectable form of rhetoric that is the ultimate goal of marketing) requires one to pursue the absolute truth. If one did find the absolute truth, could he or she turn his or her back on the truth to then develop the perfect lie?
Defining Brand
A necessary clarification on marketing definitions is that such definitions are often both banal and benign. The problem with marketing definitions stems from the systemic use of rhetoric from the fathers" of modern marketing. A case in point would be what David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising offers as a definition/perspective of the customer." Ogilvy stated, the customer is not an idiot, she is your mother."[2] Logically, Ogilvy's statement quickly falls apart with the following argument. Idiot is a measure of IQ, is the barbarian north of Ancient Greece, or is the colloquial expression used to describe someone acting foolishly. A mother is a female that gives birth to a child. A customer is a consumer. There is no condition that says a stupid female that gives birth to a child cannot also be a consumer. Therefore, some customers are idiots and therefore, Ogilvy is wrong.
It would follow that if the father of modern advertising is wrong about that which he is an expert then the fathers of other marketing vehicles can be equally wrong about their areas of specialty. Even if Ogilvy meant something other than his logical inconsistency (there really is no doubt that Ogilvy was using hyperbole), if a student's education was built on or was made up of significant amount of over statements then it [url=http://www.crazy-diamond.it]woolrich outlet[/url] would seem reasonable that the truth of what matters could be lost. Often, in my experience, the hyperbole of great men is rarely challenged, the hyperbole moves on to become conventional wisdom, and once exalted, the lie becomes a truth. This paper is [url=http://www.batfriendtrust.it]scarpe hogan[/url] not about advertising (brand education on a mass scale) but advertising itself is often about turning fiction into fact and marketers ought not to promote hyperbole among themselves.
It should be noted that the corpus of marketing is littered with such nonsense. Also, consider the means by which most students learn marketing, the simplistic four Ps of product, price, place, promotion. It is fairly probably that the 4P's became popular because they were a simple way to look at marketing for college students. And now, many students have been indoctrinated that it is difficult to break free of the cycle of unimaginative marketing academia[3]. It is important then, to define Brand and Branding in a thorough yet simple view, based more on philosophical argument and less on the rhetoric that has been built around marketing terminology.
The concept of a Brand is nothing new, Vesuvinum" wine jars found at Pompeii (C.E. 79), are considered, by some, to be the first commercial brand[4]; though, as Sidney J. Levy asked, but did they [the Romans] have a concept?[5]" Such a question is significant in modern commercial terms as the sophistication of marketing has evolved such that improper branding, brands without a strategic plan or concept," often fails to capture the consumer's mind leading to the death of that particular brand. Levy's comments continue with a historical observation.
There was life before the Romans: The origin of branding livestock dates from 2700 B.C. Paintings in Egyptian tombs document branding oxen with hieroglyphics. Ancient Greeks and Romans marked livestock and slaves with a hot iron. Hernando Cortez introduced branding from Spain to the New World in 1541. He brought cattle stamped with his mark of three crosses. There has never been anything to take the place of a visible brand as a permanent definitive mark of ownership and deterrent to theft. Livestock people say a brand's something that won't come off in the wash."[6]
In popular terms, brands are both abstract and concrete marketing devices. Brands are made concrete by a logo design such as the Nike Swoosh symbol or Catholicism's Crucifix, trade names, packaging, product or service design, an auditory cue such as McDonald's I'm Love'n It" or the Hindu mantra Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare." Brands are abstract in that Brand Identity comes from human like abstracts such as love or trust[7]. With a brand identity, a brand seeks to elicit a favorable emotional response from those that come in contact with the brand. Brands have been variously described as 'trustmarks,' 'lovemarks' and even in the words of our friend, branding guru extraordinaire Scott Bedburry, 'the result of a synaptic process in the brain.'"[8] Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker, whose observations will be discussed later in more detail, offer a holistic view of brands that start with the terms myth, brand, and story being synonyms. Mathews and Wacker suggest that branding is an infusion of a story into a product. Those stories transcend the product to emotionally move people, businesses use stories to launch brands and enhance existing brands[9]. Brands, when viewed as synonymous with myths and stories, create a feedback loop building on personal identity. Mathews and Wacker use Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's relationship of stories and people where Achebe states, People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories."[10] Mathews and Wacker move from anthropology to psychoanalytics extracting the following paraphrase from Jung; A myth is a public dream, and a dream is a private myth[11].
The goal of the brand is to direct behavior that favors the owner of the brand. But people do not buy brands, they buy categories[12]. For example, when a person buys a Mercedes-Benz, that person is making a purchase for luxury. The Mercedes Benz brand is only a symbol of luxury[13]. Thus, it is the duty of the brand manager (among others) to position the brand's perception in the consumer's mind to capture the emotional or utilitarian evocations for the desired category. Therefore, a brand is a bridge between the product and the desires of the mind. The brand is born from the producer's mind, transferred to the product, and rooted in the consumer's mind. Though, as this argument will demonstrate, brands tend to become independent of their owner and brand ownership by any person tends to become an illusion, hence the necessity of the institution of brand management. As laid out in Culture Code, psychoanalyst Clotaire Rapaile likens branding to military institutions where a person's interaction with a brand is analogous to purchasing a military rank[14], or stripes" to heighten or validate his or her position in a society[15][16]. From a psycho-analytic point-of-view, a brand has one general function, to give its users stripes" but, in order to perform that function, the brand has to overcome one hurdle, satisfying our cortex[17]. The cortex hurdle, is one regarding utility. In purchasing a $50,000 automobile over a $30,000, a component of the difference in purchasing decision is not based entirely on glory.[18] It would seem quite reasonable that $20,000 saved on an automobile could be used in an even greater form of conspicuous consumption i.e. $20,000 wheels for a $30,000 automobile. As an example, Rapaile suggests that, [a] Volvo, a safari vacation, and a large donation to the NEA send a message very different from that sent by a Suburban, a week at a stock-car-racing fantasy camp, and a big check to the NRA.[19]" It is important to note that much of Rapaille's view on desire and human response to products [url=http://www.davidhabchy.com]barbour outlet[/url] originates in the human brain stem in an area he calls the reptilian hot button.[20][21]" In Symbolism and Life Style," which was written in 1963, Levy wrote
If we think of a housewife who uses Crosse and Blackwell soups, subscribes to Gourmet magazine, flies live lobster in from Maine to Chicago to serve guests, drives a Renault, and doesn't shave under her arms, we sense a value system engaged in choosing things from the marketplace that add up to a life style quite different from that of the woman who uses Campbell's, reads Family Circle for ideas on how to furnish a playroom, makes meat loaf twice a week (stretching it with oatmeal), rides in her husband's Bel Air, and scrubs the kitchen floor three times a week."
Opinions of both both Rapaille and Levy bridge 43 years of brand analysis where there is a remarkable agreement on brand interaction among persons. Levy, much like Rapaile, views a brand as:
a sign of aggression, indicating conquest or ownership. Then it [the brand] may become self-inflicted as a badge or acceptance of submission to membership in a gang or group or cause, distinguished from others and even a sign of merit or honor. "[22]
In addition to the view of a brand as a group identifier, Levy broadens the definition of a brand as:
Everything that is named is somehow being branded. So, in a fundamental sense the name of anything is its brand to begin with even though conventional usage says it is a commodity. But it, whatever it is, is branded to be recognized at all. So we have degrees of brandinganimal, vegetable, or mineral, for example, as first degree branding. Second degree says it is a fish, third degree says it is a salmon, fourth degree says it is Norwegian salmon, and fifth degree says it is King Oscar salmon."[23]
Branding, according to Levy, can be considered to date back to the dawn on man's own self-awareness. First-order branding, the classification of animal, vegetable, mineral leads us to the question, if animal, vegetable, mineral existed before man then, is it man who defines the concept Brand or did Brand exist before man? Such a question will be examined in a discussion regarding meta-physical issues of man and brand. In this paper, I will broaden the definition further though an argument that allows a bull to brand a mountain lion and how, through game theoretic demonstrations, a basic distinction between the mental processes of humans and other animals is distinction enough (where higher-order reasoning is [url=http://www.orlando-apts.com/cheapnfljerseys/]nfl jerseys[/url] the sufficient definition of a Person and higher-order reasoning is defined as rationality and recognition of the rationality of others in a sufficient manner to measure the value of collective dividends) to demonstrate that complex branding is what makes a thing a Person.
Therefore, and in light of the psychological nature of the brand, a brand may act as an implanted short-cut algorithm that expedites behavior. The brand may best be viewed as a blueprint for neurolinguistic programming, but, in and of itself, any brand (either residing in a creatures mind or having the potential to reside in a creatures mind) is only one of many brands in existence. All brands either compete or, as game theoretics will demonstrate, become additive to create more complex or efficient set of algorithms. The result of brand competition may be labeled the Darwinian Fitness of Brands", and may cause branding dilemmas, which may be analogous to moral dilemmas. Very little research has been carried out on brand interactivity at the synaptic level. For now, branding theory by Ockham's Razzor may be the most prudent view. And the most simplistic view of a brand, the one used for this paper, will be defined as: A brand either currently affects or has the capacity to affect the neural path (presently functioning or has the ability to become functional and therefore implanted or implantable) in some measurable way (Rapaille). A brand is the recognition of ANY THING that can be classified and the closer the brand is to oneself, such as one`s mother or one`s child, the better we identify with that particular brand (Levy). Placement strategies (the context) of the brand, that is, where and when stories are told, are critical in our interpretation of the brand (Mathews and Wacker).
PERSONS IN A STATE OF NATURE AND IN A COMMONWEALTH
I like to think that I am a person. And if you are reading this, then I might consider you to be a person as well. Likewise, the reverse should also be true. By writing this paper and possibly without even meeting me, you might also consider me to be a person. But why [url=http://www.riad-marrakesh.fr]abercrombie pas cher[/url] should there be a mutual recognition of personhood? As a newborn, I highly doubt I thought of my mother as a person, though she might have thought of me as one. For an infant, sleeping in his mother's arms may just be the best alternative of all possible options as babies tend to like soft warm places. If we remove the baby and replace it with a newly-hatched duck, the imprinted duck might think it is a person but my mother may not reciprocate those feelings. At face value, there seems to be an inequality of the judgment of personhood. A baby human might not consider itself to be a person while the baby duck might yet, my mother will disregard my lack of say in the matter and equally disregard the duck's quite vocal say in the matter. Even if all that either newly formed life wanted was food and comfort, the recognition of personal identity appears to be reserved based on something other than basic desires, such as in this example, food and comfort for me, and food, comfort, and acceptance as a person for the duck (anthropomorphism aside, this is hypothetical after all).
Imprinting is another word for branding and, as with the infant and duck example, there seems to be a boot-strapping problem. For my mother too was once an infant. So, at some time, there had to have either been a first person from whom a spontaneous conscious concept of personal-identity derived, though, such a conjecture does not solve the bootstrap unless we consider divine law which has bootstrapping problems of its own. Or, a more plausible theory to the origin of personal identity is a theory of a gradual progression, possibly in rational development where, at some point, we hit a toggle point that sufficiently enabled us to reason the need of a category called Person. This gradual progression may even have been one of accumulated knowledge that lead us toward recognizing the category of Person or the a priori of an awareness of personal identity, and probably equally important, we became deeply cognizant of the significance of this personal identity.
From the polemic of my hypothetical infancy, some challenges have to be addressed to help us decide if a person is a brand and if a brand is a person. One challenge to the consideration of Persons as Brands and Brands as Persons is a view that a condition of personhood is the responsibility to which one is held for his actions. If a person-candidate or a brand cannot be held responsible for his (its) actions then whatever it is to be considered a Person is not a Person. To simplify this first challenge, consider this argument; if I am a person and you are a person then there must me some level of equality for each of us to hold the same label. If we are equal at some significant level then any action that I take can, in a moral sense, also be taken by you. If I slap you for no justifiable reason, then your response in kind ought not be met with moral outrage by me. On the contrary, and returning to my polemic, if a bee came near me while I slept in my mother's arms, I am sure my mother would either move or if the option was reasonably safe, she would kill the bee. If she failed to kill the bee and the bee subsequently either stung me or her, a can of Raid would probably come out and, if she found the hive, my father would be dispatched to destroy that too. Such reactions are often reserved in human-non human interactions (games), where the responsibility as measured by proportionality is rarely considered. Responsibility, in the case of human-human games is a much more complex matter. A question that must be asked of such a statement is, what is responsibility? If responsibility is merely a reaction to an action then it would follow that a cat walking in front of a dog is responsible and thus the dog chases the cat. For some, humans deserve greater consideration than that of cats and dogs because humans are considered to be intrinsically moral creatures. If we consider humans as intrinsically moral creatures, it would be reasonable for us to also consider a world where no person need be responsible to another person for his or her actions or to consider a world where morality is not a spiritual, religious, or intrinsic human quality (where morals are simple survival instincts). Such a consideration may be necessary as without night it would be difficult to know day and therefore, to understand intrinsic morality we might have to understand a world without intrinsic morality. If humans are intrinsically moral or intrinsically responsible to one another then it would seem rational that through such conditions a Society (as a collection of humans with sufficiently similar levels of morality or intrinsic responsibility) would form. But, if Society is a social construct based on fear and fictions (stories that create illusions of personal identity) then there is no such thing as Society as we might think it, for a society based on fear and fiction would not be much different than Hobbes' state of nature. Society (as a collection of humans with sufficiently similar levels of morality or intrinsic responsibility), as follows from Hobbes' Equality Condition of The Leviathan, is a consequence of fear where Hobbes states,
Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe."[24]
It would follow that in the state of nature, no man can be held responsible to another man for his actions; for to be responsible to another man, the initiator of an action must submit to the will of the man he acted upon. If both men are equal to kill one another then responsibility between men is not the measure for their actions but more so, the responsibility of one man for his own actions that would make a man submit to another man. Thus, fear of the consequences of his actions is what makes a man responsible. Yet, the would-be recipient of the action would have the same fear. Therefore, no man is responsible to another of his actions but actions may be guided by fear this is no different than the fear a cat has for a dog. Cats do not hold dogs responsible, cats merely run from dogs. Man, therefore, is responsible only to himself. If a man acknowledges that another may destroy him and vice versa, then a rational man would be prudent to enter into a contract that provides further protection to the rational man's life. The contract is not based so much on not killing but on not being killed. These men then bargain with a mutually agreed upon sovereign to enforce the contract.
If, for those that consider a man willing to exist within a society (as distinct from a solitary savage beast) as the only man eligible to be considered a person, that is, the man who enters in to a civil contract that offers mutual protection, then those who exist in societies are persons and those (solitary savage beasts) not willing to enter in to a civil contract are not persons for they are not willing to address mutual responsibility. But, if it so happened that the men of the confederacy ARE Persons, then it can be argued that once the pre-confederacy thought and rationale took place in a non-Person's mind, that a confederacy should take place, then, upon those thoughts, that non-Person would then, be a Person because he is addressing responsibility by asking to be held responsible (to recognize that he is only one Person of many persons) but the confederacy has yet to be formed. In fact, the confederacy in incapable of being formed because a condition of a confederacy is the contract and if two rational men are not within sufficient proximity to enter into a contract, the thought of a confederacy may exist but not the actual confederacy. Therefore, when considering Hobbes' state-of-nature, to say that responsibility is a necessary condition of personhood is problematic. Not only does responsibility require that at least two men in reasonable proximity with whom to offer each other mutual responsibility (to display or demonstrate responsibility) but, without having an opportunity to demonstrate the capacity to be responsible, the capacity to be responsible is still only a conjecture.
But, if two men were responsible to one another and thus are Persons, should one of those Persons die, it is not known if the identity of the man who remained should still be that of a Person. Likewise if, for illustration, you or I become stranded on an island, we too could no longer be persons. Therefore, it should be concluded that it is not overt recognition of even an overt display of responsibility that makes a man a Person. The common denominator of a possible Person either in or not in a state of nature is the rationale to understand responsibility and a recognition of benefits should an opportunity to form a commonwealth arise.
Alternatively, if you find the above argument insufficient to declare responsibility a necessary condition of the Person, consider a reductionist approach to the same problem. If, upon the rationalization of a need for a confederacy (unless of course you prefer a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short then there really is no need for a confederacy), it took ten years and 1,000 undesirable acts against a man to come to the conclusion of a need for a confederacy, it would seem quite plausible that a man one-point" more rational would come to such a conclusion after 999 undesirable acts; and if another man came along who was one-point" more rational that the second man then the conclusion of a need for a confederacy would come after 998 undesirable acts. Such a scenario, if a sufficient number of men were alive, would eventually reduce to one or even zero acts to determine the need for a confederacy. But, even in a confederacy, any man can be subject to one or more undesirable acts. Therefore, there is no detectable (phenomenological) difference between a very rational man existing outside of a confederacy than his slightly less rational counterpart existing inside of a confederacy. Therefore, whoever objects to my argument that responsibility is not a condition of personhood must not be willing to recognize the man who is so rational that he recognizes the need for a commonwealth much earlier than the less rational man. The objector would probably best fit in to a world where de-evolution is d'rigour. Therefore, the rational man is a responsible man. To grant a less rational man the label Person would be immoral" if we were not to offer the same label to the very rational man who could find no other equally rational man with whom to form a commonwealth. In each case, with varying degrees of rationale, both Persons came to the conclusion of the need for a commonwealth. Therefore, the conclusion as before is the same, the common denominator of a possible Person, either in or not in a state of nature, is the rationale to understand responsibility and a recognition of benefits should an opportunity to form a commonwealth arise.
NIETZSCHE AND THE PERSON
According to Nietzsche, a categorical imperative condition of life exists, namely Will to Power. The kind of responsibility shared among persons in a commonwealth may be considered a condition of the weak or cautious and thus the soon dead. For Nietzsche, whether we actually ARE persons or just organic conquerors is a moot point, ALL living things are conquerors. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote,
To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organization). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIETY, it would immediately disclose what it really isnamely, a Will to the DENIAL of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equalit takes place in every healthy aristocracymust itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it LIVES, and because life IS precisely Will to Power."[25]
Responsibility then, in Nietzsche's view, is at best, a strategic maneuver to gain more power. Responsibility is a Moral illusion; for morals are negotiations based on fear or greed. If we take Viminitz's view,[26] that modifies Contractarianism to hold that contracts are not necessarily entered into voluntarily, and join Viminitz to Nietzsche's will to power then we arrive at a new monster. This monster states that, morals come out of an optimization of power which in turn are derived from a series of short cut algorithms applied in a game theoretical framework. Some of these games are Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Grim Trigger. Responsibility (the power of holding a man accountable for his actions) therefore, is only made possible when a man loses the game of chicken, plays a terrible hand of prisoner's dilemma, or in the case of Grim Trigger, stops cooperating with the wrong player. Therefore, further to having sufficient rationale to recognize responsibility, a necessary condition of a Person is one who, if he refuses to be responsible, self-effaces to responsibility because he acknowledges an increase in cooperative dividends for being responsible to his actions. What I mean by this is that not only does it takes a certain level of rationality to recognize the need for responsibility but, it quite probably takes a greater measure of rational to understand that if the state-of-the-art commonwealth is not set up to favor the man who refuses to accept responsibility, if the man who refuses to accept responsibility pretends" to be responsible (in a Machiavellian sense).[27] Such self-effacement would be undetectable. But, because a man is only self-effacing to increase his collective dividends (the label Person" granted by other persons would bring much benefit), the self-effacing man, posses a greater capacity, than do the honestly responsible persons, to defect from any contract should he sense greater dividends for such a defection. But as Nietzsche notes, life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange.[28]" A defector within the confederacy would probably present himself as being strange" and thus would be subject to injury, violence [and] exploitation.[29]" Therefore, using Nietzsche's own argument, to defect from a confederacy has grave consequences. Nietzsche also suggests that organizations" which are confederacies would also seek to destroy other confederacies. But, should several confederacies enter into an agreement, NATO, the UN, etc., those confederacies too would be punished in the same way as the individual defector. Therefore, the rationality of a man, considering Hobbes' equality principal, could not be so great that he could see beyond what a group of men could also see. Therefore, strategically, in either case of Hobbes or Nietzsche, even if a man self-effaces to responsibility to allow himself be considered a person, he would run a great risk to himself by defecting by performing a group adverse action or to claim I am not responsible." With this argument, I will make a very bold statement, not only is:
The common denominator of a possible Person, either in or not in a state of nature, is the rationale to understand responsibility and a recognition of benefits should an opportunity to form a commonwealth arise. But, that once declared a Person, there is no turning back to non-person status.
HOBBES, NIETZSCHE, AND GAME THEORY
Let us consider now, that we are in a commonwealth, though, it is important to remember that it is not a confederacy that defines a man as a person for a person can exist without a confederacy. So far we have only said that a Person is one who possesses the rationale to understand responsibility and recognition of benefits should an opportunity to form a commonwealth arise and that, once declared a Person, there is no turning back to non-person status. Returning to life in a state of nature, men are motivated by fear and the desire for things necessary to commodious living. It is probable that fear alone would be motivation enough for man to seek shelter in a safe place. If the commonwealth is a safe place, and it should be as it has many rational men, an irrational man (the motivated predominantly by fear but without reasonable rationality to understand exactly why the commonwealth has formed) may simply seek shelter there and mimic the natives. Therefore, a commonwealth may possess rational men (Persons) and irrational men who, have been gifted the label Person by virtue of behaving rationally.
When considering The Leviathan, the tyrant is not necessarily a person. The sufficiently rational men (already having identified one another as Persons) of The Leviathan nominate a tyrant (an agreed upon man to enforce the contract). Those men who are insufficiently rational to recognize the need for a commonwealth also exit the state of nature, and thus those men become Persons (if only as a courtesy of the rational men). But, in view of Hobbes' theory, the power of any tyrant is tenuous and thus the status of personhood of some men (namely the irrational man) is equally tenuous. It would follow that the judgement to which some irrational men are considered persons would be directly proportionate to the differential in the power of the tyrant and the power of the irrational man within the commonwealth.
It would also be reasonable to assume that the irrational men of one commonwealth are greater persons than the irrational men of another commonwealth because the tyrants of commonwealths probably have different measures of power to which they can hold their irrational men responsible. But, if there were two such nations, one with a great tyrant and another with a lesser powerful tyrant, then the nation of the greater tyrant would enslave the men of the nation of the weaker tyrant. By virtue of conflicts between commonwealths, Darwinian fitness would allow the strongest tyrants to not only retain their power but to increase it through conquest.
If someone were to challenge Hobbes on his equality principal by stating that the Principal is wrong then I would like the challenger to consider the drunken man versus the irrational man argument. Consider that a drunken man is identical to an irrational man with their respective degrees of rationality. If a powerful man wishes to exploit the commonwealth but refuses to accept responsibility for his actions (to act in a way that is counter to collective dividends) then at some point he will present some form of weakness to the other members of the commonwealth. The powerful man will, at some time, become drunk, sleeps, have sex, or partake in some other form of preoccupation. At the moment of preoccupation, the powerful man can be held responsible, if only through punishment, and thus when he become sober and rational ought to understand to benefits of submitting to the contract of the confederacy. This argument is much like the ability of secret machinations that a man may undertake in Hobbe`s equality principal. So, for the challenger, drunkenness is a condition of personhood. This view ends in a reduction ad absurdum.
With the reduction removing one option (that Hobbes is wrong) I will proceed with the condition of personhood of the irrational man being a condition of the relationship between a man and his tyrant. So long as irrational man can be held responsible by the tyrant then that man is a person. From here we would need to remove the ability of the tyrant to label anything a person; it would not prove useful if the tyrant should hold a dog responsible and to then label the dog as a person unless the challenger's view on this matter is also a reductio. The irrational man as a person brings us one step closer to the definition of a person,
As mentioned, the common denominator of a possible Person, either in or not in a state of nature, is the rationale to understand responsibility and a recognition of benefits should an opportunity to form a commonwealth arise. That, once declared a Person, there is no turning back to non-person status. And, the degree to which an irrational man, existing within a commonwealth, is a person is directly proportionate to the differential in the power of the tyrant and the power of the irrational man within the commonwealth.
If irrational men living in a commonwealth are not much different than their irrational counterparts still living in a state of nature and that all of these irrational men are subject to a force of nature such as Nietzsche's condition of life[30], Will to Power, and (the Game Theory will soon follow) then these irrational men would often be the defectors (at point where it is irrational to defect and thus reduce collective dividends) of various interactions between rational and irrational men (games). If irrational [url=http://www.sandvikfw.net/shopuk.php]hollister sale[/url] men did reduce collective dividends within the commonwealth then the tyrant (and hoping that he too is rational) would have to lay responsibility (through some form of punishment) of those defectors. If the desire of the irrational man is a desire motivated more by fear than by reason (when compared to his more rational counterpart), then the irrational man is only a person by label and therefore, he is not intrinsically a person. It may be that the rational man is also motivated by fear. But, in my view, one's degree of rationality is a direct measure of one's thoughtful reflection on a matter. The rational man, therefore, distinguishes himself from the irrational man through reflection[31] not, through primal fear. Therefore, there are two kinds of men, rational Persons and irrational Persons. The title of personhood, then, is what is forced upon an irrational man by rational men in order to hold him responsible as a Person. It is not the will of the weak that creates personal identity but the will of the strong. Considering what has taken place for an irrational man to be labelled a person, a forced upon title, it would be useful to revisit the definition of Brand as described at the beginning of this paper,
A brand either currently affects or has the capacity to affect the neural path (presently functioning or has the ability to become functional and therefore implanted or implantable) in some measurable way (Rapaille). A brand is the recognition of ANYTHING that can be classified and the closer the brand is to ourselves, such as our mother or our child, the better we identify with that particular brand (Levy). Placement strategies (the context) of the brand, that is, where and when stories are told, are critical in our interpretation of the brand (Mathews and Wacker).
As a final note on the irrational man, it would like to say that I did not go so detailed as to describe an irrational man as a stupid man, for even an irrational man understand many great concepts. The ways that the irrational man might combine concepts to form his conclusions as to what a reasonable action is, may be quite irrational. Therefore, an irrational man can remember that he was branded person, that his classification is identical to other persons, but quite possibly, his irrationality does not allow him to understand the context of the brand Person and thus he may defect when the group to which he belongs desires cooperation. But the context of the brand Person is well understood by the rational man as it is the rational man that formed the commonwealth.
Therefore, personhood IS, categorically, a brand. For, to force upon a man the identity of person requires a man to be branded Person. Irrational men are not persons first but men become persons the instant they become branded as person with a brand identity called Person. Rational men, give themselves the brand Person, which has the tenants of the confederacy as its mark, namely responsibility. Therefore a Person is a Brand.
For some, the use of Hobbes and Nietzsche in explaining the relationship between the Person and the Brand may be a little archaic. Game Theory, the study of strategic interaction situations that involve more than one individual where the action of each affects the other(s),"[32] on the other hand, offers fairly simple mathematical models for analyzing the same things as does pages of philosophical argument. Through the extrapolation of conclusions from two game theory papers, I will present a series of simple arguments that use various games to illustrate the evolution of rationality that makes a thing a person while still maintaining the integrity of the pervious Hobbes and Nietzsche arguments.
In Salience and Symmetry-Breaking in the Evolution of Convention, Bryan Skyrms sets the stage as to why a sufficient degree in similarity to the Human form is what created the category Person.
The first step in the formation of language is the first step in the formation of convention. Predator-specific alarm calls can serve a useful purpose only if the animal giving the call and the animal receiving the call associates types of predators with types of calls in the same way.[33]
At this point, it would seem that all functional signalling systems are on par with one another. In computational models, Skyrms found that signalling systems did not necessarily evolve in the same way but those systems always evolved into a symmetrical format (that senders and receivers learn to coordinate signal meanings).[34] Skyrms makes an interesting point in that symmetry can be broken by random environmental features.[35] Assuming, much like the commonwealth, that we have rational players and irrational players, then should the irrational player emulate the rational but at times defect at inappropriate times then the signalling system could break down. If we consider a signal to be a very simple story then the break down of the system would be much like the boy who [url=http://www.fayatindia.com/giuseppe-zanotti.html‎]www.fayatindia.com/giuseppe-zanotti.html‎[/url] cried wolf. In that story, the town's people ignored further signals, the story told could well have ended with one of the town's people being harmed. Had it been such that someone else was harmed over poor signalling then the tyrant would have the duty to correct the situation. The tyrant would have three options, do nothing, re-educate the boy, or punish the boy. The point is that, much like the definition of the irrational man as a Person as detailed so far where, the degree to which an irrational man, existing within a commonwealth, is a person is directly proportionate to the differential in the power of the tyrant and the power of the irrational man within the commonwealth, then, irrational defections, if detected through poor story telling, create a scenario where the degree to which an irrational man is a Person will be measured.
If the tyrant cannot stop improper signalling then, not only will the commonwealth suffer but, the irrational man challenges the definition of the Person. It is likely then, that commonwealths are made up of a great majority of rational men to enforce the responsibilities of the status Person. Therefore, the fact that all commonwealths have varied in their degrees of stability suggests that rational behaviour (as defined as maximizing collective dividends) is not always dominant or that some form of instability has entered the system. Referring to Nietzsche, life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest [url=http://www.mxitcms.com/abercrombie/]abercrombie[/url] of the strange and weak,"[36] then the strange and weak could very well be the irrational defector. Therefore, I would like to add one more criteria to the definition of a person. A Person is one that (as a moral obligation) ought to seek to remove (through re-education or punishment) irrational defectors (those that remove value from the commonwealth). If irrational defectors are not punished or re-educated then their actions challenge the authority of the tyrant and thereby damaging the value of the category Person.
One specific problem with my suggestion that the rational man ought to defend the commonwealth from the actions of irrational defectors is the notion of ought being embedded in the necessary definition of a person. Thus, the question to be asked is, how can an ought claim be a necessary condition of what it is to be a thing? At face vale, my answer may be weak but it addresses the problematic nature of a highly rational being. If the commonwealth must address the irrational defector it may only be through trail and error to determine exactly how many rational men must defend the commonwealth from irrational actions. Today, we often use a jury of peers but even a jury of peers is not a perfect system. Likewise, in the formation of the commonwealth, it would probably not be rational for every man to address irrational acts for the commonwealth would crumble under such a system of justice. Therefore, the precision to which a rational man ought handle and irrational act might best be made through the cooperation of other rational men, where not ALL rational men need respond to the irrational act.
In Evolution of Moral Norms, William Harms and Brian Skyrms make an attempt to answer the question of whether moral norms (the rules of morality) are mere arbitrary products of culture" or whether there are any standards higher than the whims of culture in determining right and wrong."[37] Because one of the components for a thing" to be a Person is a sufficient level of rationality to understand responsibility then, if morals are arbitrary products then morality itself would be discounted to a point bordering irrelevance. If morals are arbitrary then the irrational man could institute his own moral [url=http://www.orlando-apts.com/cheapnfljerseys/]cheap nfl jerseys[/url] codes through a claim that is as valid as a claim that they were arbitrarily formed. If a condition of the definition of Person is viewed as irrelevant, namely, the rationale to understand responsibility," then, it would follow that a condition of the definition of the person would be viewed as the rationale to understand the irrelevance of responsibility." If responsibility is irrelevant then the entirety of my argument thus far crumbles. Harms and Skyrms make a series of conjectures that lead to a conclusion that responsibility (which from a game theoretical view means acting in a way that maximizes dividends of either the individual or the group) is made possible only through a series of social interactions (games).[38]
Because Persons are social (how else would we have a commonwealth?), then members of a group can perform acts that cost them little but provide much greater benefits to the rest of the group, such as warning of danger[39]. An act which costs one unit to [url=http://www.golfwithashotgun.co.uk]barbour[/url] perform and benefits the recipient two sets up a Prisoner's Dilemma.[40] Harms and Skyrms move from the Prisoner's Dilemma to a similar game, the Stag Hunt. The point of using the Stag Hunt is that it demonstrates that while high dividends exist for cooperation (4 utiles each), the toggle point to either defect (3 utils for one player and zero for the other) or not play at all (defect-defect) is dangerously close (3 utils each) to promoting constant defection. Cooperation is such a game requires a great deal of trust.[41] What is essential," Harms and Skyrms state, is that mutual advantage is maximized if both players cooperate."[42]
Because brands are trust marks"[43] and stories[44], then it is branding that plays an essential role in the development and stability of the Person. Irrational men are less skilled at building trust in the same way as an irrational player might defect during Stag-Stag cooperation and their stories may be problematic, such as the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Therefore, the rational man can be said to be a good" brand, and the irrational man can be said to be a bad" brand.
The Necessary and Sufficient Definition of a Person A Reductionist Challenge
If we could assume that all Homo sapiens living today (baring the functionally brain dead i.e. Terri Shaivo)[45] are persons because these rational persons (as [url=http://www.tagverts.com/barbour.php]barbour deutschland[/url] discussed thus far) possess the common denominator of what it is to be a possible Person, either in or not in a state of nature. Where the common denominator is the rationale to understand responsibility and a recognition of benefits should an opportunity to form a commonwealth arise, that, once declared a Person, there is no turning back to non-person status and that, the degree to which an irrational man, existing within a commonwealth, is a person is directly proportionate to the differential in the power of the tyrant and the power of the irrational man within the commonwealth, then, it can be said that that rational man is a strong brand and the irrational man is a weak brand. A Person is one that (as a moral obligation), ought to seek to remove (through re-education or punishment) irrational defectors (the weak brands which are those that remove value from the commonwealth) where the rational man can be said to be a good" brand, what the irrational man can be said to be a bad" brand. Then, today's Homo sapien person (to be called person from here on) should come to terms with past and future personhood.
If, someone we have identified as a person in 2008, considered a Homo sapien of 1808, would the Homo sapien of 1808 also be a person? Justice and sound moral judgment would seem to be the standard by which a person-candidate should be considered for personhood. A reasonable means for such a process would be Rawls' Veil of Ignorance. For the purpose of this argument, the answer to exactly why a jury would want to place themselves under the Veil is found in the very definition of why anyone would even want to be a person in the first place. The answer as to why a Homo sapien would even use such a jury is that the jury themselves should want to be persons for the status of personhood entitles them to freedoms[46] that they may grant themselves and not to other creatures. To elaborate on this point, I would like you to consider what Hume has stated in Treatise of Human Nature.
Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they occasion. But, as the relations and the easiness of the transition may diminish by insensible degrees, we have no just standard by which we can decide any dispute concerning time when they acquire or lose a title to the name of identity.[47]
If a just standard" could be found, I would place my bet with a Rawlsian Jury to find that standard. Thus, up to some toggle point of too many people" and the need for a more distinct category[48], the lay of the land is the more persons the merrier."[49]
Considering a predefined condition of personhood being one that must pass a jury's veil of ignorance test, that is, to be a person in 2008, a past or future person-candidate would be granted personhood if the person-candidate would be judged a person by such a jury. Let us assume that most juries would say, Yes, a Homo sapien from 1808 is a person." The regression of the calendar would keep spinning back to some time when it could be considered that the first Homosapiens may not meet the sufficiency of compatible interactions with persons of 2008, for the first Homosapiens in the context[50] of what is a person in 2008, to be considered persons. Also consider Nazi Germany propaganda where, only 70 years ago, Nazis would have us believe that some Homo sapiens were not sufficiently similar to the German's of the 1930s and 1940s to be considered persons. Thus, the moral, ethical, and legal determinations of personhood seem to crumble under hypothetical scrutiny if we consider a group of people today being forced to live in proximity with the original Homo sapiens of 250,000 years ago. Neither group may recognize the other group as persons. What comes out of laws, ethics, and morals are, like Nazi Germany, constructs to enable individual and group survival; thus, when considering behaviors between groups, the self-rationalization of one group's behavior may entail the rationalization to categorize some persons as non-persons . This is to say that, though it may be permissible for a man to watch a dog chase a cat, it is fairly safe to assume that for a man to watch a dog chase a fellow man and should those men be sufficiently similar in circumstances, a measurable moral outrage would follow. What can be concluded from such a scenario is a view that states: there are some things that persons should and should not do, there are some things that a non-person should and should not do, but the acknowledgement of acceptable behavior between what a person believes just a non-person believes just is not mutually exclusive. Thus the term Person means US and the term non-person means THEM.
Anthropologists believe that the Cro-Magnon (circa 5000 B.C.E.), was subgroup of Homosapiens and had a slightly larger brain than modern humans[51], yet, it would be debatable if, even removing the condition of morals being based on individual or group survival, that a Rawlsian Jury would consider a Cro-Magnon a person. The calendar would continue to spin back to Neanderthal, Homo erectus, Monkey, Reptile, Fish, Algae, Rock.
Therefore, if laws, morals, and ethics cannot be held as a means of defining personhood then some other attribute(s) must. If laws are based on morals and ethics then laws would seem to be the weakest of the three to hold some intrinsic capacity to define personhood. Morals and ethics, for the sake of this argument, will be considered one in the same and will be what we feel" are the right things to do in relation to the survival of persons. If we are concerned with personhood and, if personhood is only relevant in the context of a group of such persons, then, to preserve personhood, members of the group must protect the group (or certain members at least), where, such protection has, as a necessity, the need for the title Person. In this view, the title Person only serves as a means of [url=http://www.rtnagel.com/airjordan.php]nike air jordan pas cher[/url] allowing the group selectivity of whom to grant entrance or exclusion. There is no point is being the only person in existence for such a person would be the categorical definition of Hobbes' Solitary and to consider Locke's requirements to finish a gentleman, specifically good company," the solitary person would probably be brutish and nasty.
Therefore, not only are there sufficient conditions to be a person (as mentioned thus far, rationality and recognition of the rationality of others in a sufficient manner to measure the value of collective dividends)[52], there must also be a sufficient number of persons with whom to self-identify. Because the sufficiency of the definition of personhood requires multiple persons with whom to self-identity, it would probably be in the best interest of the Rawlsian Jury to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions of personhood to even ensure the survivability of the Person.
If such necessary and sufficient conditions were moral judgments we would have no choice but to go under Rawls' Veil simply because the Veil is where both jury and defendant would make the same judgment. If the necessary and sufficient conditions are not moral judgments then Rawlsian Jury may very well be ignorant of them and the jury may either not allow a person-candidate to be a person, may allow all person-candidates to be persons, or the possibility exists that the members Rawlsian Jury may forfeit their own personhood and simply resign from the jury. Since a necessary condition of a Person is one whom self-effaces to responsibility because he acknowledges an increase in cooperative dividends for being responsible to his actions then, morals are relative to the individual disregarding the needs but not the actions of others (if the needs of others are not met). Machiavellian like morals, when placed under the Veil, would, at the least, become more empathetic. Thus, the Veil, demonstrates the ability to reconcile the bias in the intuition of what is a person between different [url=http://www.davidhabchy.com]barbour sale[/url] Person-candidates. The bias would exist because, morality under the Hobbesian and Nietzschian views are survival techniques for the individual and not the group.
Unlike the hypothetical reduction of turning back the clock to the Rock, we should no longer be concerned with hypothetics, for, if we want to be Persons, we should want to be Persons-categorical and not Persons-hypothetical for arriving at categorical definitions ought to be a major pursuit of philosophy.
Because what we know to be a Person is sufficient to be the hypothetical definition of Person (if one could exist) and that the categorical definition can only be made by a hypothetical Rawlsian Jury, then conditions of what are necessary and sufficient to be a person for the time being are categorically hypothetical. Therefore, a Person is a theoretical person. A theoretical person is a person because he or she satisfies the legal, moral, and ethical criteria. To use Hume's, a person is a fiction[53], and the Wacker-Matthews conjecture that persons and Persons because Persons are storytellers and the stories we tell our selves are moral stories, ethical stories, and legal stories, then, by definition, persons are Persons because they are storytellers and they tell themselves that they are Persons through stories. Therefore, a Person is a circularly arguing set of algorithms.
THE BRAND AS A PERSON
Thus far, the definition of the Person is, the common denominator of a possible Person, either in or not in a state of nature, is the rationale to understand responsibility and a recognition of benefits should an opportunity to form a commonwealth arise, that, once declared a Person, there is no turning back to non-person status, that, the degree to which an irrational man, existing within a commonwealth, is a person is directly proportionate to the differential in the power of the tyrant and the power of the irrational man within the commonwealth, that, the rational man is a strong brand and the irrational man is a weak brand, and, a Person is one that (as a moral obligation), ought to seek to remove (through re-education or punishment) irrational defectors (the weak brands which are those that remove value from the commonwealth) where the rational man can be said to be a good" brand, what the irrational man can be said to be a bad" brand.
From this definition, a person is a brand. But we cannot conclude that a brand is a person. If I said that my computer was a black box, I could not correctly state that all black boxes were computers. We can, however say that a special kind of brand is a person. So long as that special kind of brand has the same definition as the Person, then that brand is a person. But this is no different that the circularly arguing set of algorithms". I doubt that we will know what kind of brand we are until the brand creator steps forward and divulge his or her marketing plan.
IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH
From the half way mark of this paper to its end, the implications of branding on those minds that are not fully developed is quite frightening. If we as persons are only a set of algorithms and, if commercial brands are designed to neatly" implant themselves into this set, then a considerable measure of protection must be afforded to children. Quebec, for example, bans direct marketing to children. If, in the stages of early childhood development, a child cannot distinguish between learning experiences designed to maximize his or her own dividends as opposed to the dividends of a corporation, then a child is an easy target for a lifetime of subversion. There is a rather cold expression in marketing, get'm while they're young." Through my analysis, I can only conclude that if short term profit is the goal then prenatal marketing may be the best approach. I wonder thought, if there were no restrictions on marketing, what would the not to distant future look like?
APPENDIX 1 Conversation with Sidney J. Levy (Apr-Jun 2008)
Levy, June 9
RE: Student of Philosophy & Marketing‏
From: Sidney J. Levy (slevy@email.arizona.edu)
Sent: June 9, 2008 1:08:40 PM
Reply-to: [link widoczny dla zalogowanych]
To: 'david howse' (davidhowse@hotmail.com)
David,
When I think about the words and ideas of brands and branding, I like to start with their roots to see what people have meant and mean by them and then how those meanings have evolved to the present.
Brand" is derived from the old Saxon/Norse/French word for sword. We see that sense of aggression in notions of brandishing or as the sword generalized to heated metal or a piece of wood, a torch, a burning impression on an animal and stigmatic marks prisoners or Holocaust victims. Thus, the brand is a sign of aggression, indicating conquest or ownership. Then it may become self-inflicted as a badge or acceptance of submission to membership in a gang or group or cause, distinguished from others and even a sign of merit or honor. As a name and a logo it asserts pride of being, of ownership, a way of individualizing, demarcating one or one's objects from the hoi polloi, the run of the mill, the general. Naming helps to inform of originationone's family, one's town, one's nation, one's religion, all ways of saying who we are, manifesting our identity.
From this point of view, everything that is named is somehow being branded. So, in a fundamental sense the name of anything is its brand to begin with even though conventional usage says it is a commodity. But it, whatever it is, is branded to be recognized at all. So we have degrees of brandinganimal, vegetable, or mineral, for example, as first degree branding. Second degree says it is a fish, third degree says it is a salmon, fourth degree says it is Norwegian salmon, and fifth degree says it is King Oscar salmon.
You are evidently addressing the psychological function of engaging in this process and [url=http://www.anepf.fr]doudoune moncler pas cher[/url] saying that people can't help doing it, that it is functional or predictable as a mechanical means or efficiency (an algorithm) in relating to their experience, and surely that is so. Of course, it might also be seen as a way in which people create increasing complexity (and richness) in their lives by making finer and finer distinctions whether as sources of brands or as consumers of them. If you loo