DEFINING OUR TERMS


The term ethics falls off the tongue very easily these days, yet many people who use it have not taken the time to consider its true meaning.

In the late 1960s, former dean and president of Loyola University in Chicago, Raymond Baumhart (who holds a doctorate in business administration as well as being a Jesuit priest), wrote the now-classic book An Honest Profit: What Businessmen Say About Ethics in Business . [ 7] He asked businessmen of the age what ethics meant to them to which they gave a variety of responses from references to their feelings about what is right or wrong, through religious beliefs, to doing what the law requires. Some suggested that they did not, in fact, know what ethics really meant at all. Perhaps these were the honest ones.

An examination of what something is not , however, can sometimes be helpful in determining a useful definition of it.

First, ethics is not merely what has become accepted practice within the industry. Just because something wrong has been done over and over again through the years does not make it the right thing to do. Indeed, the history of human existence on this earth has been riddled with activities that were deemed acceptable ”slavery, child labour and human sacrifice come immediately to mind. However, just because they were deemed permissible at a certain point in history does not necessarily make them morally acceptable for all times. For example, setting up front groups that hide their true agendas might have been accepted PR practice in the past; however, that does not mean that today's publics are prepared to accept them as morally appropriate.

Second, ethics is not merely a question of figuring out what you can get away with. Not getting caught doing something wrong does not make it right. Doing the right thing only to serve your own needs is often considered to be the hallmark of an individual who is functioning at a low level of moral development. In fact, our prisons are filled with people who thought it was all right to do something if they did not get caught. (We discuss moral development more fully in Chapter 7). Thus, from a practical standpoint, it might be time for organizations to consider that being ethical means considering the needs of others as well. Creating a PR campaign that considers only the needs of the organization without respect for the public's needs could today be construed as unethical.

Finally, ethics is more than simply following the letter of the law. It is a fallacy to assume that everything that is legal is also morally correct; it is equally problematic to presume that everything you consider to be ethical must therefore be legal. Law and morality are related , but they are certainly not the same thing. Organizations that follow the letter of the law and nothing more are clearly looking out for their own needs, without considering the possibility that their responsibility to their communities might be morally dictated rather than simply legally. What they ought to do might be considerably more than what they must do. Now that we have established what ethics is not, perhaps we're a step closer to what it is.

Philosophers define ethics as the study of moral rightness or wrongness, which is limited by the human ability to reason. Our decisions are only as good as our human reasoning abilities . Whereas philosophers have the luxury of simply studying these issues, as professionals we need to be able actually to apply aspects of philosophical rumination. Thus, we can think of ˜public relations ethics as

the application of knowledge, understanding and reasoning to questions of right or wrong behaviour in the professional practice of public relations.

We'll use this as our fundamental definition as we move through our discussions. In practical terms, someone once defined ethical decision-making as drawing a black line through that grey area I mentioned in the preface. The area will always remain grey but at some point each of us has to draw that line. As you will see, there are few clear-cut solutions to ethical dilemmas, but as a professional it is your responsibility to determine what might be the right place to draw that line.

[ 7] Baumhart, R (1968) An Honest Profit: What Businessmen Say About Ethics in Business , Holt, Rinehart & Winston




Ethics in Public Relations. A Guide to Best Practice
Ethics in Public Relations: A Guide to Best Practice (PR in Practice)
ISBN: 074945332X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 165

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