BACK TO THE CLASSROOM

Ethics teachers have favourite tools and techniques for forcing students to think about their ethical principles and their own personal value systems. Put yourself in the following scenario. I know it seems to have nothing to do with PR, but we'll get to that.

You live in a large town with your spouse and two children, all of whom you love dearly. Your spouse becomes gravely ill with a terminal disease. There is, however, a cure for that disease. The problem is that it is the invention and possession of only one man ”a man whom you despise.

You go to see this man who feels the same about you as you do about him. You tell him your spouse's plight and he promptly slams the door in your face. You begin to plot your next step. Would it be acceptable ethically for you to steal it from him?

If you have a personal, non-situation-dependent code against stealing (ie you tend towards the rule-ethics approach to ethical decision-making), then you would likely say no because to you stealing is always wrong and you would be duty-bound to avoid it, thus your spouse dies and that's the end of the story. But what if your children are dying? The whole town? Is it right to steal? Is it right to steal for what you consider to be a good reason? Can the ethical line over which you have chosen not to step be moved?

For those of you who are still right there, believing that at some point it is morally acceptable to steal, then let's move the scene forward. You plot to steal the cure but when you arrive at the house in the middle of the night to do the deed, you are confronted by the owner. The only way now for you to obtain the cure is to kill him. Would it now be acceptable to kill him to save your spouse? If not, how about if both your spouse and your children were affected? The entire town? Is the morality of killing a matter of being able to justify it? This situation is actually attributed to Lawrence Kohlberg who used it to elicit responses from subjects in his research on moral development that we discussed in Chapter 7.

What you have just done is taken a look at the extent to which your own principles and values might or might not be stretched . You have examined where you draw your own black line through that grey area of ethics and under what circumstances, if any, you are prepared to move it. This is the kind of thing that ethics education can do for anyone , not just for public relations practitioners . The truth is, a person's personal values, whether related to lying, stealing, cheating or killing, or anything else, have a huge impact on their professional decision-making, whether in medicine, law, politics or public relations. If your values are so deep-seated, then, can ethics be taught?

The real question is not whether or not ethics can be taught , but if moral reasoning can be learnt. Teaching and learning are two different, albeit related, things.