The tobacco industry co-opted individual-rights rhetoric to defeat smoking bans

Evidence

In a strategy to counteract Ralph Nader’s petition to ban smoking in airliners, Ross Millhiser (1970) an executive at Philip Morris, recommended focusing on individual rights: … Let’s support Mr. Nader but ask that smoking seats and/or areas where-in smoking is permitted be provided in planes, buses, etc. We are simply thereby endorsing and upholding the right of each individual citizen to be protected from infringement upon his privacy, or whatever the right word is, by other individuals. We do not want an individual’s rights to be infringed upon even by products of our manufacture. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1633

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the gun industry’s parallel free-speech framing mentioned in the same chapter, and to moral disengagement’s euphemistic labeling-plus-advantageous-comparison mechanisms from earlier chapters.
• CANDY: ‘We do not want an individual’s rights to be infringed upon even by products of our manufacture’ is a deliciously disingenuous corporate line.