To respond to your point, though, the application of your philosophy simply doesn't yield a remotely familiar society. I understand how it is alluring to, in an isolated example, argue that stupid people must be coddled. But if we have to build a society where nobody can make bad decisions then we have to apply this filter everywhere. What's the end result? Humans are no longer allowed to make any decisions because they could make the wrong one. Instead a central authority must decide for them. I don't see how this is even remotely tenable.
Now if you want to devolve into a discussion about how democracy itself is in fact a failure because it depends on an educated electorate, which we clearly don't have because we can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, that's a whole different topic. But I'm trying to apply my argument in the context of the world we live in currently to keep it somewhat grounded.
Fantasy names are a psychologically manipulative marketing tactic deployed to cause you to associate the thing you are consuming with something unrelated to the thing you are consuming so as to divert your attention from the thing you are consuming to some other (presumably more exciting) topic thereby increasing likelihood that you consume the product. Or they're a brand identity entirely divorced from the actual nature of the product which would also require you to look at the label into order to discern the healthiness of said product.
My side is that it’s absurd to hold Coke responsible for not choosing a name that might be misleading to somebody. And that I find the VitaminWater trial absurd. My point about fantasy names is exactly that they’re not any different from VitaminWater so what gives? It’s rhetorical.
Marketing is all manipulative tactics born out of a desire to push more product not help people be healthy. Assuming Coke is somehow responsible for our health is skirting personal responsibility and passing the blame no different than the “fast food makes you fat let’s tell McDonalds what type of oil to use but not the restaurant down the street which is twice as unhealthy” mentality. It’s downright irresponsible to operate under the assumption that a company’s marketing department is going to give you an unbiased wholesome view of reality. I don't see how pretending Coke is some angel of healthy drink knowledge and herald of good diets that fell from grace with vitaminwater because they neglected to mention in the title “oh btw there’s some sugar” so must be punished is anything other than blissful ignorance at best.
My visceral reaction to the absurdity of the trial is derived from what I perceive as lazy inconsistency in how we approach the ethics of advertising. Cherry picking VitaminWater, a drink where the facts are spelled out explicitly on the label on every bottle, of all things, feels more like an effort to dodge responsibility by attacking big soda than a true attempt to ask whether we should be allowing corporate propaganda to influence certain aspects of society. I really don't want the courts having an opinion on what makes a healthy diet. And I don’t want companies doing so either. It’s not a disagreement that we shouldn't try to stop manipulative marketing. It’s that I don't want any company anywhere trying to tell me what is healthy and what isn't when there is money to be made based on the message they present.
Essentially I believe all marketing is manipulative and we should do away with all of it of we truly want to build a smarter society.
I knew parents who didn’t let their children consume media with commercials. The internet has certainly made that more difficult and I don’t know how it turned out for them.
So everything that has sugar in it but doesn't explicitly spell it out in the name must be renamed to include a reference to sugar in the name? Frosted flakes -> sugar frosted flakes, rice crispy bars aren't just rice + crispy, they're rice + sugar + crispy. Orange juice -> orange juice and added sugar. I mean come on it doesn't work.
All that said, the term vitamin is also entirely subjective. Nothing about "vitamin" to me ever implied "healthy". It simply implied "has vitamin". It's just all around absurd.
Having a small (200ml or so) glass of orange juice once a day is going to net you most of your daily vitamin C requirement and a third of your recommended daily sugar intake. Whether it's healthy really depends on what the rest of your diet looks like: if you mostly live on sugary cereal, pizza, and chicken nuggets, OJ means you've got something vaguely fruit-like in your diet. If it's possible to substitute it for actual fruit, actual fruit is better, but the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Sometimes I worry that "X is unhealthy!" can make people eat an even worse diet.
To respond to your point, though, the application of your philosophy simply doesn't yield a remotely familiar society. I understand how it is alluring to, in an isolated example, argue that stupid people must be coddled. But if we have to build a society where nobody can make bad decisions then we have to apply this filter everywhere. What's the end result? Humans are no longer allowed to make any decisions because they could make the wrong one. Instead a central authority must decide for them. I don't see how this is even remotely tenable.
Now if you want to devolve into a discussion about how democracy itself is in fact a failure because it depends on an educated electorate, which we clearly don't have because we can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, that's a whole different topic. But I'm trying to apply my argument in the context of the world we live in currently to keep it somewhat grounded.