Morality of tilting Pepsi bottles?

Great Debates
61

Are you kidding me? Do you really think the company selling eggs would find it objectionable for you to check for broken eggs?

You don’t have to. You could simply tell a clerk working there to discard a cracked egg so no one else buys it. You can’t go up to him and tell him that this Pepsi bottle doesn’t have a winner, so it should be discarded so know one buys it.

Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. I really hope that society realizes that buying uncracked eggs is not a game of chance. Its perfectly acceptable to check eggs before purchase. If I haven’t made my point apparent to you on this matter yet, please ask someone else to explain it to you. I’ve done the best I could. Seacrest out.

62

Do you have any evidence Pepsi or Apple feels the same way?

Well, go off in a huff if you must, but I don’t think jsgoddess needs anything explained to her in this issue except the merit of your position, which remains unclear to me, too.

63

I live in alaska so my pricing may be different buy lets just call it 1.00 for a pepsi.
During a promtional period you get the same pepsi plus a 1 in 3 chance of winning the ability to leagaly download a song.

The song usually cost a dollar.

One dollar for some cheaply swetend artificial flavor sounds unethical.

If you go and buy 6 pepsies all the while tilting them and make out a winner pepsi is happy, expecially if this is more than your usuall purchace amount.

Apple is happy because you are using there service, sigining up, becoming a member, downloading their software, making regular visits to there website, looking at an untold number of Ipod ads, and hopfully become addicted to their service and pay wilth dollars rather than soda tops.

The Mucisians are happy because someone is paying for music.

Remember the earlier post about the janitor who found a million dollar coke can.
Most people probally throw away the top or never even look at it.

those that want a free download can just tilt the bottle.

I think everyone involved is happy.

Anyone who is buying a pepsi soley for a 1 in 3 chance of getting a 1 dollar free download is insaine.

Either way

64

Ahh Alaska56, that was so elegantly put.
How is it unethical to tilt the can when, not only is not against the rules of Pepsi’s contest, but you are under no obligation to purchase a drink to participate in the sweepstakes. Like Alaska said, if you are buying a Pepsi just for the chance to win a song not only are you spending 3 dollars to get a 1 dollar song, but you are just falling for thier lame marketing scheme in the first place.

You could send 3 letters to Pepsi each asking for a game piece. But then you’ve just spent $1.20 on a 1 dollar song.

In the end… it’s a win/win situation for Pepsi. Regardless of who gets the winning game piece.

My point is that we need to boycott Pepsi.

65

I dunno, I see it as spending $1.25 for a bottle of Pepsi (that’s how much the cafeteria here charges) and getting a $1 coupon for a song.

Though to complicate the math a tad, some of the caps (1 in 6) also say “Buy 1 20oz. bottle, get one free”. So you may be doing the tilt for a chance to get 50% off two subsequent bottles. If you tilt those for winners…

Now that’s crazy talk. :wink:

If you want people to give up disgusting beverages, go start a boycott of Starbucks. :smiley:

66

Let me address two issues here.

  1. Apple has agreed with Pepsi to give away X amount of free music downloads.
    Which equals approx. X ( not counting the .01’s or the taxes.)

No matter who buys the Pepsi, those downloads have already been accounted for.
So Apple is clearly not a loser here.

Pepsi is seeling cola, not songs, so they aren’t the loser.

Every customer has the same chances to win based on randomness AND their ability to look under the caps. Sooooo… techincally, there is a level playing field. As one poster said, no special equipment or skill is needed to look under the cap. (some special KNOWLEDGE of the trick, yes… but that knowledge is freely avaiable… and hey, isn’t that basically how ALL of life works, it’s up to you to keep yourself informed. You can’t get upset because people didn’t come to your house to educate you about any given subject.)

Soooooo… in the end, not very unethical at all. Just a screw up by Pepsi/Apple.
2) Stealing $0.01 vs stealing $1,000,000.

If you’re going to tell me that there is no relativity in ethics and that these two actions are exactly the same, then I’m afraid we strongly disagree.

This is to assume that the thief has no knowledge of the value of what is being stolen and the implications of the theft on the target. Before I continue, of course stealing is wrong, but I’m just judging degrees of ‘wrongness’ here. If someone steals a penny and knows that the target has 5,000,000 more pennies, then they can safely assume that the loss will be considered insignificant by all. However, if the thief steals $1,000,000 and that’s everything the target has… well then it’s pretty obvious that they are putting their very life at risk with no means of support. A very different line of thinking all together.

Do you consider a teenager joyriding a car the same as a professional stealing the car with the intent to sell it on the black market?

What about punching someone in the face versus shooting them in the stomach?

How about keying a car’s paint job versus setting it on fire?

Flirting with your friend’s girlfriend versus sleeping with her on the eve of their wedding?

Are we allowed to have degrees of morality? Can we consider the intention behind the actions?

I think the answer is pretty obvious, but maybe I’m wrong.

67

Nobody. Which is why I said I don’t consider it unethical. My response was to someone saying tilting bottles wasn’t unethical because you were only taking a dollar. I agree that it’s not unethical but for other reasons; not because it fails to reach a minimum financial limit.

68

Everyone has been approaching this from a deontological or untilitarian perspective. I prefer a virtue-based ethics. Many people have agreed that tilting is unsportsmanlike. Good sportsmanship–a commitment to fairness, to honoring the intent of a contest, to giving all an equal chance, a refusal to “game the rules”–is a virtue. Deliberately behaving in an unsportsmanlike manner is unvirtuous, and therefore immoral.

One of the benefits of virtue-based ethics, however, it that it makes it easier to avoid the black-and-white, good-or-bad duality frequently encouraged by deontological systems. With this in mind, I think it is more accurate to say that of the two choices ordinarily available, to tilt or not to tilt, not to tilt is the more virtuous choice and therefore the more moral, and to tilt is the less moral choice.

Frankly, either way it’s small potatoes, and I find worrying excessively about petty moral issues tends to be counterproductive to the formation of virtue. In this case, therefore, the most moral thing is probably not to sweat it.

69

I hope you haven’t completely abandoned this thread, because the part I bolded makes me raise an eyebrow at your argument.

You basically seem to be ascribing some sort of sanctity to games of chance that I, for one, feel is misplaced. Your logic would also seem to argue that card counting in blackjack in unethical, with which I would disagree strongly.

Is it unethical to attempt to maximize your odds at winning a game of chance? I say it’s not only ethical, it is foolish to do otherwise.

For example, let’s look at jai-alai, which is a (very entertaining) form of pari-mutuel betting, similar to horse and dog racing. Pari-mutuel means that the winnings are paid out to scale based on the bets booked. So if x people win, and y dollars total have been wagered, each of those x people win (y - house commission) / x. Clearly, in this instance, if I manage to increase my odds of winning, I have negatively affected the other gamblers.

Long ago I analyzed the mathematical structure of the “Spectacular 7 Scoring” system jai-alai employs, and noticed that, given exactly equal skill of all participants, there is a disparity in the likelihood of the 8 different positions winning, and an even larger disparity in various groups of numbers finishing in the top two or three together in the same game.

So I formed a hypothesis about the best winning combinations. To test it, I went on the local jai-alai fronton’s website and downloaded all the results, complete with payouts, for the previous year, and set up a database to brute force identify every possible bet that had a net win for the entire year. There was remarkable similarity to the net win bets and the mathematical predictions, with a few notable exceptions.

So I went and bet those numbers. Several times the ticket person commented “good numbers” when I placed the bets. There ended up being some large payouts, and I did quite nicely. That had a definitive effect on my fellow gamblers, as the other winners’ spoils were reduced compared to if I had not won a stake in those pots.

Were my actions unethical?

70

Now this I can agree with. I’ve been mostly playing devil’s advocate in this thread, but if we want to get down to core values, its always best to hold yourself to the highest set of ethical behaviour based on virtues.

It DOES avoid this idea of ‘arguing’ ethics, or by using arguments such as ‘everybody else was doing it!’ while wholeheartedly knowing the action was wrong.

I only wish all people could hold themselves fully accountable for their own actions in such a way.

71

I love blackjack. I’ve been playing in the casinos for years. If I was good enough at counting cards would I do it? Yes. Would it be unethical for me to do so? Yes. I know that the casinos have rules and that counting cards goes against them. By knowingly breaking that rule I am being unethical. Its that simple.

It depends. Counting cards in blackjack is unethical for the reason I already stated. Learning to read tells off of other players faces in poker is not unethical because it is part of the game and not against the rules. You are making the blanket statement that maximizing your odds of winning a game of chance is always ethical. I couldn’t disagree more. What if I were to invent x-ray specs that could see through the little silver patches on lottery scratch off tickets? Would it be unethical if I were to use these glasses to decide which tickets to by? Of course it would be. I would have an unfair advantage of buying winning tickets only and leaving the losing tickets for other consumers who think that everyone has the same chance of buying a winner. You may think it would be foolish financially not to use these glasses but that doesn’t make it ethical. Its the same principle with tilting Pepsi bottles. The fact that I’m using a device in one scenario and using a trick that I learned on a web-site that doesn’t require a special device shouldn’t matter.

72

No actually counting cards in blackjack is the only way to win consistently at blackjack. He’s not talking about counting cards as in remember every single card played. But a simple system that gives you more of an average of whats been played. It’s not allowed in the casinos because they know that if you use this system you increase your odds of winning slightly more than the house advantage.

Introducing skill is the only way to consistently win a game of chance. Which is just what this contest is. You pay money to play games of chance at a casino, you are going to use every skillful advantage in your inventory to try and win. Same as this contest, you are winning over Apple, not over your fellow player. There is not a shortage of caps people, they are giving away 200,000,000 free songs. You are not depriving anyone of a chance to win.

Your analogy doesn’t hold up because 1. that technology isn’t available to everyone and 2. scratchers come on rolls you pull off 1 at a time.

I don’t mean to come off sounding like stealing is ok. Because I don’t consider this stealing. How could you steal something that someone hasn’t already bought yet. It’s the same price to check for a winning cap and buy that soda as it is to send in 3 envelops for 3 game pieces.

73

I agree.

Really? Some are allowed. Some are not allowed. Some are illegal.

You are lowering others odds of winning by putting losing bottles back on the shelf and only buying winners. I thought this was pretty obvious.

Hypothetical situations do hold up in analogies. Imagine that I invented the technology. Imagine that I can see over the counter and only buy tickets next to be sold on the roll that are winners.

The difference is that you check the cap before you buy it and put it back if its a loser. You do that until you find a winner and then buy it. You aren’t guaranteed a winner when you send for game pieces through the mail.

74

Okay, I just realized what you meant by point #1. I thought you were saying that the technology wasn’t available. I just noticed the “to everyone” part.
I’m assuming your argument is that since almost anyone can figure out how to tilt bottles its fair but not everyone can figure out how to make x-ray specs, so its not fair? Not a good argument in my opinion. How hard it is to come up with an advantage of buying a winner every time isn’t the issue. If I’m able to make x-ray specs than the technology is available to everyone.

75

Then what of my jai-alai example? I am lowering the other gamblers’ expected value, which is mathematical indistinguishable from lowering their odds of winning. Was it unethical?

76

But isn’t playing to the best of your ability also a virtue? And doesn’t playing to the best of your ability include using your cleverness? Here’s an analogy from professional sports - the no-huddle offense. It’s definitely not a violation of the rules but it was something other teams didn’t expect when it first emerged so they had a hard time defending against it. Was the coach who developed the no-huddle offense a visionary who was virtuously improving the game by getting the most out of his team or was he a petty rules weasel who was unsportsmanlikely gaming the rules by exploiting an opportunity the other teams didn’t know about?

77

I’m either too tired to figure out exactly what you did in your jai-alai example or its just over my head. Can we keep it simpler? I’ll look at it again in the morning.

78

Not in the Pepsi bottle example. Pepsi meant for this to be a game of chance and not a game that uses skill or cleverness like football. Now Bryan Ekers asked me if I had evidence of this. If you truly believe that Pepsi doesn’t mind you peeking under the cap, then you aren’t doing anything immoral. I think most of us realize that Pepsi intended this to be a game of pure chance so that all consumers have an equal chance of winning and that football is meant to be a game of skill and cleverness and that the team employing more of these abilities will win.

79

When I bought my pop I selected a yellow cap rather than a white one, thinking I might win a chance to buy one, get one free.

Instead I got this lousy code, and I’ve spent the last two hours trying to figure out how to download my free song.

Frankly, I think the whole contest is rigged. I can’t get to any place where I can either enter my code or select my song.

80

  1. Go here and download the iTunes program.

  2. Install it. Run it.

  3. In the left column, click “Music Store.”

  4. In the big window on the right side, click the big square button that says “Redeem code”