Keep your pants on Australia!

(Week Eight "Ethics")
In the past year, I've had the opportunity to reside in three different cities, in three different countries, in three very different continents: Tokyo, Hawai'i and Brisbane.
Living on campus at a college, I hadn't much exposure to the Australian advertising industry - it is like living in a bubble- and was more than mildly confronted when in our lecture we were shown many examples of what I would consider inappropriate advertising.
I noticed this myself on the 428 bus ride towards Indooroopilly from Chancellors place when I saw a billboard advertising a podiatrist - it may have been Dr. Foot - depicting the bottom half of a feminine looking figure lying sideways so that the nude portrait was visible without showing any genitals, however evidently naked.
This was within the first few weeks of moving here and I was horrified. Never had an advertisement I had laid eyes upon in America or Japan or Brunei been so crude.
In our lecture about ethics, we considered levels of appropriateness and tastefulness in advertising. It was interesting to note from the discussion that what I had believed unbelievably in bad taste and confronting, others thought tasteful and appropriate. The ethics of advertising that I had grown up with in other, more conservative countries had sculpted my view of the ethics in media is such a way that I felt that the advertising in Australia was unethical whereas somebody who had grown up in Australia would surely feel differently.
This gap in cultural and social ethics which does not translate between countries show just how malleable ethics is and how culturally defined it is. This topic leads us down the road of some very philosophical questions such as "What are ethics?" or "Do ethics or standards of ethics exist when they are no ground rules of ethics?".
As I am interested in international relations and working whilst traveling in the future, these are important considerations - questions I need to be asking myself and formulating a personal response to. Obviously I could not apply the ethics of Australian advertising - using the foot billboard advertisement as an example - in a conservative culture such as Japan because it would be confronting and in bad taste, or in an Islamic country like Brunei where it would be offensive to their religion and values. Judging the ethics of a country and evaluating the appropriateness of media that can be used in those cultures is a skill set that I will need to develop in any field of work I intend to pursue as these problems of ethics are transferable between problems from big such as between countries and small, between communities of people.