Chapter 8: The Good, the Bad And the (Almost) Ugly--Ethics Codes

OVERVIEW

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

”Plato

Christians have the Ten Commandments, Buddhists have the Eightfold Path, adherents to just about any other formalized religion have a set of rules, a code if you like, to live by, and if you believe the fictionalized versions of organized crime, even the Mafia has a code of ˜honour. In the field of public relations we have these codes, too: codes of ethics by the hundreds.

The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions lists some 850 codes of ethics on its Web site. ^{[ 1]} If you draw any conclusion from this it might be that a whole lot of people have spent an inordinate amount of time considering ethical behaviour and making up rules ”or at least guidelines ”for moral behaviour. Most professional organizations have codes of ethics, and public relations and communications organizations are no different. The Institute of Public Relations, the International Association of Business Communicators, the Canadian Public Relations Society, the Public Relations Society of America and the International Public Relations Association, for example, all have their own codes. There has even been an attempt to produce a so-called global protocol for ethics in public relations. So, what is a code and what's so good (or bad) about it?

^{[ 1]} Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions (Illinois Institute of Technology) [accessed 25 November 2003] Codes of Ethics On-Line . http://www.iit.edu/departments/csep/PublicWWW/codes/codes.html