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> For the most part it's a company whose core business model is "leverage unfathomably vast marketing resources to coerce large numbers of people into making the least healthful dietary choice available to them at any given moment".

They don't coerce anyone to eat their food. What a ridiculous hyperbole.

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Depends whether you accept emotional manipulation in the definition of coercion, or use the more strict definition and restrict the concept only to actual or threatened force.

If you are accepting advertising as emotional manipulation, then say your real point: advertising is immoral coercion.

Or are you seriously going to argue that McDonalds has ads that are considerably more emotionally manipulative than other typical advertisers?

My point was as I said. There are two main definitions of coercion, one of which is stricter than the other. I was just replying to the statement that McDonalds does not employ coercion by pointing out that it rather depends on which definition you choose as if you choose the wider definition then most advertising is coercive to one degree or another. I wasn't really talking about the moral angle, just the semantics.

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