PROBLEMS WITH ROBIN HOOD

Here are some of the problems with its application to our situation. Somewhere along the line, someone has to be able to assess accurately the actual consequences, and that's a very tough call, especially when it comes to the outcomes of public relations campaigns . Ask anyone who does PR research. As much as we try to develop outcome objectives for our campaigns and then evaluate our success against these, outcomes in public communication are still dependent on so many variables over which we have no control. Unplanned outcomes are a fact of life in a field like public relations. Our work involves people and their attitudes and behaviours. In spite of the best research and plans based on knowledge of all the social science theories in the world, people are still frequently unpredictable ”so too are mitigating circumstances outside our control. Public relations does not happen in a laboratory.

Perhaps even more worrisome, however, is the utilitarian notion that a society is a collection of individuals, and that what is good for these individuals can be added up to the public good, regardless of the atrocities being committed against any seemingly small segment. One of the basic tenets of ethics, as we have already determined, is to do no harm. Can the known harm be outweighed by the unknown outcomes ”the unplanned results?

Perhaps we can learn something from the often vilified author-philosopher Ayn Rand whose ethical theory of objectivism and its concept of rational self-interest have been the core of many ethical debates since she first published her best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in the middle of the 20th century. She had this to say about this kind of approach to making moral judgements:

When the ˜common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members , it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. ^{[ 2]}

So, sometimes you can do the right things for all the wrong reasons, but often the right thing is still ethically dubious. Robin Hood had no more claim to the moral high ground than a public relations practitioner working to support the aims of an ethically questionable client. When we move on to our discussion of the ethics of specific public relations approaches in Part 3, we'll discuss in more depth the morality of applying these techniques to clients whose ethics have been questioned.

^{[ 2]} Rand, A (1966) What is capitalism ? In Capitalism: The unknown ideal , The New American Library, Inc, New York