RELYING ON A PERSONAL CODE

By the time I had finished teaching our new stand-alone public relations ethics course to our third-year PR students, I was still perplexed about how to evaluate them. If a student knew a lot about ethics and yet made what I considered to be a morally reprehensible decision, did I have the right to make such a judgement and fail that student? On the other hand, what would I do with a student who seemed to have gleaned no knowledge about ethics and morality and yet when faced with a decision used his or her own personal values to make what I might deem a sound decision? And, anyway, who was I to be making these ethical pronouncements? Naturally, I had set objectives at the beginning for what the students would be expected to accomplish, and this should tell me what I must evaluate. But educational theory notwithstanding, I was still perplexed.

Let me state the question: Is it appropriate to measure the extent to which the students understand and can apply ethical theory to ethical decision-making in public relations practice? Or, should students be given marks based on their ability to make these decisions with a high level of integrity (as defined by the textbooks and me)? Should they be marked at all?

Figuring out how much students have learnt about the theory and the processes is relatively easy and probably tells me whether or not they met the educational objectives. But, if the reason we add courses on ethics to the basic public relations degree is to ensure that, in future, the field is practised with a high degree of integrity, wouldn't the second approach (evaluating the ability to make morally defensible decisions) provide a more appropriate basis for evaluation? Shouldn't the most ˜ethical students in the class who are able to function with the highest level of moral standards receive the highest grades? This is a real dilemma.

A case in point

Towards the end of the course, we began discussing specific public relations cases, trying to come to a consensus as a group about the best, most ethical ways of dealing with practical situations. One of the sources I used for these cases is the Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA) Code of Ethics Case Study Series. Here's a summary of one of the cases we discussed in class:

You're the PR director for a housing developer who is getting ready to market some lots to middle income families. The site is on a former landfill and government reports show ˜very low levels of contaminants that are not life- threatening . You tell the boss how to handle this in the promotional materials and he says not to discuss it proactively at all. What to do? ^{[ 4]}

The in-class discussion was very interesting. PRSA discusses key values such as honesty, independence, loyalty and fairness as providing guidance in this situation, with a clear sense that these values might even conflict with one another. Students seemed to be able to come up with the same list. Part of the final PRSA solution goes like this: ˜You must convince your boss that it is in the company's best interest to acknowledge the history of the land The reputation of the company will be enhanced by proactive communications Your reputation as a public relations practitioner depends on your skills to persuade your employer to act in the best interest of the public. (For the complete discussion go to the PRSA Web site and look up Case Study #6 BEPS 11-05-01.) There is, however, no guidance here about what to do if your best efforts at persuasion fail, but for most students it seemed clear to them that they would not be a party to what they perceived as dishonesty (a cover-up ) and the potential harm that could come to the organization, the buyers and their own careers. They felt strongly that the buying public had a right to the information up front in order to make an informed buying decision. I was so proud.

But ”a hand went up (actually, his hand didn't go up; students just speak up in these discussions). ˜I disagree , said one student.

Everyone has a chance to take the floor in these discussions. I asked him to explain his position. As far as he was concerned , he said, since the contamination had been determined to be ˜low-level and ˜not life-threatening he felt no obligation whatsoever to broach this subject in the promotional materials. He was on the boss's side. He figured that there was no harm to be done, not disclosing the information was in no way misleading, and he was willing to make the decision for the potential buyers that they didn't need this information.

If other students in the class agreed with him, they weren't saying, and the response to this student was that his decision would be less than ethical. To this he responded that he guessed he would just have to make his own decision based on his own personal code of ethics.

^{[ 4]} Public Relations Society of America Ethics Case Study Series. http://www.prsa.org