This post isn’t going to have any additional ethical musings on the Tide commercials themselves, for I am sick to death of them, and almost as sick of arguing about them. What I have been thinking about instead is what to glean from the fact that an ethics critique of a 30 second laundry soap commercial has become the most viewed post on Ethics Alarms after fourteen months and about 1,100 posts, and has generated more debate than all but a few other issues.

Not that I much mind becoming the apparent ethics authority on Tide (with Acti-Lift!).  It’s a small niche, but at least it’s a niche. If you Google almost anything about the original commercial—“green shirt” and Tide, for example—Ethics Alarms is the first non-Tide site that gets listed. Still, with carefully considered ( and occasionally proofed) posts on politics, immigration, global warming, education, sex, law enforcement competing with it for attention, my ethics review of a TV commercial has attracted far more interest than any one of them.

Why? My thoughts:

• One reason is that despite all of the commenters who have responded, “Oh, come on—it’s just a commercial!”, I was correct: people notice TV commercials, and they have genuine cultural influence. If they did not, nobody would care that Mom lied (twice) about the green shirt. The sheer volume of interest that the post has received (it had more views in December than in any two previous months, and the most of any post) demonstrates that we are right to call foul when Tide, or Twix, or Direct TV uses its mini-dramas to define what is acceptable conduct in America.

• Another reason, and I am delighted about this, is that a lot of Americans do believe that values are important, particularly when children are involved. They have not become inured to the constant and casual dishonesty of our elected officials; if anything, the habitual lies have made much of the public less tolerant of bad conduct than ever before. They see, as I do, Tide’s easy endorsement of a mother deceiving her child to avoid accountability as an effort to corrupt us, or as a warning sign that we may already be corrupt. We may not know how to get our Representatives to tell the truth, but when the wrong messages are used to sell us soap, we’re going to object. Good.

• A lot of the interest is from the other side, the subjective ethics advocates that I argue with and confront every day. They are the ones who maintain that any declared definitions of right and wrong is “imposing one’s values on others,” and their objective, admitted or not, is to have no values, ethical standards or coherent cultural norms at all. Because of ethical entropy, these individuals have been gradually getting their way, creating a place for the rest of us to live that is increasingly rude, corrupt, venal and unjust, where popular celebrities wear “Fuck You” jewelry, teen-age girls dress and act like prostitutes, and a Governor who gets caught in a prostitution ring can be hired as the star of a CNN news show. Their ultimate victory may be unavoidable, but one of many reasons Ethics Alarms exists is to make sure our cultural values don’t go down without a fight.

I take  satisfaction in the fact that Tide miscalculated. The culture isn’t completely corrupt yet, and enough people apparently objected, here and elsewhere, to the green shirt caper that Tide re-edited and shortened the spot to eliminate the mother’s lies. This minuscule victory is still meaningful, for it demonstrates how cultural values are challenged, fought over, and maintained. Perhaps the Tide commercial isn’t so trivial after all. It is symbolic of the ethics battles that have to be fought daily and over time, on the nationals stage, in the arts and media, in the schools and workplace, and in our daily lives, to keep a firm grip on right and wrong. A fictional green shirt may be a strange point to draw a line in the ethical sand, but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is that we drew the line, and have the fortitude and determination to keep drawing it elsewhere.