17.       
This ad recommends non-prescription Acid-Ease over non-prescription Pepticaid for relief of excess stomach acid. The only reason offered is that doctors have written 76 million more prescriptions for the full-strength prescription form of Acid-Ease than for full-strength Pepticaid. While this reason is relevant, and provides some grounds for preferring Acid-Ease over Pepticaid, it is insufficient as it stands because it depends on three unwarranted assumptions.

      The first assumption is that the prescription form of Acid-Ease is more popular among doctors. But this might not be the case, even though doctors have written 76 million more prescriptions for Acid-Ease. Acid-Ease may have been available for several more years than Pepticaid; and in the years when both products were available, Pepticaid might have actually been prescribed more often than Acid-Ease.

      The second assumption is that doctors prefer the prescription form of Acid-Ease for the reason that it is in fact more effective at relieving excess stomach acid. However, doctors may have preferred Acid-Ease for reasons other than its effectiveness. Perhaps Acid-Ease is produced by a larger, more familiar drug company or by one that distributes more free samples. For that matter, the medical community may have simply been mistaken in thinking that Acid-Ease was more effective. In short, the number of prescriptions by itself is not conclusive as to whether one product is actually better than another.

      The third assumption is that the milder non-prescription forms of Acid-Ease and Pepticaid will be analogous to the full-strength prescription forms of each. But this might not be the case. Suppose for the moment that the greater effectiveness of prescription Acid-Ease has been established; even so, the non-prescription form might not measure up to non-prescription Pepticaid. This fact must be established independently.

      In conclusion, this ad does not provide enough support for its recommending non-prescription Acid-Ease over nonprescription Pepticaid. To strengthen its argument, the promoter of Acid-Ease would have to show that (1) the comparison between the number of prescriptions is based on the same time period; (2) its effectiveness is the main reason more doctors have prescribed it, and (3) the comparative effectiveness of the two non-prescription forms is analogous to that of the prescription forms.
18.       
In this argument, the head of a government department concludes that the department does not need to strengthen either its ethics regulations or its enforcement mechanisms in order to encourage ethical behavior by companies with which it does business. The first reason given is that businesses have agreed to follow the department's existing code of ethics. The second reason is that the existing code is relevant to the current business environment. This argument is unacceptable for several reasons.

      The sole support for the claim that stronger enforcement mechanisms are unnecessary comes from the assumption that companies will simply keep their promises to follow the existing code. But, since the department head clearly refers to rules violations by these same businesses within the past year, his faith in their word is obviously misplaced. Moreover, it is commonly understood that effective rules carry with them methods of enforcement and penalties for violations.

      To show that a strengthened code is unnecessary, the department head claims that the existing code of ethics is relevant. In partial clarification of the vague term "relevant," we are told that the existing code was approved in direct response to violations occurring in the past year. If the full significance of being relevant is that the code responds to last year's violations, then the department head must assume that those violations will be representative of all the kinds of ethics problems that concern the department. This is unlikely; in addition, thinking so produces an oddly short-sighted idea of relevance.

      Such a narrow conception of the relevance of an ethics code points up its weakness. The strength of an ethics code lies in its capacity to cover many different instances of the general kinds of behavior thought to be unethical to cover not only last year's specific violations, but those of previous years and years to come. Yet this author explicitly rejects a comprehensive code, preferring the existing code because it is "relevant" and "not in abstract anticipation of potential violations."

      In sum, this argument is naive, vague and poorly reasoned. The department head has not given careful thought to the connection between rules and their enforcement, to what makes an ethics code relevant, or to how comprehensiveness strengthens a code. In the final analysis, he adopts a backwards view that a history of violations should determine rules of ethics, rather than the other way around.