THE REAL TROUBLE WITH RULES

On the surface, in our day-to-day practice, it may seem useful and comforting to have a cookbook-style guide to help us solve ethical dilemmas. Indeed, it might be reassuring to wave that rule book in the face of the supervisor who suggests that a few well-placed gifts to local journalists might be appropriate. But this approach has limitations.

First, there can never be enough rules to cover everything that you might see as a moral dilemma. For every place and every time of your life there will be another set of circumstances and there may be no rule in your rule book to deal with this.

The second problem has to do with loopholes. What happens when people are faced with a series of rules such as those required by governments when you are completing your income tax return? The more rules there are, the more exceptions have to be made and this leads to a whole branch of ethical decision-making based on the search to discover loopholes.

The third problem is that rules are clearly open to interpretation. On the surface, a belief in a duty to be honest may appear simple to apply in the field of public relations. However, the way one person interprets the rule about honesty may be quite different from how another one does. For example, whereas they may both agree that to include a bold-faced lie in a media release would be highly unethical, they might disagree vehemently about whether it is necessary to include every detail so as to avoid any possibility of misleading the public.

And, of course, just as it is the case that one person's rights may conflict with another's as we discussed earlier, it is possible for one rule to conflict with another in a particular situation. For example, if there is one rule to avoid telling lies and another to avoid harming people, what do you do in a situation where to tell the complete truth to the media about what's going on with your client would harm one or more people? You may have rules to follow, but you still have a dilemma.