Industry executives inflate product benefits to encompass entire society and defense

Evidence

Years later Joseph Fath, the vice president of Tenneco Chemicals, was more expansive on the scope of benefits as justification for the use of PVC: I believe we can easily demonstrate how PVC has benefited all of us in the supply of economical consumer goods, has aided our defense industries in preserving our political system, our communications industry in enabling us to conduct the business of our modern society and has played a key role in assuring us through the plastics industry in particular and the chemical industry in general, of a continued increase in our standard of living. (Fath, 1974) However, the accent on benefits was accompanied by efforts to obfuscate and negate polyvinyl chloride’s harmful effects by other modes of moral disengagement. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1780

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Complements ‘On Sacrifice’ and grafting articles as another example of appeal-to-infrastructure framing — the product positioned as load-bearing for civilization itself.