I want to arrive at the following conclusion, but I need help with the arguments getting there, and help with appropriately precise language: that there is something unethical in selling a ten-month cold storage apple I can get at the average local supermarket that rots in three days, is half-filled with internal browning, tasteless, and contributes next to nothing for your health, to say nothing of the externalized side-effects of producing that apple.
The problem lies not so much in the condition of the apple and its poor quality, as in the implicit false representation, by the growers and the supermarket, that it is an apple of great quality, as demonstrated by its bright color and its homogenous, robust appearance. Those attractive characteristics did not appear by accident. It's a question, I think, of false marketing.
There is a distinction between lying and deceiving. The concept of a lie we generally reserve to a deception where the good of the other is erased from our calcuations, and frequently where we intend his harm. A deception has a wider scope, and can include a simple trick, or a falsehood that is for the other's benefit (deflecting curiosity about a surprise party, for example), or simply protecting the existence of a secret from an impertinent questioner. Nevertheless it still seems that a righteous deception has to possess an element of truth - a deceiving statement ought to be able to bear the true interpretation even if it isn't the plain sense of the words.
For this reason I'm hesitant to describe false marketing as actually immoral; I don't think it's a lie in the strong sense. Though the plain sense of the colorful shapely apple connotes health and well-being, the marketer can reply that the color does not actually denote anything. It's simply colorful; color is attractive to the eye, and increases sales.
Hence I use the term unethical, by which I'm trying to get at the conditions that underlie successful business relationships, which is a variety of friendship, a simplistic friendship where each party finds the other useful. One of those conditions is veracity - truthfulness, plain speaking. Marketing's proper role is to make a product appealing to the consumer, and to make the activity of shopping pleasant. It goes beyond its role when it conceals imperfections in a product, to offer it for more than it's worth by implying something about the functionality of the product is true when it isn't.
An Austrian will tell you that everything is revealed in the price. If its a crappy apple, it'll sell for a low price. Good apples are expensive, and you'd cheat the world of apples if you insisted that supermarkets only sell great apples. Bad apples are what they are because that's what the market has settled on.
But I'm not going to respond to that argument quite yet, though to dispute the Austrian on his own grounds you might take up the themes of the ethics of information exchange, and the distinction between long-term equilibriums and short-term disequilibriums. And there are other ways to counter the argument.
