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ETHICAL DILEMMAS: NOT ALL THE SAME

Not all ethical dilemmas are the same. In her book Good Intentions Aside: A manager's guide to resolving ethical problems , corporate ethics guru Laura Nash suggests that there are two types of problems in business ethics: the acute dilemma ”when you truly do not know what is the right thing to do; and the acute rationalization ”when you do know the right thing to do but fail to do it. ^[

1]

Nash indicates in her discussion of these different kinds of problems that ˜top managers often fail to achieve moral results, despite their good intentions, because they have thought only in terms of [acute dilemmas] , ^[

2] the kinds of problems generally faced by these higher-level managers rather than those on lower levels of the hierarchy. Experienced managers have often faced similar situations before, worked through the issues and actually do know what they ought to be doing. Doing it, however, requires a different set of personal and professional characteristics. What often happens, however, when the managers who know what they ought to be doing fail to do it, is that they can be viewed by their subordinates as less than ethical, despite their clear awareness of what is right.

We can learn from this if we apply it to public relations situations.

An example of an acute dilemma in PR practice would be deciding where to draw the line between a news release that fails to disclose all the facts and one that tells all but might have negative consequences. These are the daily dilemmas that face PR practitioners all over the world. An example of an acute rationalization would be knowing that all the pertinent facts should be included in a news release because of their potential to prevent harm, but you hide those facts because you rationalize that members of the public who might be harmed have a responsibility to seek out such information on their own. What happens most often in public relations is not just that lower-level practitioners might see the upperlevel manager as unethical, so too will the media and the public when the facts finally come to light as they so often do.

^[

1] Nash, Laura (1993) Good Intentions Aside: A manager's guide to resolving ethical problems , Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA

^[

2] Nash, p 127

DECISION STEPS

In public relations practice, we base our strategic approaches on a careful process which has four steps (see Figure 15.1):

The process of PR decision-making revisited

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Figure 15.1: The process of PR decision-making revisited

a research phase consisting of collecting all pertinent data, analysing it and determining the problems;
a planning phase where one of the main tasks is to determine what we want to accomplish (objectives) and figure out the best way to accomplish it;
an implementation phase where we carry out the strategies and tactics we figured out in the planning phase; and
an evaluation phase where we figure out if our plan actually accomplished what we set out to do and more.

Making ethical decisions is a bit easier if we consider the phases that are similar to the above:

The research phase in ethical decision-making is similar to the data collection and analysis that we do in the PR planning process. The tricky part is recognizing that we are facing an ethical issue in the first place. Figure 15.2 suggests using the ˜PR pillars that we discussed in Chapter 2.

Recognizing an ethical issue using the ˜PR Pillars

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Is there harm involved?
Is there a missed opportunity to do something good?
Could anyone be misled in any way?
Will anyone's privacy be invaded?
Is it unfair to anyone?
Does it feel wrong?

Figure 15.2: Recognizing an ethical issue using the ˜PR Pillars

Once you recognize that, indeed, an ethical issue is part of the situation that faces you, you need to gather as much information as possible about the following:

how the situation developed in the first place;
who are the involved parties on both sides of the situation;
what current issues are affecting the situation.

The planning phase in making ethical decisions forces us to examine the outcomes we want, but also to consider the outcomes that are likely, given the choices available. This is where we can use what has come to be known in ethics circles as ˜The Potter Box. This decision-making model was developed by Harvard divinity professor Ralph Potter and is now widely accepted as an organized approach to considering the application of values, principles and loyalties to making defensible ethical decisions (more about how to apply this approach a bit later).

Figure 15.3: The ˜Potter Box

Once we know from our data collection and analysis that there is an ethical issue, we define it. The next step is to determine the values that we bring to bear on the situation. Then we apply selected principles to the situation and consider to whom we have duties . All of this should lead us to the next step in the process.
The next step in making the decision is to actually make it, but this is where our ethical decision-making differs slightly from our PR process decisions. Rather than moving immediately to implementation, we move directly to a hypothetical version of the final phase. Implementation comes later.
The final phase is to evaluate the decision to determine if it is a good one. This is where a second guess comes into play. But the second guess is accomplished before the first guess is carried through.