Advertising as Guaranteeing: a Defense of Strict Liability

Résumé 0

: In many jurisdictions, advertisers are held strictly liable for false statements of fact. This may seem to depart from the ordinary moral treatment of speech, whereby individuals describing their activities -the food they cooked last night or the room they prepared for guests- are held only to being sincere and careful about what they say; if they tried hard to get things right, they are morally in the clear if they turn out mistaken. That may invite the thought that strict liability for false advertising is either a departure from ordinary morality or a special context justifying a different moral standard from the norm. Here, to the contrary, I argue that commercial claims often take the form of a familiar type of speech act, namely guarantees, for which, I try to show, speakers are already morally responsible for accuracy, regardless of fault. For that reason, I argue, strict liability for false advertising is not only justifiable, but natural and inevitable.