I think you know where this is going. It's an Amazon review for a book with no likely audience. Of course it is written by a friend or family member, they all do it. In this instance, the guilty party is prof's own web designer.Wade Harvey - Web Designer wrote: 5 stars
I greatly enjoyed it. Some of the ideas that I liked ...
December 18, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
Just finished reading Living Successfully. I greatly enjoyed it. Some of the ideas that I liked were:
1. The incisive analogy it offered to show how our welfare is tied to the welfare of others.
2. Ethical Fallacies that follow logically from the perspective of the new paradigm.
3. The chapter on Schools of Thought in Ethics.
4. Many other ideas and concepts which were expressed in various ways. I appreciate how they were rephrased in a manner so that they will sink in better in the long run; this writing technique will aid my recall of them. --Wade Harvey - Web Designer
Obviously, the fact that Prof boasts about his glowing reviews in the thread where he is pushing this book is something I will be punishing him for at length. I am a total bastard*, and he is easy meat. But this shabby action does give us a vaguely interesting question.
Everybody knows that Amazon is stuffed with fake reviews, we expect it. If I wanted to do a fraudulent one, I'd give it 4 stars and complain about something small to make the review less obviously bought and paid for. But just because it is normal, doesn't stop it being blatant misrepresentation. If everyone does it though, and it isn't really all that bad, shouldn't we all feel ok about doing it too? Should Marvin C. Katz just proudly say he got his friend to write the fake review and let that be the end of it?
And I sort of think it's weird to do this on behalf of a book (by Dr. Marvin C. Katz) that is supposed to teach ethics. Do others agree this makes what is really a very mundane act of naughty into a bit of a farce?
So, I hand over to you guys.... in the words of the great Prof himself....
PS. The other (anon) glowing reviewer there didn't identify themselves, but did stop to type out "Marvin C. Katz", almost as if they were trying to ensure a high pagerank score in case of googling... Don't worry Marvin C. Katz, I'm sure Amazon outweighs philosophynow on that algorithm by a hefty margin and my overuse of the term Dr. Marvin C. Katz won't have any effect.
*Total bastard. It's quite transparent that I only made this thread in Gen because nobody reads prof's threads where he puts them... and he abandons them when they get tricky just to make a new one with the same content. So I wanted to have nice easy place to find the details for re-use.