Chapter 15: The True Reality of Everyday Ethics--Making Decisions

OVERVIEW

A decision without the pressure of consequence is hardly a decision at all.

”Eric Langmuir

This is probably the chapter you've been waiting for as you've moved through the previous discussions which have focused more on the underlying ethical principles and your own approach to ethical thinking. After all, the heart of ethics in practice is facing those everyday ethical dilemmas and making decisions that you can live with. However, before you can examine ethical decision-making and apply those principles to your own public relations practice, you do need a bit of background. Now, though, we have finally arrived at that point where we can really get to the substance of ethics in PR practice.

We make decisions every day of our lives. When I teach classes on the public relations process ”which in itself is nothing more than a systematic way for making and implementing decisions ”I always remind students that the very fact that they are sitting in that classroom is testament to the fact that they have made myriad decisions even in the short time since they got out of bed that morning. They decided what to wear, whether or not to eat breakfast and what to have, if anything, whether to come to class or not, how to get there, where to sit, to whom they would speak and the list goes on.

Our lives can be boiled down to a series of decisions, some major, some minor, some conscious, some unconscious, some that ultimately turn out to be the right ones and others that we live to regret . The bottom line is that, for better or for worse , we all know how to make decisions already. The question is: do we know how to make good decisions and do we know how to apply our considerable talents in decision-making to making good ethical decisions?