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