Tobacco executives co-opted critics’ goals by reframing smoking bans as infringements on individual rights

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, 1632

Categorization

• XREF: A textbook case of appearing to concede (‘let’s support Nader’) while actually defending the harmful practice — parallels the vault’s moral-panic and coopting mechanisms where surface accommodation masks continued harm.
• SEED: The strategy of embracing your critic’s demand while hollowing it out (‘smoking sections for everyone!’) is a reusable narrative and argumentative pattern worth an article.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1632