writing a memorandum about whether the proposed advertising campaign is ethical

concerns the morality of an advertising proposal for certain pharmaceuticals. The proposal was developed by the Sackler family, which owns the privately held company Purdue Pharma. There are a number of articles about this; one of the more detailed is by Patrick Radden Keefe, titled “The Family that Built an Empire of Pain,” The New Yorker, October 30, 2017.

In your paper, you are to assume that you are writing a memorandum about whether the proposed advertising campaign is ethical. (I realize that consideration of the ethics of a new advertising campaign is not something that was likely to have been requested at the time the campaign was conceived, but it is the sort of thing American business should do more often.) Your advantage is that you do not need to speculate about the future, because we know how the ad campaign turned out. With the knowledge provided in the Keefe article (and any others you find on your own), you should be able to draft a good memo about the moral implications of the campaign as proposed.

This paper should be 5 pages long