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: Continue reading →