Arrington's Common Hierarchical Model Of Autonomy

Arrington (2001) argues that advertising does not manipulate people in ways that undermine their autonomy. He claims that advertising merely employs marketing techniques that create an association of products with people’s “independent needs and desires that they already have and not creating those basic desires”. Arrington suggests that our culture and social environments is the source of our desires. The common hierarchical models of autonomy (Frankfurt, 1988; Dworkin, 1976), suggest that autonomy is comprised of first-order desires, which fulfils our second-order desires. Arrington explains that an autonomous desire is one that we endorse via a second-order desire. To understand Arrington’s point that “autonomous first order desires are