the importance of communication ethics essay

Importance of Ethics in Communication Essay

Introduction, what is communication ethics, how can one observe ethics in communication, unethical communication, importance of ethics in communication.

In any organization, the workplace needs to be run in such a way that every person feels part of the organization. On many occasions, decisions are made by the leaders and supervisors, leaving the subordinates as mere observers. Self-initiative is crucial in solving some of the problems that arise and as such, every employee is expected to possess self initiative.

Communication ethics is an integral part of the decision making process in an organization. Employees need to be trained on the importance of ethics in decision making so as to get rid of the blame game factor when wrong choices are made. The working place has changed and the employees have become more independent in the decision making process.

The issue that arises is whether employees make the right decision that would benefit the company or they make the wrong choices that call for the downfall of the company. Some organizations have called for the establishment of an ethics program that can aid and empower employees so that unethical actions would be intolerable. This is because occasionally, bad decisions destroy organizations making the whole decision making process unethical.

Some programs on good ethics can help in guiding the employees in the process of decision making. This would ensure the smooth running of organizations and instances of unethical decision making would be null. An ethical decision making process is important in ensuring that the decisions made by the employees are beneficial to organization welfare and operations.

Ethical communication is prudent in both the society and the organizations. The society can remain functional if every person acted in a way that defines and satisfies who they are. However, this could be short lived because of the high probability of making unethical decisions and consequently, a chaotic society. For this reason, it would be of essence to make ethical rules based on a set guidelines and principles.

Ethical communications is defined by ethical behavioral principles that include honesty, concern on counterparts, fairness, and integrity. This cannot be achieved if everyone acted in isolation. The action would not be of any good to most people. Adler and Elmhorst (12) note that actions should be based on the professional ethics where other professionals have to agree that the actions in question are ethical and standard. If a behavior is standard there is nothing to fear if exposed to the media.

However, unethical behavior can taint the reputation of an organization. An action needs to do good to most people in the long run. Adler and Elmhorst (12) note that this golden rule needs to be applicable in organizations. Failure to do this, it becomes an obstacle to this principle.

In achieving the ideals, several obstacles are bound to arise in the process of decision making. Rationalizations often distract individuals involved in making tough decisions. According to the Josephson Institute of ethics (2002) the false assumption that people hold on to that necessity leads to propriety can be judgmental that unethical tasks are part of the moral imperative.

For example, assuming that a particular action is necessary and it lies in the ethical domain is a mere assumption that can be suicidal to an organization. This necessity assumption often leads to a false necessity trap that prompts individuals to take actions without putting into account the cost of doing or failing to do the right thing (Josephson Institute of ethics, Para 5). As part of a routine job, it is likely to be an obstacle in the sense that an individual is doing what he/she got to do.

For example, morality of professional behavior is often neglected at the workplace and on most occasions, people do what they feel is justifiable although it is morally wrong even if not in that context. Individuals often assume that if everyone is doing a certain action, then it is ethical. However, this is not the right way to go as the accountability of individuals and their behaviors should not be treated as a norm in the organization. For example, we could assume that everyone tells lies in an organization.

This assumption is uncertain because lying is unethical and can hinder the achievement of certain goals in an organizational. It may not bring harm at the given time but in the long run it may be chaotic. An observation by the Josephson Institute of Ethics (para 9) is that false rationalization is just an excuse to commit unethical conduct. Basically, the assumption that an action would not harm somebody or the organization does not give the limelight to committing unethical deeds.

The management of an organization should make the ethics of their employees their concern and business. The assumption that employees can make ethical decisions without advising them on what is ethical and then blaming the employees in case the plan backfires is unethical. In ensuring that the actions carried by employees are ethical, the human resource management should set up ethical programs within the organization.

As noted by Flynn (30) the principles of ethical behavior are bound to develop if an organization itself practices acts of ethics. For example, honesty, fairness, concern for others, morality and truthfulness can be achieved if code of ethical conduct is practiced in organization. In achieving an ethical decision some steps need to be followed. Decisions making should be ethical and objective to the organization and its components.

According to Flynn (37) the rules of the Texas instrument company noted that the legality of an action is of imperative importance. If for example an action is illegal then the law should not be broken because an action has to be taken. Instead, the executioner of the action needs to stop right away. Actions need to comply with the values of an organization. If the actions cannot comply with the set organizational values then the action may not fit well.

An action carried should not make someone feel bad or the actions carried should not be harmful to the executioner. The public image of an action in the newspaper or media should be considerate. An action should be within a given timeframe and be done even if its appearance will affect it. For an action that one is not sure, they are obligated to ask and if not satisfied they continue asking until an answer is got (Flynn 37).

Communication ethics is important in the operation of an organization. The way in which decision making is carried in an organization determines the outcome. Ethical decision making process is necessary in an organization. Some of the obstacles that restrict rationalization are merely based on assumptions. They lead to downfall or negative ramifications that affect the organizations. Organizational managers are advised to take decision making of employees as their own concern.

Legitimacy of actions is important and so are the values, because some actions maybe illegal or values fail to meet the organizational values. This may have negative impact if they are not illegal or in line with organizational goals. In general, ethical decision making process is important as it saves a company from the problems it would face for its unethical actions

Works Cited

Adler, Ronald B. and Jeanne Marquardt Elmhorst. Communicating at Work . 9 th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.

Flynn, Gillian. “Make Employee Ethics Your Business.” Personnel Journal ( 1995) 74.6: 30-37. Web.

Josephson Institute of Ethics. “Making Ethical Decisions—Part Five: Obstacles to Ethical Decision Making.” Accounting Web (2002 ). Web.

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Together, We Succeed.

The importance of communication ethics.

Brown University describes ethics as “a set of standards for behavior that helps us decide how we ought to act in a range of situations.” But it’s more than just right and wrong, because hard decisions are not always so clear, and knowing how to make them is an important next step. The communication professional must carry both the understanding of ethical principles and the strict adherence to these values, as well as the ability to adhere to them through media literacy, research, fact-checking, and analytical skills. It’s two-fold: they must have both understanding and ability.

Building ethical understanding for communication professionals

Communication professionals who have thought about potential decisions they might have to make and hold true to their own codes of ethics are more likely to know what to do when faced with these decisions. Courses in Communication ethics, like the one all Communication students take at Saint Vincent, are crucial to help future communication professionals, journalists, PR professionals, and more navigate complex situations with these principles in mind.

Professional communicators are often faced with complicated decisions surrounding the ethics of their work. Decisions surrounding the credibility of sources. Decisions surrounding divulging certain names, or the language used in speaking about people. In business communication, communicators must achieve their company’s financial goals without sacrificing truth, accuracy, others’ privacy, and other obligations. These are just a few of the many examples.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics declares four principles as the “foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media.”

First, Seek Truth and Report it.
Second, Minimize harm
Third, Act Independently
Be Accountable and Transparent

Because of the fast-paced nature of communication today, and its ability to spread quickly to places outside of one’s control, it is crucial that professional communicators adhere to these specific rules around accuracy, truth, respect, and more. Ethical communication is delivering your message in a way that is “clear, concise, truthful and responsible.”

Developing the concrete skills to becoming an ethical communicator

The reality is that it is easy to become a published communicator, but it is a challenge to do so with a strong tie to these principles. How do you truly adhere to principles of accuracy and clarity? You learn how to become a strong writer, you learn how to tell the difference between solid research and accurate sources and something less reliable, and how to check every fact. That is why, in addition to understanding the ethical principles surrounding ethical decision-making, communication professionals must truly understand the work that goes into accurate reporting. Courses like CA 201 Communication Research Methods and CA 230 Writing for Media among others at Saint Vincent work to build these skills so that communication graduates become responsible professionals able to take on the challenges this field faces every day.

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Article contents

Communication ethics.

Lisbeth A. Lipari Lisbeth A. Lipari Department of Communication, Denison University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.58
Published online: 27 February 2017

Communication ethics concerns the creation and evaluation of goodness in all aspects and manifestations of communicative interaction. Because both communication and ethics are tacitly or explicitly inherent in all human interactions, everyday life is fraught with intentional and unintentional ethical questions—from reaching for a cup of coffee to speaking critically in a public meeting. Thus ethical questions infuse all areas of the discipline, including rhetoric, media studies, intercultural/international communication, relational and organization communication, as well as other iterations of the field.

moral reasoning
normativity
communication and critical studies

Introduction

Broadly conceived, ethics concerns the creation and evaluation of goodness, or “the good,” by responding to the general question: How shall we live ? What makes any given decision good or right or wrong? Is it ethically good for governments to persuade poor people to fight, and perhaps die, in wars that disproportionately benefit the wealthy? Is it an ethical good for society to provide access to free and quality education to all children? Are politicians obligated to tell the truth to their constituents regardless of the consequence? By wrestling with the ancient human question of what is good , ethicists disclose the inherently social and political nature of communicative phenomenon—whether they are linked to laws, morals, values, and customs and whether they vary from region to region or culture to culture. The word ethics itself comes from the Greek word ethikos , which means habit or custom, whereas the word moral comes from the Latin translation of the Greek word ethikos . Ethics govern and yet are distinct from law. That is, while laws encode values and customs that will be enforced by the power of the state, more generally ethics concern those values and beliefs (whether enforced by law or not) that a society or group or individual believe will most likely create goodness. But as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others have famously said, one has a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws. And the questions of what makes a law or action just or unjust, who gets to deliberate, and how we decide are some of the central questions of communication ethics.

In the field of communication ethics , scholars draw upon a variety of ethical theories to address questions pertaining to goodness involving all manifestations of communicative interaction. And because both communication and ethics are tacitly or explicitly inherent in all human interactions, everyday life is fraught with intentional and unintentional ethical questions—from reaching for a cup of coffee to speaking up in a public meeting. Thus, ethical questions infuse all areas of the discipline of communication, including rhetoric, media studies, intercultural/international communication, relational and organization communication, and all other iterations of the discipline. Some scholars specialize in communication ethics as a subfield of communication studies with applications to all aspects of the field, while others work more theoretically in search of philosophical inquiry and understanding. After a brief introduction to the history of the field, this article sketches three central characteristics that shape contours of communication ethics scholarship—heterogeneity, interconnectivity, and historicity—and then goes on to follow three central concerns of communication ethics scholarship—integrity, power, and alterity. A brief overview of five modes of ethical reasoning will close the article.

Brief History of the Discipline

Some scholars trace the origins of communication ethics to American public education in the early 1900s, when questions about “speech hygiene” drove researchers to examine the role of education in fostering qualities of moral character and “mental health” in students (Arnett, 1987 ; Gehrke, 2009 ). Scholarship in subsequent decades came to emphasize speech education as a means to prepare citizens for participation, as both speakers and listeners, in democracy, and particularly as a way to resist fascist oratory. Developed at a time when access to education and the democratic process was shifting from elites to the masses, these scholars focused on speech education as a means to develop moral excellence in psychological, cognitive, and communicative terms they traced to the classical canon of rhetoric, such as the great Roman teacher/scholar Quintilian’s definition of rhetoric as “the good man speaking well” (Quintilian, 2006 ). Postwar decades in the United States brought increasing attention to questions of communication ethics involving demagoguery, persuasion, propaganda, and human rights (Lomas, 1961 ; Nilsen, 1960 ; Parker, 1972 ). Central to these studies were concern for accuracy and truthfulness such that “in each persuasive situation there is an ethical obligation to provide listeners with such information as it is possible to provide in the time available and with the medium used” (Nilsen, 1960 , p. 201).

In the 1980s and 1990s, communication scholars affiliated with what was then the Speech Communication Association (now the National Communication Association) inaugurated the first communication ethics commission and, subsequently, the first national conference on ethics (Arnett, Bell, & Fritz, 2010 ). These early scholars, such as Ken Anderson, James A. Jaksa, Richard Johannesen, Clifford Christians, and Ron Arnett, seeded what was to become a fertile field of scholarship connecting all areas of the discipline in ways that bridged philosophical and applied approaches. Also in the latter half of the 20th century , scholars in communication ethics began to wrestle with the problematics of power and truth in order to interrogate ethical questions regarding the relationship between social standpoint and social justice. Influenced by continental theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francoise Lyotard, and Michel Foucault, communication ethics were sometimes characterized by the struggle between objectivist, absolutist questions of truth versus subjective, relativist conceptions of truth. Scholars critical of objectivist perspectives drew upon insights from critical, critical race, feminist, postcolonial and postmodernist theories that challenged prevailing orthodoxies about the nature of identity, the status of the subject, and the role of power in constructing models of “the good.” Scholars such as Molefi Asante, Larry Gross, and Janice Hocker Rushing undertook examinations of the relationship of ethics to racism, sexuality, and sexism (Asante, 1992 ; Gross, 1991 ; Rushing, 1993 ).

Influenced in part by Alasdair MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotlean work, “After Virtue,” as well as Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, public sphere theory, and theory of communicative action, scholars in the last part of the 20th and first part of the 21st century became increasingly interested in ethical questions pertaining to truth conditions in political discourse, such as journalism, political rhetoric, and discourse in the public sphere (Baynes, 1994 ; Ettema & Glasser, 1988 ). At roughly the same time, an increasing number of communication scholars began to draw on the existentialist and hermeneutic continental scholarship of philosophers such as Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas to explore questions of alterity and otherness as it pertained to relational, rhetorical, and mediated communication (Hyde, 2001 ; Pinchevski, 2005 ).

Over the last 100 years, communication ethics has engaged questions about how to create ethical worlds with our communication processes, be they individual, face-to-face, mediated, or institutional. The area of corporate ethics, for example, concerns not “green-leafing” public relations, but institutional practices that create goodness—such as transparency, accountability, and profit-sharing—not just for owners or shareholders, but for all stakeholders including workers, the earth, the animals, and so forth (Groom & Fritz, 2012 ). Some ethicists, such as Zygmunt Bauman, would likely argue that the concept of corporate ethics is itself oxymoronic: “No moral impulse can survive, let alone emerge unscathed from, the acid test of usefulness or profit. All immorality begins with demanding such a test” (Bauman, 1993 ). In short, communication ethics concerns the discernment of the good, seeking to balance the competing values, needs, and wants of multiple constituencies inhabiting pluralistic democracies.

General Characteristics: Heterogeneity, Interconnectivity, and Historicity

At this point in time, communication ethics scholarship can be described by three central characteristics: heterogeneity, interconnectivity, and historicity. Communication ethics is marked by heterogeneity through the sheer multiplicity of ethical concerns, disciplinary contexts, theoretical perspectives, and modes of reasoning it can pursue. A question about deception, for example, could be examined in any number of communication contexts (e.g., social media, political campaigns, workplace organization, family relations), from any of a number of theoretical perspectives or concerns (e.g., ideological, dialogic, rhetorical, universalist), employing any number of modes of ethical reasoning (e.g., virtue, deontological, teleological, care) and any combination within and between these categories. Often ethical perspectives and values bump into one another, and the ethicist may employ multiple modes of thought to weigh the priorities of ethical value against another—questions about harassment for example, concerns the values of freedom of speech balanced against freedom from intimidation and harassment.

But heterogeneity should not be mistaken for relativism (Brummett, 1981 ). 1 Because ethical questions are embedded both tacitly and explicitly in all human interactions, communication scholars look at both covert as well as overt questions of ethics. Mission statements, for example, may set an overt frame for ethical values and ideals that a given organization aspires toward, but they may not facilitate the recognition of more hidden ethical questions that play out in daily operations. Similarly, ethical codes and credos that stipulate their norms and values are often written at the level of the individual and therefore obscure how institutions, organizations, and groups also function as (un)ethical agents. Codes and credos can also interfere with individual ethical agency and decision-making by removing from conscious awareness the need for vigilant attention to ethical issues that may be hidden. Other forms of overt ethics involve public argument, laws, policies, principals, guidelines, and so forth. In contrast, tacit ethics are implicit patterns of communicative interaction institutions that have ethical implications. That is, communication ethics looks not merely at individual agency and intersubjective processes but also at institutional norms, structural arrangements, and systematic patterns. In communication ethics, ethical questions are a question of not (only) individual agency but of shared implicit and explicit habits, norms, and patterns of communicative action. Communication ethics is therefore quite deliberate in examining both overt and covert contexts.

Heterogeneity also arises through the sheer number of values that may come into conflict in any given situation. In the case of hate speech, for example, the values of free speech bump up against the values of freedom from intimidation, harassment, and violation. Similarly, from the purview of communication ethics, context can mean nearly, if not fully, everything. The question of what makes a convincing ethical argument changes from setting to setting. In the context of a religious setting, for example, reasoning based on tradition and authority might take precedence over reasoning based on compassion and care. Within any given religious community, people wrestle with questions about how much they shall be governed by intelligence, compassion, and outcome and how much by faith. When intelligence tells us one thing and compassion another, which should we trust? Similarly, tensions between local and state or federal control can also shape what values or modes of reasoning take precedence. The communication ethicist must face this nearly endlessly multiplicitous diversity in her inquiry into questions of the good.

Because communication ethics is an immanent subfield that, like the myriad processes of communication itself, is inextricable from the deeply interconnected manifestations of all human interaction, our communicative interactions are inevitably intertwined. Interdependency manifests in the recognition that humans are socially embedded beings and therefore that no self exists completely independent of the social conditions (e.g., language, customs, narratives, hierarchies) from which that self emerged. But it is not simply the self that may or may not consciously choose a given action; communication ethicists also look at how actions choose persons. A worker in a health insurance industry is given an incentive to deny health claims knowing not only that if she does not do it someone else will, but that if she refuses she will be fired and her family will lose its insurance, upon which her disabled child depends. How much ethical agency and “freedom” can such a worker exert? Similarly, the financial managers of this company know that without such incentives, the company will lose money leading to layoffs of workers and possibly denial of even more claims. Thus, not only can there be a kind of independent ethical agency that stands apart from the set of relations it inhabits, there is little possibility of any ethical agent perceiving or anticipating all these ethical interconnections. I may serve my family a healthy dinner of quinoa not knowing that, as an indirect result, thousands of peasants high in the Andes can no longer afford to feed their families the very grain they grow.

Communication ethics is also deeply responsive to the historical events, conditions, and conventions that give rise to every communicative interaction. This can be seen in work on public memory, an area fraught with ethical questions—which historical events are commemorated or memorialized, and which are forgotten (Bruner, 2006 ; Vivian, 2010 )? What events rise to the level of national concern—that is, which events are remembered so as to reflect a shared national or cultural identity? Why is there a Holocaust museum but not a Native American genocide museum? Why have there been no reparations for centuries of American slavery? History relates to ethics via other questions of narrative, public and private. What stories are told, from whose point of view? When or how are these stories punctuated, and who speaks and who is ignored? When communication ethics examines concerns of power, it also explores how struggles over meaning and meaning making are always in dialogue with past and present discourses and regimes of power. How do the historical tensions between the differing goals of public education (i.e., serving to foster public goods such as democracy, liberty and citizenship vs. imposing social control through social stratification, compulsory subordination, and coerced conformity) continue to play out in today’s public debates about education policy, from questions of No Child Left Behind to the neoliberal moves to privatization? And what are the implications of education policy for class position, labor conditions, and increasing economic inequality? What has led public discourses about public goods to be subsumed so readily under neoliberal discourses emphasizing self-sufficiency and individual autonomy (Oh & Banjo, 2012 ; Saunders, 2010 )?

Integrity: Truth, Truthfulness, and Trust

Questions of truth and trust have long been at the center of communication ethics inquiry. As she noted in her classic treatise On Lying , Sissela Bok argues that few if any human groups, organizations, institutions, or states could succeed without the background assumptions of truthfulness (Bok, 1979 ). Distinguishing between truth and truthfulness, Bok puts the burden upon an individual’s active intention—intentionally misleading others differs, to Bok, from unknowingly uttering a falsehood. This distinction between conscious intention and unintentional distortion has been central to studies of journalism ethics, where questions of staged, falsified, and censored news are central (Wilcox, 1961 ; Wulfemeyer, 1985 ; Zelizer, 2007 ). Other questions involve the role of objectivity in news, its epistemic (im)possibility, and the ethical implications distinguishing between impartiality and objectivity (Carey, 1989 ; Malcolm, 2011 ; Ward, 2004 ). The role of the press as a watchdog of democracy has also been of central concern to journalist ethicists, principally through its imagined role as the fourth estate (or branch) of American government and the ethical implications of increasingly concentrated corporate ownership (Bagdikian, 2004 ; Huff & Roth, 2013 ; McChesney, 2014 ). A host of other issues, such as censorship, omission, bias, confidentiality, deception, libel, misrepresentation, slander, and witness, have long been central to ethical concerns in journalism. And some scholars, such as Stephen Ward ( 2005 ), have argued for a new philosophical basis for journalism ethics.

But issues of integrity are not just central to journalism—other modes of mediated communication also give rise to ethical questions about appropriation, colonization, and misrepresentation in addition to the kinds of human interactions these media call forth (D’Arcy, 2012 ; Munshi, Broadfoot, & Smith, 2011 ). Jaron Lanier ( 2010 ), for example, has written extensively about ethical questions related to social media, including what he calls “Hive Mind” that induces mob behavior, an overall lack of independence, groupthink, and depersonalization. Lanier also finds fault with social media’s alienation of information from experience and the drive for anonymity that induces violation, reductionism, insincerity, and a general lack of intellectual modesty. Similarly, in an examination of fearless speech, Foucault ( 2001 ) looks into a series of questions about the philosophical foundations of parrhesia: “Who is able to tell the truth? What are the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions which entitle someone to present himself as a truth-teller? About what topics is it important to tell the truth? What are the consequences of telling the truth?”

Ethical questions about truth and truth telling also show up in rhetorical studies, especially those involving regarding history and politics (Johnstone, 1980 ; Newman, 1995 ). Whistleblowing is another communicative phenomenon where issues of integrity meet ethics. Ostensibly, “whistleblowing happens when ethical discourse becomes impossible, when acting ethically is tantamount to becoming a scapegoat” (Alford, 2001 , p. 36). Yet, according to Alford, the common narrative of the whistleblower as a martyr to truth who is seeking institutional redemption is not played out in the lived experiences of whistleblowers. In fact, the whistleblower is by definition only constituted by processes of institutional retaliation wherein the whistleblower is punished and the institution merely carries on. Even laws supposedly aimed to protect whistleblowers function merely at the level of procedure, which work in turn to reinforce institutional power leaving questions of morality as purely private, not public, affairs. “To act politically in this depoliticized public space is to be a scapegoat” (Alford, 2001 , p. 130). Other areas involving integrity in a wide variety of communication ethics contexts include questions of authenticity, betrayal, cynicism, demagoguery, denial, disclosure, distortion, erasure, exposure, falsification, mystification, obfuscation, omission, secrecy, selectivity, silence, surveillance, suspicion, and transparency (Herrscher, 2002 ; Ivie, 1980 ).

Power: Justice, Normativity, and Force

Power is another central thread in communication ethics scholarship that reveals the extent to which politics and ethics are deeply interconnected. Power is here understood to describe the capacity to impose, maintain, repair, and transform particular modes of social structuring that explicitly and implicitly condition our ideas about the good. When ethical values rise to the level of social/cultural importance, they become laws and not merely customs. But all laws and questions of justice are inherently ethical questions insofar as they inherently shape the contours of what any given community conceives of as the good. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, “Politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and the coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out tentative and uneasy compromises” ( 2013 , p. 4). The relationships between ethics and power can be understood in terms of three dimensions—justice, normativity, and force.

Normativity is a form of power with wide-ranging ethical implications. Not only do social norms become a framework within which all forms of the good (and by extension, the bad) may be produced, they also invisibly become part of the interconnected embeddedness of the social that make subjectivity itself possible. Gender, for example, is a form of social normativity with far-ranging ethical implications. Not only do gender conventions govern nearly every conceivable variation of human interaction (from the professions to child raising), violations of gender norms are soundly punished, often violently. Similarly, because every binary includes a hierarchy, in the case of gender male standards are not only normative but unmarked as such even while they serve to set the standard of what is “good” in many situations. Thus evaluations of performance of many communicative actions such as oratory, argument, debate, writing, turn-taking, holding the floor, delivering instruction, and so forth, may appear to be gender neutral when in fact the very standards of quality and merit may be deeply embedded in normatively masculine gender conventions. Thus, because of its relation to ideology as a means of legitimating existing social relations and differences of power, status quo, and common sense, normativity can exert tremendous and often invisible power that inevitable engender ethical questions. Who dictates the terms of what is normative, correct, standard, common sense?

At the same time, however, normativity fuels the very machinery of everyday communicative action. Without predetermined conventions, such as those that govern traffic (street, commerce, or Internet), human interactions would be fraught with peril or even simply impossible. Similarly, what some consider to be the social contract—the implicit moral obligations we have by virtue of being part of society—make everyday life in the shared social world possible. But at the same time, norms and conventions by necessity make some things possible and others impossible. A good example of the role of normativity in ethical questions of power relates to the questions of national and world languages. Language plays a significant role in the production, maintenance, and change in relations of power. For example, although to many native English speakers the United States appears to be a monolinguistic society, the truth is quite the contrary. Some tens of millions of American speak more than 25 languages other than English (not including the more than 175 native American languages now spoken in the United States) with 17.5 million Spanish speakers (Schmid, 2001 ). The implications of exclusive usage and public acceptance of English-only policies and laws involve a constellation of ethical questions ranging from access to recognition (in terms of citizenship, voting, education, courts, medical care, etc.).

Similarly, there are enormous political and ethical implications of so-called world English wherein there are 1.5 billion English speakers in the world, where English is designated as an official language of 62 nations, and where English serves of the dominant language of science, academic publishing, and international organizations (Tsuda, 2008 ). From a global perspective, world English can serve as problem of linguistic hegemony, whereby English dominates as a form of linguistic imperialism with ethical consequences ranging from linguistic and communicative inequality, to discrimination, and colonization of the consciousness (Tsuda, 2008 ). Thus, issues of communicative competence are not ethically neutral but can in fact become political means of social stratification employing linguistic, discursive, and social norms. Because discourses are ways of displaying membership in particular social groups, communicative norms can also serve to include as well as exclude, to mark as insider or outsider, and as a means to regulate other forms of behavior. Other issues of normativity that touch on communication ethics therefore include belonging, civility, codes, community, common sense, conformity, consensus, identity, homogeneity, legitimation, locality, loyalty, mimesis, narrativity, political correctness, precepts, principals, propriety, prudence, ratification, representation, rules, standards, uniformity, unity, and universalism (Lozano-Reich & Cloud, 2009 ).

The area of justice provides yet another means by which power interrelates with communication ethics. Typically, justice revolves around questions of rights, fairness, due process, discrimination, equality, equity, impartiality, participation, privilege, recognition, sovereignty, and so forth. The American political philosopher John Rawls maintained that justice was equivalent to fairness, and he designed a thought experiment called the veil of ignorance as a means to determine principles of justice (as fairness) in a given community. Rawls’s veil was intended to conceal the social position of each participant in the deliberation of justice. In other words, people would deem principles of fairness without knowing where in society they would end up at the end of the day. In Rawls’s view, meritocracy cannot be just unless everyone begins at the same starting line with the same resources, experiences, endowments, etc. So what principles would those behind the veil choose? Rawls says we would choose equal basic liberties for everyone, with social and economic inequalities existing only if they worked to the advantage of the least well off members of society. To Rawls, the facts of inequitable distribution of economic or other success or failure are, to a large degree, outside of our control and thus neither just nor unjust . What is just and unjust is the way that public and political institutions deal with these facts. Some communication ethicists, however, have challenged these Rawlsian ideals of the capacity for neutral imagination (Couldry, Gray, & Gillespie, 2013 ; Munshi, Broadfoot, & Smith, 2011 ).

Explicit and overt questions of communication ethics often involve the values of justice. Ethical credos, honor codes, moral principles, and ethical guidelines often stipulate “right vs. wrong” scenarios as a means to get at the good. When questions of justice need to be arbitrated, deliberative methods that weigh first principles, outcomes, and precedent are often employed. But these themselves often beg the ethical question of who deliberates, under what conditions, and with what resources (Fraser, 1994 ; Habermas, 1989 ). A community dialogue meant to empower citizens largely disenfranchised from the halls of power must contend with questions of access, competence, and convention that underlie the very possibilities of deliberation. For example, when knowledge and communication skills leading to social power are made available to advantaged social groups but are withheld from less advantaged groups in society, a community “dialogue” can inadvertently become an instrument of injustice (Gastil, Lingle, & Deess, 2010 ; Jovanovic, 2012 ). Similarly, inequitable access to the resources of symbolic capital—the prestige, privilege, and education needed to constitute arguments—cannot be just if the allocation of those resources is unequal and available only to a few.

Questions of force are often directly related to justice in that they present manifestations of state and social power that can violently silence, repress, or simply rule “out of order” questions of justice. Force creates situations in which people are not able to speak for themselves, where those in power do not listen, and when the very language needed to articulate claims to justice is not understood. An example of the ethical dimensions of force can be seen in Scott’s ( 1990 ) idea of the “hidden transcript,” a form of hidden public discourse produced by and witnessed only by those without the power to set norms and the claims of justice. As Scott writes, even the most violent political oppression never completely silences the voices of the oppressed—the unspeakable is spoken clandestinely through discourse hidden from those in power: “Most of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in overt collective defiance of power holders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the vast territory between these two polar opposites” ( 1990 , p. 136). Similarly, Squires ( 2002 ) draws on this concept to examine how subordinated groups voice political resistance in disguise, hidden between the lines of the official or public transcript in a multiplicity of coded forms: “In the history of Black public spheres, the pressures of living in a racist society, the ongoing fight for equality, and the rich cultural reserves have necessitated” the use of hidden transcripts (Squires, 2002 , p. 457). Thus explicit force such as prohibitions of speaking and listening are met with implicit and explicit modes of force involving rumor, gossip, disguises, linguistic tricks, metaphors, euphemisms, folktales, and ritual gestures: “For good reason, nothing is entirely straightforward here; the realities of power for subordinate groups mean that much of their political action requires interpretation precisely because it is intended to be cryptic and opaque” (Scott, 1990 , p. 137).

Other forms of the power of force can be seen in the selective aggregation of “big data” by media and Internet conglomerates, or the everyday silencing, censorship, coercion, compulsion, confession, diagnosis, interrogation, negation, marginalization, repression, and prohibition that occur in workplaces, schools, governments, and other organizations where force overtly and covertly serves power (Fairfield & Shtein, 2014 ; Nunan & Di Domenico, 2013 ). But force also resists power in forms such as (re)appropriation, critique, extortion, framing, mobility, negation, networks, parrhesia, speaking truth to power, subversion, and even violence. For example, during the height of state violence in response to the American civil rights movement, a group of Quakers began pamphleteering, witnessing, and organizing in search for forceful responses to violence. In their 1955 pamphlet, “Speak truth to Power,” the Quakers wrote, “if ever truth reaches power, if ever it speaks to the individual citizen, it will not be the argument that convinces. Rather it will be his own inner sense of integrity that impels him to say, ‘Here I stand. Regardless of relevance or consequence, I can do no other’” (Rustin, 1955 , p. 68).

Relation: Alterity and Compassion

Another central thread of communication ethics is the idea of the relation as ontologically basic, meaning that no self can exist outside of the myriad relationships that make up the social matrix of communication. As Martin Buber wrote, “man did not exist before having a fellow being, before he lived over against him, toward him, and that means before he had dealings with him. Language never existed before address” ( 1998 , p. 105). The relational thread of communication ethics calls upon us to never lose sight of the radical alterity, or otherness, of the other. That is, we are asked to never mistake our understanding of the other for the other herself , never to impose our meaning and understanding upon him, never to attempt to absorb/assimilate/appropriate the other into ourselves. We are enjoined to avoid absorbing the other’s difference into my own same .

One of the central concerns of communication ethics pertains to our relation to others and, in particular, to the radical otherness , or alterity, of others. Postmodern and post-colonial literatures have clearly identified and lucidly critiqued the many ways in which political hegemons cast the other in the role of feared and threatening stranger where the other is depicted as without humanity or legitimacy, resulting in patterns of annihilation, oppression, and alienation or of appropriation, assimilation, and absorption. In contrast, the ethical relation to alterity approaches the other as welcomed—as “the stranger, the widow, the orphan” (Levinas, 1969 , p. 77). To Levinas, the other is a moral center to whom one owes everything, and the other must always come first, not last: “To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as ‘Vous’ in a dimension of height” ( 1969 , p. 75).

In writing about this second, ethical sense of alterity, Levinas observes how the other is always more than she appears: “The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me” ( 1969 , p. 51). The acknowledgment of alterity enables speakers to acknowledge, if not honor, radical differences in thought, belief, political and social location, communicative, symbolic and social capital, and so forth. Other aspects of alterity that arise in communication ethics involve relations of alienation, ambiguity, asymmetry, contradiction, cosmopolitanism, discord, diversity, incongruity, interruption, intersectionality, and ostracism (Arneson, 2014 ; Hyde, 2012 ; Pinchevski, 2005 ).

Thus, unlike a Habermasian discourse ethics of the ideal speech situation, where interlocutors are instructed to “bracket status differentials and deliberate as if they were social equals,” (Fraser, 1994 , p. 117), or a Rawlsian theory of justice, which asks interlocutors to deliberate behind a “veil of ignorance,” alterity deliberately invites and acknowledges difference, acknowledging that each of us arrive “on the scene” of communication with different histories, traditions, values, and experiences. The acknowledgment of alterity gives rise to a sense of ethical responsibility—the ability to respond to the other—which leads to compassion. To Buber, therefore, “Genuine responsibility exists only when there is real responding” ( 1975 , p. 16). Ethical compassion arises not because one identifies with the others’ suffering but because one recognizes the other’s alterity, and therefore, her suffering. As Noddings writes, “I do not ‘put myself in the other's shoes,’ so to speak, by analyzing his reality as objective data and then asking, ‘How would I feel in such a situation?’ On the contrary, I set aside my temptation to analyze and plan. I do not project; I receive the other into myself, and I see and feel with the other” ( 1984 , p. 30).

Noddings illustrates the idea of empathic engrossment as our response to an infant crying. We know something is wrong, and the infant’s feeling becomes ours. This is not a problem-solving state, but a feeling-with state. Thus ethical compassion is not vulnerable to ideological ideas about worthy and unworthy suffering but simply feels with the other because she is suffering. Therefore, relational compassion is open to transformation of the self wherein “we are not attempting to transform the world, but we are allowing ourselves to be transformed” (Noddings, 1984 , p. 34). The relational dimension of communication ethics are also important in feminist care-based ethics, focusing less on the rights of individuals and more upon caring responsibilities in relationships (Tronto, 1993 ). Other dimensions of compassion that arise in communication ethics involve acknowledgment, advocacy, affirmation, amnesty, atonement, attunement, embodiment, forgiveness, generosity, gratitude, humility, kindness, leisure, precarity, reconciliation, and sharing (Arnett, 2013 ; Holba, 2014 ).

Discussion of the Literature: Five Modes of Ethical Reasoning

As a branch of philosophy, ethics concerns questions about what makes some actions right and some wrong in a given context. Throughout history all cultures have developed particular doctrines or philosophies of the good, many of which are classified in the West along four primary lines: virtue ethics , which locate the good in the virtuous character and qualities of actions or individuals; deontological ethics , which locate the good in an act or an individual’s adherence to duties or principles; teleological ethics , which locate the good in the consequences of actions and choices; and dialogic ethics , which locate the good in the relations between persons. During the 20th century , postmodern ethics has called these prior ethical theories into question by challenging not merely the value of rules, procedures, systems, and fixed categories for understanding or theorizing ethics, but the humanist ideas of persons as autonomous agents who can act independently as ethical agents. Below are described five such modes of ethical reasoning.

Most commonly associated with the 5th-century bce Greek philosopher Aristotle, virtue ethics focus on the choice, cultivation, and enactment of “virtuous” qualities, such as courage, temperance, truthfulness, and justice, in both the individual and in civic life. In his foundational Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle ( 1998 ) describes how virtue is an expression of character in which we become temperate by doing temperate acts. In the Aristotelian sense, then, ethics are a human activity rather than a creed, principle, or goal. Most religious traditions articulate a number of overlapping virtues, many of which derive in turn from even earlier traditions and cultures. For example, the so-called cardinal virtues of 12th-century Roman Christianity emphasize courage, prudence, temperance, and justice; these were derived from the earlier Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle that in turn derive from far earlier Egyptian wisdom literature (ca. 3000 bce ). Similarly, the 5th-century bce Paramitas of Indian Buddhism stress generosity, patience, honesty, and compassion and are derived in part from virtues articulated in Hindu scriptures that originated around 1000 bce . Further east in 5th-century bce China, both Confusianism and Taoism identified virtues such as empathy, reciprocity, and harmony for the cultivation of an ethical personal and civic life. Even the 18th-century American political virtues of Jeffersonian democracy (inscribed in the Declaration of Independence as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) derive in part from the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia , the happiness caused by living a virtuous life. Outside of religious traditions, contemporary Euro-American theorists of ethical virtue, sometimes called neo-Aristotelians, locate virtue variously, for example, in the enactment of intentions and motives (Phillipa Foot, Michael Slote), in practical action or phronesis (Alasdair MacIntyre), and in the civic value of emotions, especially compassion (Martha Nussbaum).

Deontological ethics (derived from the Greek word for duty ) are most commonly associated with the 18th-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, who constructed a theory of moral reasoning based not on virtues, outcomes, or emotions but on duties and obligations. In his book Foundations for a Metaphysics of Morals , Kant proposes that ethics are based on a universal law that he calls the categorical imperative . Sometimes mistakenly confused with the golden rule (i.e., do unto others as you would have them do unto you ), the categorical imperative holds that a person should only act on the principles that she or he would want everyone else to always act upon. Kant’s universal law is categorical because there are absolutely no exceptions under any conditions, and it is imperative because it is a necessary duty to which everyone must adhere. But the imperative is dictated not by goods in and of themselves, but by logical reasoning. For example, Kant argues that the ethical prohibition against lying is a categorical imperative because if lying were universalized, no one would believe lies, which depend for themselves on public trust. Bok’s work on lying builds upon this logical contradiction inherent in lying. Similarly, the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative—which states that we should never treat people as means to our ends, but always as ends in and of themselves—is readily understood as a universalizable, prohibitive law. Other deontological ethical theories include religious and monastic approaches (such as adhering to divine commands, doctrinal principles, and the fulfillment of monastic vows) and social-contract theories based on the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jeans-Jacques Rousseau. In contemporary Euro-American contexts, deontologists, also called neo-Kantians, have developed rights-based approaches (e.g., John Rawls’s theory of justice ), discourse-based approaches (e.g., Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics ), and contract-based approaches (e.g., Thomas Scanlon’s contractualism ). Significantly for communication, both Habermas’s and Rawls’s theories center on processes of communication from which ethical norms and principles are derived. For example, Habermas’s discourse ethics prescribes the development and acceptance of rationally grounded validity claims and nontranscendable norms that are produced in democratic argumentation, whereas Rawls’s theory of justice relies upon the discursive achievement of overlapping consensus and public reason . Both approaches have been critiqued on a number of grounds from differing theoretical perspectives, including feminist, postmodernist, Marxist, communitarian, libertarian, and noncognitivist. For example, Chantal Mouffe critiques both Habermas’s and Rawls’s theories because they rely upon idealized, conceptually impossible, and hyper-rational models of deliberative democracy.

Sometimes considered the foil of deontological ethics, teleologica l (from the Greek word for goal ) ethical theories (also known as consequentialist ) exercise moral judgments based on the outcomes and consequences of actions rather than on principles, duties, or virtues. Among the most common ethical theories are utilitarianism and ethical egoism . Utilitarianism, associated with the 18th-century British philosophies of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, theorizes that we are ethically bound to do what is best for the most people. According to Mill, for example, actions are good when they promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number . In the contemporary Euro-American context, consequentialist theorists include Peter Singer, who extends utilitarianism to include the good of animals and other beings on the planet; Shelly Kagan, who defends consequentialism from critiques by contemporary deontological ethicists; and Amartya Sen, who applies utilitarian ethics to economics, democracy, and public health. Another form of teleological ethics— ethical egoism (which is sometimes called rational self-interest theory)—theorizes that all ethical actions are ultimately self-serving, even those that appear to be self-sacrificing. Some contemporary theorists argue an ethical egoist position from a psychological point of view that stresses the emotional and social benefits of ethical actions to self, whereas others argue ethical egoism from an evolutionary point of view that stresses the genetic and biological benefits to self. Still others argue ethical egoism from a rational point of view, positing that both individuals and society benefit when each individual benefits. Teleological ethics have been critiqued on a number of grounds from a number of perspectives, especially the deontological and virtue-based approaches. Martha Nussbaum, for example, argues that consequentialist reasoning all too easily leads to a kind of heartless cost-benefit calculation that excludes the full expanses of the ethical.

Associated largely with late 20th-century Euro-American philosophers, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Joseph Caputo, and Michel Foucault, but also with feminist ethicists such as Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, and Nel Noddings, postmodern ethicists critique so-called modernist and enlightenment ethical philosophies such as virtue, deontological, and teleological ethics. Rather than conceptualizing human beings as free, autonomous, independent, and rational agents, as do the modernist theorists, postmodernists view human beings as inter-related, interdependent, contradictory, emotional, and, occasionally at least, irrational social beings. Drawing in part on the 19th-century philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, who crafted a brilliant challenge to traditional religion, philosophy, and morality, postmodern ethicists further reject modernist ideals of certainty, universalism, and essentialism, as well as rules, codifications, and systems. In place of ethical rules or precepts, for example, Zygmunt Bauman posits the idea of moral responsibility in which each person must stretch out towards others in pursuit of the good in all situations, even, or perhaps most especially, when what is the good is most uncertain. Thus, Bauman cautions against certainty, calculation, and precept, arguing that reason alone is an insufficient basis for ethical action. Similarly, feminist ethicists from a range of perspectives, such as Annette Baier’s virtue-oriented ethics to Chantal Mouffe’s Marxist-oriented ethics, critique deontological perspectives such as Rawls’s idea of the priority of the right over the good because it categorically privileges individualistic and abstract rights over collective goods and values. From a somewhat different postmodern perspective, Michel Foucault posits ethics as caring for the self through what he calls a practice of freedom . Joseph Caputo, in contrast, argues against ethics itself and in its place posits the affirmation of the other, the singularity of each ethical situation, and the centrality of the unqualified, unconditional gift that requires precisely those things that are not required.

Rather than theorizing an ethics based in individual character, duty, outcome, or interest, dialogic ethics locates the ethical in the intersubjective sphere of communicative relationships between and among persons. The issues of response and responsibility are woven into the center of dialogic ethics. Associated largely with the work of two 20th-century Jewish European philosophers, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, dialogic ethics posits ethics as first philosophy wherein the ethical relation with the other, rather than the ontology of the self, is understood to be foundational to human experience. To Buber, the person becomes a person by saying Thou and thereby entering into relation with other persons. The Thou , in Buber’s understanding, is not a monadic subjectivity but a relation of intersubjectivity , or development of mutual meaning, that arises from people cohabiting communication exchanges in which understanding arises from what happens in between the subjectivity of persons. To Levinas, one’s personal subjectivity can only arise through one’s own responsibility to the other , who is utterly different from oneself and to whom one owes everything. Dialogic ethics thus requires a healthy respect for the irreducible alerity , or otherness, of persons with whom one has dialogue, wherein the self never mistakes its own understanding of the other for the other herself. In the context of communication studies, dialogic ethics has generated a rich body of research by contemporary scholars such as Kenneth Anderson, Ronald Arnett, Rob Cissna, Michael Hyde, and Jeffrey Murray, wherein the ultimate issues in communication ethics pertain not so much to words themselves but rather to the ethical realm in which communication is constitutive of persons, cultures, publics, and relationships. For example, to Cissna and Anderson, dialogic ethics involve an awakening of other-awareness that occurs in and through a moment of meeting.

In the field of communication, ethicists make use of all of the above theories in approaching questions of ethics in interpersonal, intercultural, mediated, institutional, organizational, rhetorical, political, and public communication contexts. Clifford Christians and Michael Traber, for example, take a deontological approach in searching for ethical universals and protonorms across cultures. In contrast, Josina Makau and Ronald Arnett take a more dialogic approach in a volume on communication ethics and diversity. In contrast, Fred Casmir takes a multi-perspectival approach to intercultural and international communication ethics. More recently, Michael Hyde has drawn on the dialogic ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to explore ethical rhetorical action in personal and public life, and Sharon Bracci and Clifford Christians have brought a wide range of ethical perspectives to bear on a range of communication questions.

In the classroom, communication ethicists emphasize the importance of cultivating attunement to silences, erasures, and misrecognitions that occur when one voice speaks in place of another or when another is silenced. By asking questions such as who speaks, who is heard, or whose voice is rendered unintelligible, students are encouraged to more fully recognize both tacit and overt ethical questions in all manner of communicative interactions. While most communication ethics textbooks tend to include some combination of theory, disciplinary context, and applied context, each tends to principally emphasize one or two of these areas. Some communication ethics textbooks are organized principally around modes of moral reasoning, while others address ethics as it is understood in different areas of the field. Some textbooks are embedded in specific applied contexts such as the workplace or the media, and some attempt to combine theory, disciplinary context, and value.

Addendum: Some Key Themes of Communication Ethics

Websites/other information.

Communication Ethics Division of NCA: http://commethics.org/news/

Institute of Communication Ethics: http://www.communicationethics.net/sales/index.php?nav=book .

Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory: http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/

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35 Communication Ethics and Virtue

Janie M. Harden Fritz (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University. She is a past President of the Eastern Communication Association and the Religious Communication Association. Her research interests include communication and virtue ethics, professional civility, problematic workplace relationships, communication ethics and leadership, and religious communication. She is the author of Professional ↵Civility: Communicative Virtue at Work (Peter Lang, 2013), co-author (with Ronald C. Arnett and Leeanne M. Bell) of Communication Ethics Literacy: Diversity and Difference (Sage, 2009), and co-editor (with Becky L. Omdahl) of volumes 1 and 2 of Problematic Relationships in the Workplace (Peter Lang, 2006, 2012).

Published: 06 December 2017
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Virtue approaches to communication ethics have experienced a resurgence over the last decades. Tied to rhetoric since the time of Aristotle, virtue ethics offers scholars in the broad field of communication an approach to ethics based on character and human flourishing as an alternative to deontology. In each major branch of communication scholarship, the turn to virtue ethics has followed a distinctive trajectory in response to concerns about the adequacy of theoretical foundations for academic and applied work in communication ethics. Recent approaches to journalism and media ethics integrate moral psychology and virtue ethics to focus on moral exemplars, drawing on the work of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, or explore journalism as a MacIntyrean tradition of practice. Recent work in human communication ethics draws on MacIntyre’s approach to narrative, situating communication ethics within virtue structures that protect and promote particular goods in a moment of narrative and virtue contention.

I. Introduction

The field of communication, as it has been studied in the West, has existed for over two millennia, beginning with the ancient Greeks. Questions of ethics were inherent in this domain of scholarly inquiry from the start. 1 Virtue ethics, present explicitly or implicitly throughout the field’s history, has resurfaced as an explicit approach to communication ethics within the last three decades.

The current status of virtue ethics in the field of communication is tied to the field’s scholarly development and identity. The academic domain of communication hosts three loosely affiliated disciplines claiming different histories. 2 One derives from the oral speech tradition, referred to here as human communication studies ; another focuses on mediated (or mass) communication, referred to here as media studies ; and another reflects the profession of journalism. 3 During the last decades, elements of these three areas converged to form the interdisciplinary field of communication, united by the study of communicative practices and/or messages and their meanings and/or effects. 4

Gehrke (2009) suggested that the question of ethics may be “the single most persistent and important question in the history of the study of communication and rhetoric.” 5 This enduring question grows in salience as new media and digital communication technologies reconfigure the interactive landscape of public and private life, placing new demands on journalism and media ethics. 6 Calls for theoretical and philosophical approaches supporting communication ethics scholarship in a globalizing world and concerns about fragmentation as the area of communication ethics expands have elicited volumes such as the inaugural and comprehensive Handbook of Communication Ethics . 7 In this context, virtue ethics offers communication ethics scholars an alternative to complement and enhance existing approaches.

Questions of communication ethics arise whenever human communicative behavior (1) involves significant intentional choice regarding ends and means to secure those ends, (2) holds the potential for significant impact on others, and (3) can be judged according to standards of right and wrong. 8 Ethical issues are inherent in the communication process—human existence is a cooperative, social endeavor in which communicative action holds the potential for influence and necessarily bears moral valence. 9 Communication theorists look to Aristotle’s phronesis , or practical wisdom, to anchor the issue of ethical choice. 10 Ethical decisions are not formulaic, but are discerned in response to the historical moment and constraints of particular situations.

Some journalism and media ethicists understand ethics as a quest for the universal end of human and social improvement, which extends beyond rules and regulations. 11 Plaisance (2002) connects media practices with the human condition in noting the role of media in upholding what it means to be human, a position echoed by Gehrke (2009) , who observes that human communication scholars have long considered the symbolic capacity a defining feature of the human being, necessary for personal and communal well-being. 12 Tying communicative practices to perennial questions related to the good life for human beings, personally and collectively, places communication squarely within the purview of virtue ethics, which offers theoretical and practical grounding for the role of communication in human flourishing.

II. A Turn to Virtue Ethics

During the last fifteen years, explicitly articulated Aristotelian or neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics perspectives have increased, particularly in journalism and media studies. 13 In human communication studies, Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian approaches have enjoyed consistent representation from classical rhetoricians. 14 Now virtue ethics scholarship is making an appearance in other areas of human communication, such as argument, integrated marketing communication, interpersonal and organizational communication, marital communication, and public relations/crisis communication. 15 In journalism/media studies and in human communication studies, the turn to virtue ethics traces an identifiable trajectory. The remainder of this chapter highlights major developments in virtue ethics in these two broad areas of communication scholarship.

One of the major issues emerging from this review is how virtues are best conceptualized, which depends, in turn, on the view of human persons embraced by a given theoretical perspective. Are virtues discrete, internal, individualized properties of persons, much like personality characteristics or traits? Or are virtues situated within larger traditions, such as philosophical or religious worldviews or narratives, which then find embodiment through acting persons’ communicative practices? This concern has been articulated most explicitly in human communication studies, where similar questions related to the nature of communication and the locus of meaning have given rise to discussions of alternative perspectives on communication. 16

III. Virtue Ethics in Journalism and Media Studies

I. answering the call of the historical moment.

Klaidman and Beauchamp’s (1987) The Virtuous Journalist foreshadowed the growing interest in virtue ethics in journalism and media. Beforehand, journalism ethics had taken a largely atheoretical, descriptive approach, loosely based on deontological ethics. 17 Klaidman and Beauchamp argued for both duty-based and virtue ethics as professional guides. Three years later, Edmund B. Lambeth (1990) assessed Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981) work as offering a new perspective for journalism scholarship, particularly journalism ethics. A decade later, virtue-based pieces appeared increasingly in the media ethics literature.

Two major concerns propelled the turn to virtue in journalism and media ethics. One was the need for a philosophical framework for applied journalism and media practice to assist practitioners in navigating an increasingly challenging and dynamic commercial context with the integrity befitting a member of a tradition of professional practice. 18 Another was to develop an adequate philosophical foundation for global media ethics to guide practice in multiple media contexts and across cultural boundaries. 19 To these concerns was added a recent third: the need to take account of developments in the human sciences in ways that could inform ethical theorizing. 20

ii. Representative Scholarship

Scholars in journalism and media ethics appreciate the holistic approach of virtue ethics, which asks questions about what sort of person one should be and what sort of life one should live, rather than what rules one should follow. 21 The broad framework of virtue ethics maintains clarity and rigor without resting on culture-bound norms and values. Some also see virtue ethics as consistent with a malleable, responsive human nature that develops over time while retaining its distinctively human character. 22

Sandra Borden (2007) develops an ethical theory for professional journalists based on MacIntyre’s virtue ethics. She identifies practice-sustaining virtues emergent from the tradition of journalism as practice and as responsive to the environment of contemporary journalism. For example, courage and ingenuity protect journalism against corruption by external goods, such as market competitiveness; stewardship sustains journalists as institutional bearers of the practice by supporting the excellence in news reporting necessary for the success of news organizations; and justice, courage, and honesty support the collegial relationships needed to achieve journalism’s goals through constructive criticism and recognition of excellence, including mutual verification of information. 23

Scholars pursuing virtue ethics in global media, the most prominent of whom are Nick Couldry and Patrick Lee Plaisance, push off from the work of Clifford G. Christians, the leading journalism and media ethics scholar. Christians has worked deductively to establish a foundation for media ethics grounded in dialogic communitarianism, an approach identifying transcultural ethical protonorms and resting on assumptions of the sacredness of life and a relational ontology of the human person. 24 Couldry and Plaisance see virtue ethics as a more fruitful direction for a global media ethics than dialogic communitarianism.

Couldry (2010) articulates four perspectives other than virtue ethics available for media ethics: Christian humanism, based on the work of Christians; nomadism, based on the work of Deleuze or Foucault; Kantian deontological ethics; and Levinasian ethics. 25 Couldry, contrasting virtue ethics and deontology, notes that Aristotelian virtue ethics focuses on human beings rather than on any rational being, an approach responsive to potential areas of agreement about the good among human beings and to the reality of historical contingency. Although Couldry recognizes the possibility of integrating concerns for the right and the good, he argues for virtue ethics because of its open-endedness and applicability to multiple cultures and for its prioritizing of the good for human beings. Virtue ethics offers a starting point in the nature of human beings, a more universal foundation than culturally bound understandings of duty. 26

Couldry ( 2010 , 2013 ) draws on the work of Bernard Williams (2002) and Sabina Lovibond (2002) to identify “communicative virtues” of accuracy and sincerity connected to the human need for reliable information from others about the environment, identifying media as a type of MacIntyrean practice. 27 Two regulative ideals are internal to journalistic practice: circulating information contributing to individual and community success within a given sphere, and providing opportunities to express opinions aimed at sustaining “a peaceable life together” despite disagreements related to “conflicting values, interests, and understandings.” 28 Couldry’s work assumes the relevance of media ethics for both media consumers and producers.

In his later work, Couldry (2013) highlights Ricoeur’s focus on hospitality as a key issue for media ethics. 29 This expanded treatment of Ricouer, beyond the brief mention of Ricoeur’s critique of Rawls in Couldry (2010) , leads to the potential of a “virtue of care through media” consistent with both Onora O’Neill’s (1996) work and that of Lovibond (2013) , who offers an integrated perspective on rights and duties in her perspective on “ethical living” in the media. 30 “Living well through media” and “ethical living through media” together suggest a constructive approach to a media ethics grounded in virtue and duty. 31

Plaisance (2013) considers a virtue ethics approach more robust than a deductive approach predicated on identifying universal principles. The inductive nature of virtue ethics permits identification of “behaviors and practices that are directly linked to human flourishing,” locating their warrant in the human species. 32 Plaisance points to Philippa Foot’s (2001) natural normativity as the virtue ethics approach most suitable for the global media context, noting that a focus on “traditional virtues and vices such as temperance and avarice” permits us to “see the concrete connections between the conditions of human life—the presence and absence of the various necessary ‘goods’—and the objective reasons for acting morally.” 33 These concrete connections are made manifest in selected exemplars of virtuous media practice, which Plaisance (2015) offers in an extended treatment of virtue ethics in the context of media and public relations.

Plaisance (2015) continues his ongoing project to integrate virtue ethics with the findings of moral psychology by presenting and interpreting the results of a study of exemplary professionals in journalism and public relations in a book-length treatment. He provides models of good behavior—exemplars of excellence—rather than failures in ethics, following the lead of positive psychology scholars, 34 as well as strengthening virtue ethics theory in the area of media practices, noting that “our understanding of virtue in professional media work remains both abstract and rudimentary.” 35 His goal is to develop a theory that accounts for virtuous practice, and he identifies factors that lead to or thwart practitioners’ moral action.

Plaisance builds his study on the twin pillars of Philippa Foot’s virtue ethics and Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology. 36 He interprets the study’s qualitative and quantitative findings by drawing on MacIntyre, O’Neill, and Rosalind Hursthouse. 37 Chapters on professionalism and public service, moral courage, and humility and hubris describe contexts within which the participants in his study developed “patterns of virtue” in their professional lives, thereby becoming moral exemplars of virtues for journalism and media practice. 38

The work of journalism and media ethics scholars in virtue ethics takes two forms. One, represented by Borden and Couldry (and Christians), moves outward, focusing on understandings of the human person that embed the human person within a meaning structure, such as a MacIntyrean tradition or another framework. The other, represented by Plaisance, moves inward to identify influences on personal dispositions to explain virtuous behavior. As will be seen in the next section, virtue ethics in human communication scholarship appears to break along similar lines, although the theoretical discussion surrounding these approaches emerges from a different set of underlying concerns.

IV. Virtue Ethics in Human Communication Studies

I. an ongoing story.

Human communication ethics theorists trace their lineage to Aristotle’s connection of persuasion and virtue, and to Quintilian’s assumption that great orators should have excellent character as well as superior oratorical skills. 39 Some version of ethics containing virtue language consistent with an Aristotelian perspective was taken for granted in human communication ethics through the early part of the twentieth century. Moral character was considered key to excellent speaking, and moral training in the tradition of the humanities was considered necessary for effective speech. 40 The mid-1930s, however, witnessed a shift in which virtue-related terms were “redefined into mental health standards” consistent with a mental hygiene approach. 41 Bryngelson (1942), for example, listed “sincerity, humility, and confidence” as characteristics of excellent speakers, but his assumptions about human beings, consistent with mechanistic reductionism and laced with psychoanalytic language, were far different from those undergirding the virtues associated with classical rhetoric. 42

As the human communication field developed during the twentieth century, the basis for communication ethics underwent significant changes. Neo-Aristotelian understandings locating ethics in human nature and society recaptured explicit status in rhetorical studies mid-century in response to challenges from existential understandings of the human being, which denied an essential human nature. 43 In the face of crumbling philosophical foundations for moral judgments characterizing the 1960s and 1970s, rhetoricians who maintained faith in humanist or neo-Aristotelian understandings of human nature as a foundation for moral and ethical judgments kept the language of virtue ethics present in the scholarly literature, 44 even as approaches that understood ethics as “contingent, limited, and variable” surged. 45

Concurrently, methodological differences between social scientists and those committed to the rhetorical and philosophical tradition grew more pronounced. By this point, “the very possibility of moral judgment had been undermined by the prevalence of social scientific and psychotherapeutic understandings of human behavior,” and rhetoric took up ethics as one of its defining elements. 46 Although communication scientists implicitly assumed some human good guiding their quest to predict and explain communicative behavior and thereby improve human well-being, the philosophical foundations for that good and the substance of that well-being, as well as questions of ethics, were seldom, if ever, addressed. 47 The law-like generalizations characterizing communication science, which rested on a materialist ontology accompanied by empiricist methodology, did not accommodate axiological claims. 48

The subfield of interpersonal communication exemplifies an area characterized predominantly by quantitative social science assumptions and methodology. 49 Only recently have questions of ethics from this perspective been raised and addressed explicitly in the scholarly literature. 50 However, an approach to interpersonal communication rooted in dialogic philosophy found traction in a narrative understanding of human communication inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre’s work, which provided a context in which an approach to communication ethics consistent with virtue ethics could be addressed.

ii. By Way of Narrative

The narrative turn in the communication field paralleled that of many areas of academic inquiry seeking to reclaim a sense of human meaning and values lost with the adoption of social scientific methodologies steeped in rationalism and naturalism. 51 Within this context, Walter Fisher articulated the narrative paradigm, an approach to communication that invited understandings of human engagement with the world beyond traditional rationality and reclaimed meaning structures jeopardized by modernism’s subversion of the “rational world paradigm” inherited from the ancients. 52 Ronald C. Arnett’s initial treatment of narrative, which incorporated Fisher’s theorizing, drew also on the scholarship of Stanley Hauerwas, whose work reflected the virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre. 53 Later, MacIntyre’s work played a direct role in Arnett’s conceptualization of practices, traditions, and competing virtue structures in the public sphere. 54

Arnett critiqued the confounding of humanistic psychological approaches to dialogue, which centered meaning within the self, with philosophical approaches, which located meaning in the communicative space between persons emerging during dialogic encounter. 55 For humanistic, or third-force, psychologists, 56 such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, meaning resides within the human person and emerges within a developing self. For Martin Buber, communicative meaning emerges between persons in conversation who are responsive to what the situation calls for. 57 The locus of meaning is not in the mind of persons, but in the interaction, a joint construction of the two parties.

Arnett’s concern in differentiating these approaches focused on implications of the emphasis of humanistic psychology on the “ ‘real self,’ ” which he interpreted as challenging the legitimacy of roles that persons are called to enact in various life contexts and the struggles that persons undergo when seeking an appropriate response that may run counter to impulse. 58 Arnett’s concern was to reduce the unreflective importation of therapeutic language into contexts of public discourse. 59 An emphasis on phenomenological dialogue and narrative moves the focus of attention back to larger meaning structures that situate the self within guidelines that offer direction without assuming universal legitimacy. 60 Arnett (1989) , in his discussion of the importance of a common center for community or for relationships—a mission or goal that keeps people together and in conversation—made a theoretical connection between Buber’s work on dialogue and Fisher’s work on narrative. Narrative, a story larger than any of the participants and irreducible to the sum of their interactions, provides a common meaning center external to the self to bind persons together, even under conditions of personal dislike. 61 Arnett (1989) also conceptualized Buber’s “interhuman” as a story that emerges as participants “simultaneously engage in the writing of the narrative” in which each person becomes a vital participant. 62 Neither the self nor the other is the center—the narrative is. Two senses of narrative become relevant: narrative as a larger story or common center connecting persons who join in participation, and narrative emerging as a joint construction between two persons. Both senses locate meaning not in the person, but between or among persons. By then, narrative communication ethics, a response to the work of MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Fisher, had been identified as an approach to communication ethics, distinguished from universal/humanitarian approaches in its constructed, rather than a priori, nature: narrative is “rooted in community … [and] … constituted in the common communication life of a people.” 63

Arnett’s joining of Fisher’s narrative perspective with Buber’s phenomenological dialogue provided a foundation for understanding the human person as an embedded agent consistent with a MacIntyrean understanding of narrative and tradition, a framework that emerged in a later treatment of dialogic civility in public and private relationships. Drawing from MacIntyre, Arnett and Pat Arneson (1999) framed narrative as a story gathering public assent that provides a location within which embedded agents find meaning and in which virtue is situated. Arnett (2005) applied this framework to the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Arnett, Fritz, and Bell (2009) identified narrative as the location within which a given communication ethic finds traction.

Arnett, Fritz, and Bell (2009) did not claim to be presenting a virtue ethic for communication. However, their work offers a potential conceptualization of a communicative virtue ethics that follows MacIntyre and Charles Taylor (1989) . In the face of the contemporary denial of a human nature that could supply the content of a substantive good to provide meaning and purpose for human life, or a telos , Arnett et al. situate virtue within narrative traditions. Arnett et al. appropriate Taylor’s (1989) notion of the inescapable experience of humans as moral agents located in a space of the good and on the value of human participation in ordinary life, particularly in its communicative, relational contexts, thereby conceptualizing communication ethics as centered on a particular substantive good or goods in human experience given meaning within a narrative structure.

Arnett et al.’s understanding of communication ethics as protecting and promoting goods of, for, and in human life refrains from explicit reference to an ontological telos for human beings. Their work explores communication ethics as a question of literacy related to different perspectives on the good emerging in a postmodern moment of virtue contention. Goods relevant to the virtues emerge from philosophical and religious frameworks or worldviews—narratives—that provide the substance of the good that defines human flourishing; approaches to communication ethics are situated within these virtue structures that define these underlying goods. Since these virtue structures are not shared publicly in today’s historical moment, they must be made explicit in order to identify the narrative ground upon which communicators stand with monologic clarity as they engage in dialogue. 64 From this surfacing of goods, learning from difference and the identification of particular interests emerge as interlocutors discover each other’s perspectives.

Arnett et al. do not assume that character-defining virtues, such as may exist, are best conceptualized as internal characteristics, mental properties, or elements of personality located within an individual self; instead, virtues emerge from worldviews, traditions, or narrative structures that situate persons. Virtues and goods, for Arnett et al., are tied to petite narratives, particular traditions, or worldviews within which persons are situated as embedded agents. In this sense, virtues are tied to character only inasmuch as persons are enactors of traditions of virtue, shaped and formed by those traditions. 65 One may derive from this work that engaging in communicative practices that protect and promote a given good may lead to the inculcation of virtuous character reflective of a particular narrative or worldview. Arnett et al.’s approach to ethics is rooted in an understanding of rhetorical contingency—human beings cannot stand above history, although they are able to glean temporal glimpses of alternative understandings of the world through dialogic engagement with others who inhabit different narratives or traditions. The key virtue or “good” in Arnett et al.’s dialogic communication ethics framework is openness to learning.

Communication ethics, then, can be conceptualized as communicative practices that protect and promote an underlying contextual good—for example, the relationship, the public sphere, health, organizational mission, or culture—assumed to hold meaning within a larger framework. The centrality of the good in ethical considerations guides Arnett et al.’s (2009) understanding of definitions of communication ethics appearing in the literature. These definitions highlight issues such as relativistic and absolute positions, ends and means, “is” and “ought,” and public and private domains of human life; careful discernment of what values are important; attentiveness to the historical moment; choice; information-based judgments; and the “heart” and care for others, all of which become goods protected and promoted by a particular definition of communication ethics. 66 Arnett et al. (2009) revisit approaches to communication ethics through the framework of protecting and promoting goods: universal/humanitarian; democratic; codes, procedures, and standards; narrative; and dialogic ethics. For example, a universal/humanitarian communication ethic protects and promotes the good of universal rationality and of duty, while a codes, procedures, and standards approach protects and promotes the good of agreed-upon regulations, and dialogic ethics protects and promotes what emerges unexpectedly between persons. Each of these approaches could be explored as a virtue ethics approach supporting a good connected to a particular human telos .

The next section explores recent developments in virtue ethics in human communication studies, most of which have emerged within the last decade. These treatments address several specific domains of communicative practice ranging from the interpersonal to the institutional level. Several of them find their roots in the work of MacIntyre.

iii. Virtue Ethics in Human Communication Studies

As noted earlier, the rhetorical tradition maintained a focus on virtue ethics since ancient times, although the ground for this approach departed occasionally from its Aristotelian foundations during the early twentieth century. The revival of interest in Aristotelian virtue ethics on the part of rhetorical scholars, propelled initially by the work of MacIntyre, prompted James Herrick (1992) to conceptualize rhetoric as a practice marked by internal goods. 67 Rhetorical virtues would be “enacted habits of character” prompting apprehension of the ethical nature of rhetorical contexts, appreciation of rhetorical discourse as a practice, and skilled enactment of rhetorical practice. 68

As interest in virtue ethics continued, additional work in rhetorical studies and other areas of human communication emerged. Aberdein (2010) developed a virtue theory of argumentation, expanding the circle of philosophers of virtue ethics theorists relevant to questions of communication. Aberdein draws on Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski’s (1996) work on epistemological virtues and Richard Paul’s (2000) investigation of virtues of critical thinking to identify argumentative virtues, including attention to detail, fairness in evaluating others’ arguments, intellectual courage, and inventiveness. Aberdein offers a typology of four categories of argumentational virtue: willingness to engage in argumentation; willingness to listen to others; willingness to modify one’s own position; and willingness to question the obvious. 69

Fritz’s (2013) work on civility as a communicative virtue draws on Kingwell (1995) , who addresses civility as a modality of virtuous communicative engagement in the public square. Kingwell offers a sociolinguistic understanding of politeness as “just talking,” a method of public deliberation taking place between citizens who hold different positions on issues but who seek to accomplish the shared good of collective decision-making. This approach is consistent with that of Shils, who understood civility as a civic virtue that “enables persons to live and work together by fostering the cooperative action that makes civilized life possible.” 70

Fritz (2013) interprets several domains of communication theory and research within the civility/incivility virtue/vice framework that connect to Kingwell’s (1995) appropriation of communicative pragmatics—tact, restraint, role-taking, and sensitivity to context as civil communication practices necessary for joint action in the public sphere. Civility embodies practical communicative habits of character that define virtuous public interpersonal communication, which protects and promotes the good of the public sphere. 71 In related fashion, Pat Arneson (2014) addresses the virtue of moral courage prompting a fitting response in the service of liberating others in her study of white women’s efforts during the mid-1800s and early 1900s in the struggle to fight racism against black Americans. One virtue perspective on interpersonal communication emerges from a positive approach to communication, which tracks the recent turn in the social sciences to positive approaches to human behavior. 72 Julien Mirivel (2012) suggests that communication excellence embodies virtues in interpersonal communication, employing Aristotle, MacIntyre, and Comte-Sponville (2001) as philosophical touchpoints. For example, the virtue of gentleness involves restraining impulses toward violence and anger, which requires face-attentiveness, or respect for others’ dialectical needs for autonomy and interconnectedness, manifested in deferential verbal forms of address and compliments

Nathan Miczo (2012) bases his approach to virtuous interpersonal communication on Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, Nietzsche, and Comte-Sponville. 73 Communicative virtue is “excellence in ‘words and deeds’ … [that] comprises the performance of behaviors indicative of engagement.” 74 Partners in discourse and a shared object of discourse between them constitute a vital relationship to the world that defines such engagement. Miczo focuses on four dispositions of the virtuous communicator: politeness, compassion, generosity, and fidelity. Politeness requires space for expression and listening. Compassion requires attentiveness to others, which helps bring forth their responses. Through generosity, persons contribute to the conversation to enrich it by sharing positions. Being committed to a position defines fidelity, taking and endorsing a stance. The twin commitments to assisting others in their expression and standing within a position are necessary conditions for dialogue.

Fritz (2013) , drawing on Arnett et al. (2009) and Arnett and Arneson (1999) and following Borden’s (2007) application of MacIntyre to the profession of journalism, articulates professional civility as a virtue-based interpersonal communication ethic for organizational settings. The theoretical foundation of professional civility connects elements from the dialogic civility framework and the conceptualization of civility as a communicative virtue to the notion of profession as practice from a MacIntyrean virtue ethics perspective. 75 Professional civility protects and promotes goods of productivity, place (the organization within which professional work is accomplished), persons (those with whom one works), and the profession itself.

V. Conclusion

Virtue ethics is rising to prominence as an approach to communication ethics. For journalism and media studies, the fit between the conceptual strengths of virtue ethics and issues salient to media practices provides a compelling rationale for application. Borden (2007) and Quinn (2007) , for example, identify virtue ethics as well suited to professional contexts in which journalists must make decisions rapidly, with little time for reflection. For human communication, approaches to virtue ethics offer communication a central theoretical role in meaningful human existence, as exemplified in the work of Herrick (1992) on rhetoric as virtuous practice.

The scholar with by far the largest effect on virtue approaches to communication ethics is Alasdair MacIntyre. His work is a key source for scholars in all areas of communication ethics, from human communication studies to journalism and media. Although some communication scholars take issue with MacIntyre’s conclusions, many find his analysis of the current moral predicament stemming from Enlightenment rationalism and the accompanying loss of a foundation for moral judgment compelling. 76 Taylor and Hawes (2011), for instance, identify themes across communication scholars’ responses to MacIntyre’s work, each suggesting a potentially constitutive role for communication in the enactment of virtue in human communities. In the area of journalism, MacIntyre’s work is foundational for Sandra Borden’s treatment of journalism as practice. Christians, John P. Ferré, and P. Mark Fackler (1993) address problems with the Enlightenment articulated by Alasdair MacIntyre as they seek to establish a new basis for media ethics.

MacIntyre’s work offers a framework resting in tradition and narrative that gives ground for the character traits supplied by virtue ethics, providing a place for the human person within a larger narrative. However, not all applications of virtue ethics in the communication field systematically engage a broad framework for virtue ethics. For example, Philippa Foot, Onora O’Neill, and Rosalind Hursthouse figure prominently in the virtue ethics adopted by media ethics theorists such as Couldry, Plasiance, and Quinn. Although the rationale for such appropriations is the fit between virtue ethics and the nature of the human person, communication scholars make little explicit effort to situate the person within a larger narrative framework or tradition within which virtue finds its form and expression in particular human communities.

Without the larger framework within which to fit virtues, virtue ethics approaches for communication risk a return to what Arnett (1981) critiqued in some humanistic psychologists’ work on dialogue: a focus on the individual as an isolated, autonomous self, rather than on the individual as a person embedded within an enduring tradition, as MacIntyre (2007) articulates. Understanding virtue in an atomistic, discrete manner permits an eliding of character into personality traits or biological propensities, rather than as an essential component of a meaningful narrative structure. A similar transformation took place with the early speech communication scholars’ and teachers’ move to the mental hygiene approaches of psychologists of the 1930s, which resulted in a shift for the ground of virtue ethics from classical teleological understandings to behaviorist and psychoanalytic assumptions. 77 This move may ultimately risk a return to emotivism, an understanding of the good as based on nothing more than personal preference, 78 without a basis in a framework outside the self that anchors and orients human meaning, which some philosophers argue is a defining element of human experience—part of the very ontology implicit in virtue ethics. 79

This risk appears to occur in the work of Mirivel (2012) , one of the positive communication scholars making a turn to virtue, as well as in the media ethics work of Plaisance (2015) . While drawing on several philosophers, including Aristotle, and much established communication research, Mirivel focuses attention on the individual person’s quest for virtue in the interests of living a good life, without articulating assumptions related to a larger worldview or narrative tradition that defines the good life. Plaisance (2015) offers extensive theoretical development, integrating the work of philosophy and moral psychology, acknowledging the place of personal worldview—or ethical ideology—as a contributor to ethical decision-making on the part of practitioners. However, this approach places the nature of moral and ethical judgment within the individual once again, rather than within larger patterns of meaning within which persons as embedded agents find significance and moral purpose.

The virtues emerging from a minimalist agreement on some essentials of human nature may not be thick or robust enough—that is, they would be too loose, undefined, and unstructured—to nourish particular human communities. Agreement on a maximalist framework seems difficult or impossible to achieve. What is needed is a framework somewhere between a thin minimalism and a thick maximalism, adaptable to different cultural configurations, with the ability to accommodate a variety of narrative traditions. Couldry’s (2013) work on understanding media use as MacIntyrean practice does appear to fit human communicative practices within frameworks of the good that transcend the individual person. The work of Christians and colleagues to identify a human ontology as a framework for media ethics is directed toward that end. The concern related to Enlightenment individualism that Christians and his colleagues expressed, as well as concerns related to psychological approaches to dialogue and individualization of ethics noted by Arnett, can be addressed directly by communication scholars working from a virtue ethics perspective. For example, in journalism and media ethics, the work of Christians and colleagues could be usefully conceptualized as a virtue ethics perspective by addressing virtue explicitly within particular narrative traditions, as Borden has done with her work on journalism as practice and as Arnett, Fritz, and Bell (2009) do in framing narrative as a structure within which virtue resides. Finally, Arnett’s treatment of figures such as Arendt, Bonhoeffer, and Buber could be reconceptualized as exemplars of virtuous agents embedded within narrative in order to offer an alternative balance to Plaisance’s (2015) focus on exemplars of virtue from a moral psychology perspective.

1. P. J. Gehrke , The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009) .

2. E.g., W. F. Eadie , “Stories We Tell: Fragmentation and Convergence in Communication Disciplinary History,” The Review of Communication 11 (2011): 161–176 ; P. J. Gehrke and W. M. Keith (eds.), A Century of Communication Studies: The Unfinished Conversation (New York: Routledge, 2015) ; P. Simonson , J. Peck , R. T. Craig , and J. P. Jackson , J. P. (eds.), The Handbook of Communication History (New York: Routledge, 2013) .

Eadie, “Stories We Tell: Fragmentation and Convergence in Communication Disciplinary History.”

Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century , 1.

6. E.g., L. Zion , and D. Craig (eds.), Ethics for Digital Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2015) .

7. C. G. Christians , “The Ethics of Universal Being,” in Media Ethics beyond Borders: A Global Perspective , edited by S. J. A. Ward and H. Wasserman , (New York: Routledge, 2010), 6–23 ; N. Couldry , “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers,” in Media Ethics beyond Borders: A Global Perspective , edited by Ward , S. J. A. Ward and H. Wasserman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 59–72 ; G. Cheney , S. May , and D. Munshi (eds.), The Handbook of Communication Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2011), xi .

8. R. L. Johannesen , “Communication Ethics: Centrality, Trends, and Controversies,” in Communication Yearbook 25 , edited by W. B. Gudykunst (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001), 201–235 .

9. C. Taylor , Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) .

10. R. C. Arnett , “The Status of Communication Ethics Scholarship in Speech Communication Journals from 1915 to 1985,” Central States Speech Journal 38 (1987): 44–61. doi: 10.1080/10510978709368229

11. C. G. Christians and J. C. Merrill , Ethical Communication: Moral Stances in Human Dialogue (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 1 .

12. P. L. Plaisance , “The Journalist as Moral Witness: Michael Ignatieff’s Pluralistic Philosophy for a Global Media Culture,” Journalism 3 (2002): 214 .

13. E.g., T. H. Bivens , “The Language of Virtue: What Can We Learn from Early Journalism Codes of Ethics?” in The Ethics of Journalism: Individual, Institutional, and Cultural Influences , edited by W. Wyatt (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 165–184 ; S. L. Borden , Journalism as Practice: MacIntyre, Virtue Ethics, and the Press (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007) ; N. Couldry , “Living Well in and through Media,” in Ethics of Media , edited by N. Couldry , M. Madianou , and A. Pinchevski (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013), 39–56 ; C. Ess , “Ethical Dimensions of New Technology/Media,” in The Handbook of Communication Ethics , edited by G. Cheney , S. May , and D. Munshi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1204–1220 ; P. L. Plaisance , “The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory,” Communication Theory 15 (2005): 292–313 ; P. L. Plaisance , “Moral Agency in Media: Toward a Model to Explore Key Components of Ethical Practice,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 26 (2011): 96–113 ; P. L. Plaisance , “Virtue Ethics and Digital ‘Flourishing’: An Application of Philippa Foot to Life Online,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 28 (2013): 91–102. doi: 10.1080/08900523.2013.792691 ; P. L. Plaisance , “Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of U.S. Exemplars in News and Public Relations,” Media and Society 9 (2014): 308–325. doi: 10.1177/1077699014527460 ; P. L. Plaisance , Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of Excellence in News and Public Relations (New York: Routledge, 2015) ; A. Quinn , “Moral Virtues for Journalists,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 22 (2007): 168–186 .

Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century .

15. A. Aberdein , “Virtue in Argument,” Argumentation 24 (2010): 165–179. doi 10.1007/s10503-009-9160-0 ; S. Baker , “The Model of the Principled Advocate and the Pathological Partisan: A Virtue Ethics Construct of Opposing Archetypes of Public Relations and Advertising Practitioners,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 23 (2008): 235–253. doi: 10.1080/08900520802222050 ; J. M. H. Fritz , Professional Civility: Communicative Virtue at Work (New York: Peter Lang, 201) ; J. A. Herrick , “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Virtue,” Communication Studies 43 (1992): 133–149 ; R. V. Leeper , and K. A. Leeper , “Public Relations as ‘Practice’: Applying the Theory of Alasdair MacIntyre,” Public Relations Review 27 (2001): 461–473 ; J. J. Maciejewski , “Justice as a Nexus of Natural Law and Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41 (2008): 72–93 ; N. Miczo , “Reflective Conversation as a Foundation for Communication Virtue,” in The Positive Side of Interpersonal Communication , edited by T. J. Socha and M. J. Pitts (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 73–89 ; J. C. Mirivel , “Communication Excellence: Embodying Virtues in Interpersonal Communication,” in The Positive Side of Interpersonal Communication , edited by T. J. Socha and M. J. Pitts (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 57–72 ; J. M. Persuit , Social Media and Integrated Marketing Communication: A Rhetorical Approach (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013) ; M. W. Seeger and R. R. Ulmer , “Virtuous Responses to Organizational Crisis: Aaron Feuerstein and Milt Cole,” Journal of Business Ethics 31 (2001): 369–376 ; B. Strom , “Communicator Virtue and Its Relation to Marriage Quality,” The Journal of Family Communication 31 (2003): 21–40 .

16. E.g., R. T. Craig , “Communication Theory as a Field,” Communication Theory 9 (1999): 119–161 ; B. A. Fisher , Perspectives on Human Communication (New York: Macmillan, 1978) .

17. C. G. Christians , J. P. Ferré , and P. M. Fackler , Good News: Social Ethics and the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) .

E.g., Borden, Journalism as Practice: MacIntyre, Virtue Ethics, and the Press ; Quinn, “Moral Virtues for Journalists.”

19. E.g., C. G. Christians and S. J. A. Ward , “Anthropological Realism for Global Media Ethics,” in Ethics of Media , edited by N. Couldry , M. Madianou , and A. Pinchevski (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013), 72–88 ; Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers” ; Couldry, “Living Well in and through Media” ; Plaisance, “Virtue Ethics and Digital ‘Flourishing’: An Application of Philippa Foot to Life Online.”

Plaisance, Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of Excellence in News and Public Relations .

E.g., Borden, Journalism as Practice: MacIntyre, Virtue Ethics, and the Press ; Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers” ; Quinn, “Moral Virtues for Journalists.”

E.g., Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers.”

Borden, Journalism as Practice: MacIntyre, Virtue Ethics, and the Press , 66–80.

24. Plaisance, “Virtue Ethics and Digital ‘Flourishing’: An Application of Philippa Foot to Life Online” ; Christians, Ferré, and Fackler, Good News: Social Ethics and the Press ; C. G. Christians and M. Traber (eds.), Communication Ethics and Universal Values (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997) ; C. G. Christians , “Ubuntu and Communitarianism in Media Ethics,” Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 25 (2004): 235–256 ; Christians, “The Ethics of Universal Being.”

Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers,” 62.

Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers.”

Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers,” 67; Couldry, “Living Well in and through Media,” 67–68.

Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers,” 68.

In the media ethics context, hospitality is based on the inevitability of our connectedness with others and the effects of media products on others both near and far. Hospitality invites solicitude and care for distant others and the social fabric of communal life on a global scale.

30. Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers,” 53; S. Lovibond , “‘Ethical Living’ in the Media and in Philosophy,” in Ethics of Media , edited by N. Couldry , M. Madianou , and A. Pinchevski (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013), 220–221 .

Couldry, “Media Ethics: Towards a Framework for Media Producers and Media Consumers” ; Lovibond, “ ‘Ethical Living’ in the Media and in Philosophy.”

Plaisance, “Virtue Ethics and Digital ‘Flourishing’: An Application of Philippa Foot to Life Online,” 94.

Plaisance, “Virtue Ethics and Digital ‘Flourishing’: An Application of Philippa Foot to Life Online,” 95.

34. Positive psychology explores factors that contribute to human happiness and optimal human functioning. See M. E. P. Seligman , and M. Csikszentmihalyi , “Positive Psychology: An Introduction,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 5–14 ; K. Rathunde , “Toward a Psychology of Optimal Human Functioning: What Positive Psychology Can Learn from the ‘Experiential Turns’ of James, Dewey, and Maslow,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 41 (2001): 135–153 .

Plaisance, Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of Excellence in News and Public Relations , 1.

36. J. Haidt , “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” Science 316 (2007): 998–1002 .

37. A. MacIntyre , After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) ; O. O’Neill , Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ; R. Hursthouse , “Applying Virtue Ethics,” in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory , edited by R. Hursthouse , G. Lawrence , and W. Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 57–75 .

Hursthouse, “Applying Virtue Ethics,” 75.

39. C. L. Johnstone , “An Aristotelian Trilogy: Ethics, Rhetoric, Politics, and the Search for Moral Truth,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 13 (1980): 1–24 ; H. Johnstone , “The Relevance of Rhetoric to Philosophy and Philosophy to Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 52 (1966): 41–46 ; Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century .

41. Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century , 56. The mental hygiene movement, part of the early twentieth-century Progressive Era, assumed that treatment of maladjusted personalities would lead to decreased social pathology. This understanding was imported into the educational system in the United States in the 1930s; see B. K. Kearl , “Etiology Replaces Interminability: A Historiographical Analysis of the Mental Hygiene Movement,” American Educational History Journal 41 (2014): 285–299 .

42. B. Bryngelson , “Speech and Its Hygiene,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 28 (1943): 86 .

Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century , 90.

44. E.g., C. L. Johnstone, “An Aristotelian Trilogy: Ethics, Rhetoric, Politics, and the Search for Moral Truth” ; H. Johnstone, “The Relevance of Rhetoric to Philosophy and Philosophy to Rhetoric” ; R. T. Eubanks , “Reflections on the Moral Dimension of Communication,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 45 (1980): 297–312, doi: 10.1080/10417948009372458

These views included approaches that argued for a constructed human nature, one built through language rather than prior to language, which prefigured postmodernist approaches to communication theory. Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century , 94, 108, 118.

Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century , 108.

47. K. E. Andersen , “A History of Communication Ethics,” in Conversations on Communication Ethics , edited by K. J. Greenberg (Norwoord, NJ: Ablex, 1991), 3–19 .

48. C. R. Berger and S. H. Chaffee , “The Study of Communication as a Science,” in Handbook of Communication Science , edited by C. R. Berger and S. H. Chaffee , (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987), 15–19 ; J. M. H. Fritz , “Interpersonal Communication Ethics,” in International Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Communication , edited by C. R. Berger and M. L. Roloff (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 889–902 .

49. M. L. Knapp , and J. A. Daly , “Background and Current Trends in the Study of Interpersonal Communication,” in Handbook of Interpersonal Communication , edited by M. L. Knapp and J. A Daly , 4th edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 3–22 .

50. Fritz, “Interpersonal Communication Ethics” ; S. Planalp and J. Fitness , “Interpersonal Communication Ethics,” in The Handbook of Communication Ethics , edited by G. Cheney , S. May , and D. Munshi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 135–147 .

51. W. R. Fisher , “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 1–22 ; D. E. Polkinghorne , Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988) .

Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” 4.

53. R. C. Arnett , Communication and Community: Implications of Martin Buber’s Dialogue (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986) .

54. E.g., R. C. Arnett and P. Arneson , Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) ; R. C. Arnett , J. M. H. Fritz , and L. M. Bell , Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009) .

55. R. C. Arnett , “Toward a Phenomenological Dialogue,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 45 (1981): 201–212 ; R. C. Arnett , “What Is Dialogic Communication? Friedman’s Contribution and Clarification,” Person-Centered Review 4 (1989): 42–60 ; J. Ayres , “Four Approaches to Interpersonal Communication: Review, Observation, Prognosis,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 48 (1984): 408–440 .

56. The term “third force” refers to humanistic psychologists, who sought an alternative to behaviorism and psychoanalysis. See A. Maslow , Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: Van Nostrand, 1968) .

Arnett, “Toward a Phenomenological Dialogue,” 202–203.

Arnett, “Toward a Phenomenological Dialogue,” 2, 4–5.

59. R. C. Arnett , “Dialogic Civility as Pragmatic Ethical Praxis: An Interpersonal Metaphor for the Public Domain,” Communication Theory 11 (2001): 315–338 .

Arnett and Arneson (1999) would later offer a constructive read of Rogers and Maslow, interpreting their efforts as a response to a historical moment marked by loss of meaning; Arnett and Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships .

Arnett, “What Is Dialogic Communication? Friedman’s Contribution and Clarification.”

Arnett, “What Is Dialogic Communication? Friedman’s Contribution and Clarification,” 49.

Arnett, “The Status of Communication Ethics Scholarship in Speech Communication Journals from 1915 to 1985,” 54.

64. R. C. Arnett , “The Fulcrum Point of Dialogue,” American Journal of Semiotics 28 (2012): 105–127 .

65. J. -F. Lyotard , The Postmodern Condition (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984) .

Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference , 30–31.

67. E.g., Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument” ; T. S. Frentz , “Rhetorical Conversation, Time, and Moral Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985): 1–18 .

Herrick, “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Virtue,” 139.

Aberdein, “Virtue in Argument,” 175.

Fritz, Professional Civility: Communicative Virtue at Work , 66.

Arnett, “Dialogic Civility as Pragmatic Ethical Praxis: An Interpersonal Metaphor for the Public Domain” ; Arnett, Fritz, and Bell, Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference .

72. E.g., B. L. Fredrickson , and J. E. Dutton , “Unpacking Positive Organizing: Organizations as Sites of Individual and Group Flourishing,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 3 (2008): 1–3 ; S. Joseph (ed.), Positive Psychology in Practice: Promoting Human Flourishing in Work, Health, Education, and Everyday Life , 2nd edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015) .

73. H. Arendt , Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003) ; F. Nietzsche , Thus Spoke Zarathustra , translated by W. Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1995) .

74. A. Comte-Sponville , A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues , translated by C. Temerson (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 74 .

Arnett and Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships .

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78. A. MacIntyre , After Virtue , 3rd edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) .

79. E.g., B. Taylor and L. C. Hawes , “What Are We, Then? Postmodernism, Globalization, and the Meta-Ethics of Contemporary Communication,” in The Handbook of Communication Ethics , edited by G. Cheney , S. May , and D. Munshi (New York: Routledge, 2012), 99–118 .

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Communication: Ethics

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Ronald C. Arnett 2

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Communication ethics assumes a distinctive perspective of bioethics, engaging it from two principal standpoints: biopolitics and post-human. These two perspectives yield a targeted standpoint on communication ethics. The notion of communication ethics does not suggest a uniform or universal assertion about what is and is not ethical. The term “communication ethics” is more aptly understood within (Gadamer, H. G. (1988). Truth and method . New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company. (Original work published 1975)) conception of “horizon” (p. 217). Theorized in visual terms, a horizon implies a series of images in the distance; the horizon is composed of multiplicity and fuzzy clarity. A horizon is akin to an impressionistic painting that invites a number of glimpses and perspectives, all temporal and partial. The question of bioethics from the vantage point of communication ethics does not dictate correct answers. The task is to open the conversation by unmasking unstated presuppositions. The first obligation of communication ethics is the act of understanding, not the conversion of the ignorant into correct ethical alignment. Communication ethics understood as content or a sense of the good furnishes moral gravity, simultaneously assuming the pragmatic reality of multiplicity. Distancing communicative ethics from universal truth counters imposition, bullying, and historical campaigns reminiscent of colonialism and totalitarianism in the name of self-righteous assurance.

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Arnett, R. C. (2012). Biopolitics: An Arendtian communication ethic in the public domain. Communication and Cultural/Critical Studies, 9 (2), 225–233.

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Arnett, R.C. (2016). Communication: Ethics. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_109

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10.4: The Importance of Ethical and Accurate Language

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E. Michele Ramsey@Penn State-Berks
Millersville University via Public Speaking Project

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language and ethics

As was noted at the beginning of this chapter, language is culturally transmitted—we learn our language from those around us. For most of us this means that we may first learn language from our parents, but as we grow older, other family members, friends, educators and even the media impact our vocabularies and our choices regarding what language we use. Think about a world without language. Quite simply, we’d have no way of participating in our world without it. People constantly produce language to categorize and organize the world.

Think back to our discussion of how language influences your social reality. In my work as a mentor, I tutored a girl in elementary school who had a very difficult time saying the word “lake.” I used the word “lake” as part of a homework exercise. What I had not realized was that she had never seen a lake, either in person or in a picture, or, if she had seen a lake no one had pointed to that body of water and called it a “lake.” The concept of a “lake” was simply not in her reality. No “lakes” existed in her world. This is a key example of how the language that we learn and that we choose to use says something about our social reality.

Consider the above example another way. Let’s say that my young friend had seen a lake and knew how to say the word and what the word referred to, but that she had only been privy to people who used the word negatively. If throughout her life “lakes” were discussed as “bad things” to be avoided, she would have a very different perspective on lakes than most people. Switching this example around a little helps illustrate the fact that language is not neutral. Language carries ideas, and while there is often more than one choice in terms of which word to use, often the words from which you are choosing are not equal in terms of the reality that they communicate.

Think about the difference between calling a specific place “the projects” versus calling that same place “public housing.” Both phrases refer to a particular geographical space, but calling a neighborhood “the projects” as opposed to “public housing” communicates something very different, and more negative, about this neighborhood. Often students use the words that they hear more commonly used, so referring to “the projects” as opposed to “public housing” usually indicates that they have not thought enough about their word choices or thought about the impact of those choices.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. ~ George Carlin

As this example points out, we have a variety of words from which to choose when constructing a message. Successful speakers recognize that in addition to choosing words that help with clarity and vividness, it is important to think about the connotations associated with one word or the other. When speakers are not careful in terms of word choice in this sense, it is possible to lose credibility with the audience and to create the perception that you are someone that perhaps you are not. If you use “the projects” instead of “public housing,” audience members may view you as someone who has negative perceptions of people who live in public housing when you do not feel that way at all. Clearly, not being careful about language choices can be a costly mistake.

But what do these examples have to do with ethics? For our purposes here, there are two ways to think about communication and ethics. First, ethical communication is that which does not unfairly label one thing or another based on personal bias. So, in addition to choosing “public housing” over “the projects,” an ethical speaker will choose terms that steer clear from intentional bias. For example, pro-life

speakers would refrain from calling “pro-choice” people “pro-abortion” since the basic principle of the “pro- choice” position is that it is up to the person, not society, to choose whether or not an abortion is acceptable. That is a very different position than being “pro-abortion.” Indeed, many pro- choice citizens would not choose abortion if faced with an unplanned pregnancy; therefore calling them “pro- abortion” does not reflect the reality of the situation; rather, it is the purposeful and unethical use of one term over the other for emotional impact. Similarly, if a pro-choice person is addressing a crowd where religious organizations are protesting against the legality of abortion, it would not be ethical for the pro-choice speaker to refer to the “anti- abortion” protestors as “religious fanatics.” Simply because someone is protesting abortion on religious grounds does not make that person a “religious fanatic,” and as in the first example, choosing the latter phrase is another purposeful and unethical use of one term over another for emotional impact.

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides. ~ Rita Mae Brown

A second way to link communication and ethics is to remember that ethical speakers attempt to communicate reality to the best of their ability. Granted, as was noted above, each person’s social reality is different, depending on background, influences, and cultural institutions, for example. But regardless of whether you think that a “lake” is a good or bad thing, lakes still exist in reality. Regardless of whether or not you think rocks are useful or not, rocks still exist. So ethical communication also means trying to define or explain your subject in terms that are as closely tied to an objective reality as is possible—it is your best attempt to communicate accurately about your topic. Sexist and heterosexist language are two types of language to be avoided by ethical speakers because each type of language does communicate inaccuracies to the audience.

Screen Shot 2019-07-04 at 11.15.58 PM.png

sexist and heterosexist language

One of the primary means by which speakers regularly communicate inaccurate information is through the use of sexist language. In spite of the fact that the Modern Language Association deemed sexist language as grammatically incorrect back in the 1970s, many people and institutions (including most colleges and universities) still regularly use sexist language in their communication.

An argument I regularly hear from students is that language has “always been sexist.” This is, in fact, not true. As Dale Spender notes in her book,Man Made Language, until 1746 when John Kirkby formulated his “Eighty Eight Grammatical Rules,” the words “they” and “their” were used in sentences for sex-indeterminable sentences (Spender, 1990, pp. 148- 149.) Kirkby’s rule number twenty-one stated that the male sex was more comprehensive than the female and thus argued that “he” was the grammatically correct way to note menand women in writing where mixed sexed or sex-indeterminable situations are referred to (Spender, 1990, pp. 148- 149). Women were not given equal access to education at this time and thus the male grammarians who filled the halls of the academy and had no incentive to disagree with Mr. Kirkby, accepted his eighty-eight rules in full.

Interestingly though, the general population was not as easily convinced. Perhaps because they were not used to identifying women as men in language or perhaps because it did not make rational sense to do so, the general public ignored rule number twenty-one.

Incensed by the continued misuse of “they,” male grammarians were influential in the passing of the 1850 Act of Parliament which legally asserted that “he” stood for “she” (Spender, 1990, p. 150), Yes, you read correctly. Parliament passed legislation in an effort to promote the use of sexist language. And it worked! Eventually the rule was adhered to by the public and thus we have the regular and rarely challenged use of sexist language. But this use of language was not “natural” or even “normal” for many millennia.

Pretending that we haven’t learned about the work of Dale Spender, let’s assume that language has “always been sexist.” Even if language was always sexist, that does not make the use of sexist language right. We wouldn’t make a similar argument about racist language, so that argument isn’t any stronger with regard to language that is sexist. It simply isn’t acceptable today to use sexist language; and by learning to avoid these common mistakes, you can avoid using language that is grammatically incorrect, unethical, and problematic. See Table 10.1 for examples of sexist and non-sexist language.

Is your remarkably sexist drivel intentional, or just some horrible mistake? ~ Yeardley Smith

First, you should avoid the use of what is called the generic “he” or “man,” which is the use of terms such as “mankind” instead of “humankind” or “humanity,” or the use of “man” or “he” to refer to all people. A common response from students with regard to the use of “generic he” is that the word is intended to represent men and women, therefore when it’s used it is not used to be sexist. If it were really the case that people truly recognized in their minds that the term “man” includes women, then we would talk about situations in which “man has difficulty giving birth” (Spender, 1990, p. 156) or the “impact of menstruation on man’s biology.” Of course, we do

not say those things because they simply wouldn’t make sense to us. Perhaps you can now see why the people of the 1700s and 1800s had trouble switching from non-sexist to sexist language—it defied their own common sense just as discussing how “man gets pregnant” defies yours.

Second, you should avoid using man-linked terms , which are terms such as “fireman” or “policemen.” It is appropriate to use these terms when you know that the people you are speaking about are men only, but if you do not know for sure or if you’re talking about groups generally, you should avoid using these types of terms and replace them with “firefighters” and “police officers.” Colleges and universities should replace “freshman” with “first-year students” and so should you. Other, non job-oriented words also suffer from this same problem. People often note that tables need to be “manned” rather than “staffed” and that items are “man-made” instead of “human made” or “handmade.”

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A final common use of sexist language occurs when people use spotlighting when discussing the occupations of men and women. How often have you heard (or used) a phrase such as “he’s a male nurse” or “that female lawyer?” When we spotlight in these ways, we are pointing out that a person is deviating from the “norm” and implying that someone’s sex is relevant to a particular job. According to Peccei, in the English language there is a very strong tendency to “place the adjective expressing the most ‘defining’ characteristic closest to the noun” (Peccei, 2003, p. 118). Thus, as Turner points out, a phrase like the “old intelligent woman” violates our sense of “correct,” not because there’s anything wrong with the word order grammatically, but because it contradicts our customary way of thinking that values youth over age (Peccei, 2003, p. 118). If you talk about a “male nurse” or a “female cop,” you risk communicating to the audience that you believe the most salient aspect of a particular job is the sex of the person that normally does it, and some audience members may not appreciate that assumption on your part.

The use of sexist language is not just grammatically incorrect; its use is also linked to ethics because it communicates a reality that does not exist—it is not accurate. Man-linked language communicates male superiority and that there are more men than women because women are regularly erased linguistically in speech and writing. Man-linked terms and spotlighting communicate that some job activities are appropriate for men but not women and vice versa by putting focus on the sex of a person as linked to their job or activity. Finally, the use of the generic “he” or “man” communicates that men are the norm and women deviate from that norm. If all humans are called “man,” what does that say about women? Sexist language can also limit what young males and females believe that they can accomplish in their lives. Ethical speakers should therefore avoid using language that communicates these sexist practices.

Speakers who choose to continue to use sexist language are not only speaking in a manner that is grammatically incorrect, they are also risking communicating negative ideas about themselves to audience members. Often the use of sexist language is because of a careless error, so be careful about language choice so that you don’t accidentally communicate something about yourself that you didn’t intend or that isn’t true. Remember that if one person in your audience is offended by some aspect of your language use, they may share their opinions with others in the room. If that one person is a leader of the larger group or is someone whose opinions people care about, offending that one audience member may cause you to “lose” many other audience members as well.

Screen Shot 2019-07-04 at 11.38.58 PM.png

Heterosexist language is language that assumes the heterosexual orientation of a person or group of people. Be careful when speaking not to use words or phrases that assume the sexual orientation of your audience members. Do not make the mistake of pointing to someone in your audience as an example and discussing that person with the assumption that she is heterosexual by saying something like, “Let’s say this woman here is having trouble with her husband.” When thinking of examples to use, consider using names that could ring true for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. Instead of talking about Pat and Martha, discuss an issue involving Pat and Chris. Not only will you avoid language that assumes everyone’s partner is of the opposite sex, you will also better your chances of persuading using your example. If the use of sex- specific names doesn’t ring true with members of your audience that are homosexual, it is possible that they are not as likely to continue to listen to your example with the same level of interest. They are more likely to follow your example if they aren’t confronted immediately with names that assume a heterosexual relationship. There are, of course, ethical considerations as well. Because it is likely that your entire audience is not heterosexual (and certainly they do not all hold heterosexist attitudes), using heterosexist language is another way that speakers may alienate audience members. In reality the world is not completely heterosexual and even in the unlikely case that you’re speaking in a room of consisting completely of heterosexuals, many people have friends or relatives that are homosexual, so the use of heterosexist language to construct the world as if this were not the case runs counter to ethical communication.

Communication Ethics: A Vital Resource in an Ever-Changing World (October 2016): Dialogic Ethics—Communication Ethics’ Most Significant Contribution

Early History of Communication Ethics
Professionalization of Communication Ethics

Dialogic Ethics—Communication Ethics’ Most Significant Contribution

Contemporary Scope and Context
Media Ethics
Philosophical and Normative Approaches
Case Studies, Organizational Communication, and Workplaces
Rhetorical Approaches, the Communication Process, and the Public
Pedagogy and Teaching

Works Cited

Virtue, duty, and consequentialist ethics form the foundation of classical ethics study. From a communication ethics standpoint, they originate in philosophy and are applied to communicative actions, such as speaking your mind on what you believe (virtue of courage), not lying even when it is unpleasant news (duty), or not revealing something on a news broadcast that might cause widespread panic (consequential). While built on the foundation of these classical approaches, today’s communication ethics differs dramatically. In particular, there is dialogic ethics, which locates ethics in the communicative relationships between people rather than in philosophical thought. Thinkers in this area include Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, whose work has been expanded by contemporary communication ethicists.

Buber’s I and Thou emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity between persons, suggesting that we relate to others along a continuum of “I-It” to “I-Thou.” In the former, we treat another person as an object and keep her/him at a distance. The latter relationship is one of mutual and shared vulnerability in which there are high levels of trust and intimacy. For Buber, being connected to others is the foundation of our personhood. Conversely, in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority and Otherwise than Being , both by Levinas, the foundation of our personhood is rooted in our responsibility for others as it emerges in communication. For Levinas, ethics is “response-ability” for another person who is radically and infinitely different from the self. Ethics is putting the other before and above one’s self without the expectation of reciprocity, and thereby not viewing the other as an extension of one’s self. Amit Pinchevski’s By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication and Jeffrey Murray’s Face to Face in Dialogue: Emmanuel Levinas and (the) Communication (of) Ethics apply Levinas to the study of communication in terms of dialogue, language, experience, and mediated forms of communication.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on dialogue has also influenced communication ethics. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays provide a philosophical explication of how humans are dialogical beings, composed of many voices and influences. Communication ethicists cite Bakhtin alongside Buber when articulating how the ethical nature of dialogue is fundamentally connected to what it means to be human. Bakhtin’s Toward a Philosophy of the Act critiques Kant’s ethics while also centralizing the importance of action. His notion of “non-alibi of Being” speaks to the primacy of “answerability” related to communicative (and other) actions: we cannot act without being answerable for the decisions, choices, and actions we engage in.

Rob Anderson, Kenneth Cissna, and Ronald C. Arnett spearheaded contemporary examinations of dialogue as an ethical form of communication in their edited volume The Reach of Dialogue: Confirmation, Voice, and Community. It was followed a decade later by Anderson, Leslie Baxter, and Cissna’s seminal edited volume Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies . Another foundational work is Charles Brown and P. W. Keller’s Monologue to Dialogue: An Exploration of Interpersonal Communication , which situated ethics as a dialogic interchange within interpersonal interaction. It proffered early arguments for ethics as a communicative phenomenon, not as a wholly philosophical one. An emphasis on connecting ethics and cooperative communication engagement is maintained in Dialogue and Deliberation by Josina M. Makau and Debian L. Marty. Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope and Interpersonal Relationships by Pat Arneson and Ronald C. Arnett offers a pragmatic philosophical response for people interested in improving interpersonal relationships in an era of cynical communication.

I and thou by Martin Buber Publication Date: 1937

Toward a philosophy of the act by M. M. Bakhtin ISBN: 9780292765344 Publication Date: 1993
The Reach of dialogue: confirmation, voice, and community by Rob Anderson; Kenneth N. Cissna; Ronald C. Arnett; Brenda Dervin (editors) ISBN: 9781881303008 Publication Date: 1994

Monologue to dialogue : an exploration of interpersonal communication by Charles T. Brown and Paul T. Keller ISBN: 9780136008255 Publication Date: 1979

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Ethical communication in a connected world

Journal of Communication Management

ISSN : 1363-254X

Article publication date: 1 February 2016

Catellani, A. (2016), "Ethical communication in a connected world", Journal of Communication Management , Vol. 20 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCOM-11-2015-0088

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Communication Management, Volume 20, Issue 1.

This special issue presents a range of articles dedicated to the analysis of strategic communication and public relations, with an important focus on ethics. A selection of the articles were amongst the best papers presented at the annual congress of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA), held on the 11-13 October 2014 in Brussels, Belgium. The local organiser of the congress was the LASCO laboratory, which is a Belgian research group on public relations and organizational communication (Université catholique de Louvain, in collaboration with IHECS institute, Brussels). The main congress theme was “Communication Ethics in a Connected World”. A number of other papers presented at the congress were recently published in a book (Catellani et al ., 2015).

The 2012 edition of the European Communication Monitor ( www.communicationmonitor.eu) shows that a majority of European communication professionals have been confronted with one or more ethical challenges, and that these experiences are increasing. Significant reasons for this increase include the growing importance of social media and intercultural issues. In our interconnected world, different visions and practices are increasingly closer to each other, creating more ethical challenges. Different social actors, like NGOs and grassroots movements, scrutinise actively the behaviour of businesses and governments, and can criticise them in a very fast and effective way (not forgetting that criticism is also a form of strategic communication).

St Thomas Aquinas stated: “moral acts and human acts are the same” ( idem sunt actus morales et actus humani ). This means that a moral dimension is included in all types of human activities, including PR and communication, which are not purely technical and neutral practices. Instead, they are inherently ethical and political, given their links with the construction of capitals, of relations among groups, of power and/or empowerment and resistance. However, the awareness of this dimension is not equally spread among communication professionals. Additionally, ethical references and skills can vary. According to the European Communication Monitor, ethical codes, proposed over many years by different professional associations, are not always known and used, and they are even considered as outdated by some. The reputation of reputations professionals is at stake, as it has been since the beginning of the twentieth century. Globally, the improvement of ethical levels is an important aspect of the professionalisation process of communication practitioners.

Ethics of communication and PR is present as a central theme in a number of the articles in this issue, which includes five papers; the first three articles are from the EUPRERA congress.

The first paper, “Public Relations interactions with Wikipedia”, is an interdisciplinary research, which uses the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework as an enrichment to the analysis of communication. It is a contribution to the understanding and practice of the crucial relationship between common-pool online media, on one hand, and public relations and strategic communication activities, on the other. The approach of IAD is applied to the analysis of two recent cases of illicit editing of Wikipedia’s entries by PR professionals from the UK, with clear ethical implications.

The second paper, “Datafication: threat or opportunity for communication in the public sphere?”, focuses on the threats and potential of, what is today called, “Big Data” as a new ensemble of resources for strategic communicators. It underlines the fact that Big Data analysis is not a neutral tool, and that a discourse analysis can help in revealing how it can be involved in power strategies, also in order to develop resistance. The paper also deepens the ethical responsibility of communicators in relation to the defence and improvement of the public sphere, of its openness and transparency.

The third paper, “Managing CEO communication and positioning: a cross-national study among corporate communication leaders”, is the first large-scale study on how communication professionals act in order to position Chief Executive Officers and other top executives, in order to manage their presence in the public sphere. The study, which refers to a neo-institutional theoretical framework, involves 21 countries in Europe, and is based on a quantitative online survey.

The fourth paper, “Australian talkback radio prank strategy: a media-made crisis”, concerns an Australian radio show’s use of a prank as a strategy to create scoops. The study, made using textual analysis, focuses on a specific, tragic, episode, instigated by a hoax call, supposedly made by the British Royal family, and explores the subsequent crisis. The paper presents an analysis of news stories and social conversation in three countries, and applies an issue and crisis management approach, not avoiding ethical considerations on the role of media in the public sphere in relation to the common good.

The last paper, “Communication in the heart of policy and the conduct of conduct: government communication in the Netherlands”, focuses on governmental communication in the Netherlands. It is a study on the blurring separation between political communication and governmental communication, in a context of increasing pressure by politicians on professional communicators in the Dutch public service. The study is based on a series of qualitative interviews.

The high-quality papers of this special issue will allow the readers to see the importance of ethics as a crucial variable in the field of strategic communication and PR analysis today.

Professor Andrea Catellani

Faculty of Economics, Social Sciences, and Communication Policies, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Catellani, A., Zerfass, A. and Tench, R. (Eds) (2015), Communication Ethics in a Connected World. Research in Public Relations and Organisational Communication , Peter Lang, Brussels, p. 432

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Ethical Communication in the Workplace

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By Tricia Goodwin Senior Editor, MindEdge Learning

Most of us spend half (or more than half) of our waking hours in the workplace, whether it’s physical or virtual.

At work, we communicate with a range of people with different roles, experiences, cultures, perspectives, and power levels. Knowing how to communicate skillfully across such a wide spectrum of colleagues is an essential skill set in the modern workplace.

Workplace communication often involves the delicate intersection of authority, power dynamics, and collaborative teamwork. We often refer to this intersection as “workplace politics,” though these politics have less to do with the White House and more to do with the underlying attitudes that influence how ideas are received and adopted within a workplace.

But what do we mean by authority and power, and how do these relate to collaborative teamwork? While “authority” is the power that comes with a specific role or title, “power dynamics” refers to the ability of one person to influence the behavior and attitudes of others— and how those others respond to the person with influence. The “power” of one individual or team over others sometimes sets up an unhealthy dynamic that can be reinforced through communication styles. Indeed, the quality and tenor of communication may have a negative impact on different individuals and teams— and that, in turn, can affect the entire company’s well-being.

Over the last few years, the news has been full of stories detailing how communications between authority figures and workplace subordinates have led to deeply troubling power dynamics. Companies, therefore, need to model and practice ethical communication at both the policy and everyday levels, to maintain healthy workplace politics.

“Ethics” refers to the behavior of people to choose the right or best path, and to make the most correct choice from a variety of choices; this includes how and why they communicate with their colleagues and clients. In the workplace, you will face a variety of ethical choices that can influence how others relate to you and how deeply they value you as a coworker. Your communication, therefore, needs to reflect your ethics.

What does it mean, then, to communicate ethically in the workplace?

Honesty should be the cornerstone of all your workplace communications. Honesty builds trust between you and authority figures, as well as between you and your colleagues and clients. Communication can be both verbal and non-verbal. Your actions are just as important as what you say or write. Honest communication not only builds trust, it also helps you and others identify and work on any fissures that may arise in the intersection between authority, power, and teamwork. Without honesty, communication fails at its core purpose.

Transparency

When communicating in your workplace, transparency is key. First, you need to be clear in your purpose and message. You also need to be lawful (i.e., you must know the laws and regulations that govern communication in your industry); reveal any research that contributed to the content of your communication; and identify any errors you’ve made. Your willingness to admit when you are wrong not only shows your degree of honesty, it also shows how you and your colleagues can learn from your mistakes.

Respect is essential to ethical workplace communication. This concept should seem self-evident, yet there are many ways in which a lack of understanding can result in workplace communications that lack proper respect. Consider, for instance, whether there are cultural or gender differences and dynamics in your workplace; if there are, you should fashion a communication plan that builds equitable bridges between these differences, rather than relying on outdated hierarchies that stymie communication.

How can you do this? Be a careful listener, especially to those whose backgrounds and perspectives differ from your own. Use affirmation and encouragement to build bridges between communication gaps. Ask polite questions to help improve your cross-cultural competency, both within your company and outside it. Clue in to personal space, as different cultures have different social norms around personal space. Again, what you do often communicates as much as what you say and write.

Remember that effective, ethical communication is foundational to a healthy work environment, because it is how you represent yourself and your company as a whole. Ethical communication is, therefore, essential to fostering positive, respectful working relationships—both within your workplace, and between your workplace and others.

For a complete listing of MindEdge’s course offerings on business communications skills, click here.

[An earlier version of this article ran in the MindEdge Learning Workshop Blog on April 13, 2018.]

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How to Write an Ethics Paper: Guide & Ethical Essay Examples

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An ethics essay is a type of academic writing that explores ethical issues and dilemmas. Students should evaluates them in terms of moral principles and values. The purpose of an ethics essay is to examine the moral implications of a particular issue, and provide a reasoned argument in support of an ethical perspective.

Writing an essay about ethics is a tough task for most students. The process involves creating an outline to guide your arguments about a topic and planning your ideas to convince the reader of your feelings about a difficult issue. If you still need assistance putting together your thoughts in composing a good paper, you have come to the right place. We have provided a series of steps and tips to show how you can achieve success in writing. This guide will tell you how to write an ethics paper using ethical essay examples to understand every step it takes to be proficient. In case you don’t have time for writing, get in touch with our professional essay writers for hire . Our experts work hard to supply students with excellent essays.

What Is an Ethics Essay?

An ethics essay uses moral theories to build arguments on an issue. You describe a controversial problem and examine it to determine how it affects individuals or society. Ethics papers analyze arguments on both sides of a possible dilemma, focusing on right and wrong. The analysis gained can be used to solve real-life cases. Before embarking on writing an ethical essay, keep in mind that most individuals follow moral principles. From a social context perspective, these rules define how a human behaves or acts towards another. Therefore, your theme essay on ethics needs to demonstrate how a person feels about these moral principles. More specifically, your task is to show how significant that issue is and discuss if you value or discredit it.

Purpose of an Essay on Ethics

The primary purpose of an ethics essay is to initiate an argument on a moral issue using reasoning and critical evidence. Instead of providing general information about a problem, you present solid arguments about how you view the moral concern and how it affects you or society. When writing an ethical paper, you demonstrate philosophical competence, using appropriate moral perspectives and principles.

Things to Write an Essay About Ethics On

Before you start to write ethics essays, consider a topic you can easily address. In most cases, an ethical issues essay analyzes right and wrong. This includes discussing ethics and morals and how they contribute to the right behaviors. You can also talk about work ethic, code of conduct, and how employees promote or disregard the need for change. However, you can explore other areas by asking yourself what ethics mean to you. Think about how a recent game you watched with friends started a controversial argument. Or maybe a newspaper that highlighted a story you felt was misunderstood or blown out of proportion. This way, you can come up with an excellent topic that resonates with your personal ethics and beliefs.

Ethics Paper Outline

Sometimes, you will be asked to submit an outline before writing an ethics paper. Creating an outline for an ethics paper is an essential step in creating a good essay. You can use it to arrange your points and supporting evidence before writing. It also helps organize your thoughts, enabling you to fill any gaps in your ideas. The outline for an essay should contain short and numbered sentences to cover the format and outline. Each section is structured to enable you to plan your work and include all sources in writing an ethics paper. An ethics essay outline is as follows:

Background information
Thesis statement
Restate thesis statement
Summarize key points
Final thoughts on the topic

Using this outline will improve clarity and focus throughout your writing process.

Ethical Essay Structure

Ethics essays are similar to other essays based on their format, outline, and structure. An ethical essay should have a well-defined introduction, body, and conclusion section as its structure. When planning your ideas, make sure that the introduction and conclusion are around 20 percent of the paper, leaving the rest to the body. We will take a detailed look at what each part entails and give examples that are going to help you understand them better. Refer to our essay structure examples to find a fitting way of organizing your writing.

Ethics Paper Introduction

An ethics essay introduction gives a synopsis of your main argument. One step on how to write an introduction for an ethics paper is telling about the topic and describing its background information. This paragraph should be brief and straight to the point. It informs readers what your position is on that issue. Start with an essay hook to generate interest from your audience. It can be a question you will address or a misunderstanding that leads up to your main argument. You can also add more perspectives to be discussed; this will inform readers on what to expect in the paper.

Ethics Essay Introduction Example

You can find many ethics essay introduction examples on the internet. In this guide, we have written an excellent extract to demonstrate how it should be structured. As you read, examine how it begins with a hook and then provides background information on an issue.

In this example, the first sentence of the introduction makes a claim or uses a question to hook the reader.

Ethics Essay Thesis Statement

An ethics paper must contain a thesis statement in the first paragraph. Learning how to write a thesis statement for an ethics paper is necessary as readers often look at it to gauge whether the essay is worth their time.

When you deviate away from the thesis, your whole paper loses meaning. In ethics essays, your thesis statement is a roadmap in writing, stressing your position on the problem and giving reasons for taking that stance. It should focus on a specific element of the issue being discussed. When writing a thesis statement, ensure that you can easily make arguments for or against its stance.

Ethical Paper Thesis Example

Look at this example of an ethics paper thesis statement and examine how well it has been written to state a position and provide reasons for doing so:

The above thesis statement example is clear and concise, indicating that this paper will highlight the effects of dishonesty in society. Moreover, it focuses on aspects of personal and professional relationships.

Ethics Essay Body

The body section is the heart of an ethics paper as it presents the author's main points. In an ethical essay, each body paragraph has several elements that should explain your main idea. These include:

A topic sentence that is precise and reiterates your stance on the issue.
Evidence supporting it.
Examples that illustrate your argument.
A thorough analysis showing how the evidence and examples relate to that issue.
A transition sentence that connects one paragraph to another with the help of essay transitions .

When you write an ethics essay, adding relevant examples strengthens your main point and makes it easy for others to understand and comprehend your argument.

Body Paragraph for Ethics Paper Example

A good body paragraph must have a well-defined topic sentence that makes a claim and includes evidence and examples to support it. Look at part of an example of ethics essay body paragraph below and see how its idea has been developed:

Ethics Essay Conclusion

A concluding paragraph shares the summary and overview of the author's main arguments. Many students need clarification on what should be included in the essay conclusion and how best to get a reader's attention. When writing an ethics paper conclusion, consider the following:

Restate the thesis statement to emphasize your position.
Summarize its main points and evidence.
Final thoughts on the issue and any other considerations.

You can also reflect on the topic or acknowledge any possible challenges or questions that have not been answered. A closing statement should present a call to action on the problem based on your position.

Sample Ethics Paper Conclusion

The conclusion paragraph restates the thesis statement and summarizes the arguments presented in that paper. The sample conclusion for an ethical essay example below demonstrates how you should write a concluding statement.

In the above extract, the writer gives final thoughts on the topic, urging readers to adopt honest behavior.

How to Write an Ethics Paper?

As you learn how to write an ethics essay, it is not advised to immediately choose a topic and begin writing. When you follow this method, you will get stuck or fail to present concrete ideas. A good writer understands the importance of planning. As a fact, you should organize your work and ensure it captures key elements that shed more light on your arguments. Hence, following the essay structure and creating an outline to guide your writing process is the best approach. In the following segment, we have highlighted step-by-step techniques on how to write a good ethics paper.

1. Pick a Topic

Before writing ethical papers, brainstorm to find ideal topics that can be easily debated. For starters, make a list, then select a title that presents a moral issue that may be explained and addressed from opposing sides. Make sure you choose one that interests you. Here are a few ideas to help you search for topics:

Review current trends affecting people.
Think about your personal experiences.
Study different moral theories and principles.
Examine classical moral dilemmas.

Once you find a suitable topic and are ready, start to write your ethics essay, conduct preliminary research, and ascertain that there are enough sources to support it.

2. Conduct In-Depth Research

Once you choose a topic for your essay, the next step is gathering sufficient information about it. Conducting in-depth research entails looking through scholarly journals to find credible material. Ensure you note down all sources you found helpful to assist you on how to write your ethics paper. Use the following steps to help you conduct your research:

Clearly state and define a problem you want to discuss.
This will guide your research process.
Develop keywords that match the topic.
Begin searching from a wide perspective. This will allow you to collect more information, then narrow it down by using the identified words above.

3. Develop an Ethics Essay Outline

An outline will ease up your writing process when developing an ethic essay. As you develop a paper on ethics, jot down factual ideas that will build your paragraphs for each section. Include the following steps in your process:

Review the topic and information gathered to write a thesis statement.
Identify the main arguments you want to discuss and include their evidence.
Group them into sections, each presenting a new idea that supports the thesis.
Write an outline.
Review and refine it.

Examples can also be included to support your main arguments. The structure should be sequential, coherent, and with a good flow from beginning to end. When you follow all steps, you can create an engaging and organized outline that will help you write a good essay.

4. Write an Ethics Essay

Once you have selected a topic, conducted research, and outlined your main points, you can begin writing an essay . Ensure you adhere to the ethics paper format you have chosen. Start an ethics paper with an overview of your topic to capture the readers' attention. Build upon your paper by avoiding ambiguous arguments and using the outline to help you write your essay on ethics. Finish the introduction paragraph with a thesis statement that explains your main position. Expand on your thesis statement in all essay paragraphs. Each paragraph should start with a topic sentence and provide evidence plus an example to solidify your argument, strengthen the main point, and let readers see the reasoning behind your stance. Finally, conclude the essay by restating your thesis statement and summarizing all key ideas. Your conclusion should engage the reader, posing questions or urging them to reflect on the issue and how it will impact them.

5. Proofread Your Ethics Essay

Proofreading your essay is the last step as you countercheck any grammatical or structural errors in your essay. When writing your ethic paper, typical mistakes you could encounter include the following:

Spelling errors: e.g., there, they’re, their.
Homophone words: such as new vs. knew.
Inconsistencies: like mixing British and American words, e.g., color vs. color.
Formatting issues: e.g., double spacing, different font types.

While proofreading your ethical issue essay, read it aloud to detect lexical errors or ambiguous phrases that distort its meaning. Verify your information and ensure it is relevant and up-to-date. You can ask your fellow student to read the essay and give feedback on its structure and quality.

Ethics Essay Examples

Writing an essay is challenging without the right steps. There are so many ethics paper examples on the internet, however, we have provided a list of free ethics essay examples below that are well-structured and have a solid argument to help you write your paper. Click on them and see how each writing step has been integrated. Ethics essay example 1

Ethics essay example 2

Ethics essay example 3

Ethics essay example 4

College ethics essay example 5

Ethics Essay Writing Tips

When writing papers on ethics, here are several tips to help you complete an excellent essay:

Choose a narrow topic and avoid broad subjects, as it is easy to cover the topic in detail.
Ensure you have background information. A good understanding of a topic can make it easy to apply all necessary moral theories and principles in writing your paper.
State your position clearly. It is important to be sure about your stance as it will allow you to draft your arguments accordingly.
When writing ethics essays, be mindful of your audience. Provide arguments that they can understand.
Integrate solid examples into your essay. Morality can be hard to understand; therefore, using them will help a reader grasp these concepts.

Bottom Line on Writing an Ethics Paper

Creating this essay is a common exercise in academics that allows students to build critical skills. When you begin writing, state your stance on an issue and provide arguments to support your position. This guide gives information on how to write an ethics essay as well as examples of ethics papers. Remember to follow these points in your writing:

Create an outline highlighting your main points.
Write an effective introduction and provide background information on an issue.
Include a thesis statement.
Develop concrete arguments and their counterarguments, and use examples.
Sum up all your key points in your conclusion and restate your thesis statement.

Contact our academic writing platform and have your challenge solved. Here, you can order essays and papers on any topic and enjoy top quality.

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The Importance of Ethics in Our Daily Life

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1.3 Ethics in Technical Communication

Ethics is one of the most important topics in technical communication. When you can communicate clearly and effectively, and when it is your task to help others to understand an object, a process, or a procedure, it is your responsibility to do so in an ethical fashion.

Ethics refers to the choices we make that affect others for good or ill . Ethics can also be defined as a set of agreed upon rules (sometimes explicit but often implied) put forth by a company or organization.

As technical communicators, we’re sometimes forced to make difficult ethical choices—from something as seemingly innocuous as “borrowing” another writer’s or researcher’s language or findings and not giving them proper credit (we call that plagiarism), to leaving out crucial findings in a study that shows the harmful effects a household cleaning product can have on small children. And while we’d like to think that we would make the right decision when faced with an ethical dilemma, it isn’t always that simple.

At some point we may be asked to write or communicate something that isn’t exactly or completely true, or we may be asked to not say something that we know is true. What do we do in those situations? Should I write what my supervisor wants me to write even though I know it’s wrong? What if someone gets hurt because of something we’ve done or not done, and where do I draw the line?

Ultimately, we must think about our audience and ask whether we are truly acting in their best interest. Also, ask yourself if you’re willing to take responsibility, both publicly and privately, for what you have written or said? Will you stand behind your message?

As technical communicators, we should always strive to:

Not falsify data or state as truth something we know to be false
Not deliberately misrepresent facts or information
Distinguish between fact and opinion (this is especially important in today’s world)
Not assume that what an “expert” has said is the truth (experts can make mistakes too—and some even lie!)
Avoid language that attempts to evade responsibility (using passive voice , for example: “Mistakes were made.”)
Avoid using language that misleads readers (avoid abstract wording, euphemisms, or jargon, such as legal, technical, and/or bureaucratic)
Use layout/design/visuals to help readers better understand the message (rather than to mislead, deceive, or distract readers)
Not violate anyone’s rights
Act in our audience’s best interest.

As with any ethical issue or moral dilemma, there is usually a variety of opinions based upon people’s politics, personalities, and purposes. From a rhetorical perspective, as with any other technical document, keeping your communications ethical can be achieved by assessing your purpose and considering your audience , language, evidence, and structure (see P.A.L.E.S ).

Ethics for Technical Writers

It is useful to think of ethics as the “appropriate” methods for actions and relating to others in a given environment. As a technical communicator, you will create many documents throughout your professional career. Some may be simple and straightforward, while others may be difficult and involve questionable objectives. Overall, there are a few basic tenets to adhere to whenever you are writing a professional document:

DON’T MISLEAD : Do not write something that could cause the reader to believe something that isn’t true. This can be done by lying, misrepresenting facts, or manipulating numbers to favor your opinion and objectives. You cannot leave out numbers that show you’re behind or over-budget on a project, no matter how well it may work once it is completed. Facts are facts, and they must be represented as such. Be cautious when using figures, charts and tables, making sure they are not misleading. While this may seem obvious, when the pressure is on and there are deadlines to meet, taking shortcuts and stretching the truth are all-too common.

Plagiarism is a form of misleading readers. Plagiarizing is misrepresenting the source or facts, most commonly when you claim the ideas you are writing about are yours. When you are writing and performing research, make sure you are citing the sources of your information and giving credit to all the necessary researchers. At no time is it acceptable to rearrange information in order to attempt to indicate that the writer is the source of someone else’s idea or to indicate that the writer read a report that included information he/she cited, when the primary source of the information was cited in another report. All sources must be referenced accurately in the text and cited on a reference page.This rule also extends beyond writing to what is referred to as intellectual property. Intellectual property includes the following:

Patents – Items whose credit for creation is protected
Trademarks – Company names (WalMart), logos (the McDonald’s M ), or slogans (“Melts in your mouth, not in your hands”)
Copyright law – Items whose distribution is protected by law (books, movies, or software)

None of the above items can be used without proper recognition of or approval from the appropriate company or individual involved.

DON’T MANIPULATE : If you are a professional communicator, it is understood that you have at least a decent ability to write persuasively, even if your first persuasive document was your resume. You have an ethical obligation to not use your ability to persuade people to do what is not in their best interest. It is unethical to persuade readers to make a decision that benefits yourself or your company and not them. Most times, people try to manipulate others to receive some type of reward or gain.To avoid using misleading or manipulating words and phrases, it is important to be open to alternative viewpoints. In preparing any type of persuasive writing, you will come across conflicting viewpoints, so being aware of other views should not be hard. Keep your readers’ ideas and goals in mind and consider what may lie behind their concerns. Discussing several opinions and ideas on a given subject will make you appear more persuasive (and more credible!) and prevent you from appearing biased.
DON’T STEREOTYPE : M ost stereotyping takes place subconsciously now since workplaces are careful to not openly discriminate. It is something we may not even be aware we are doing, so it is always a good idea to have a peer or coworker proofread your documents to make sure you have not made any assumptions or included anything that may be discriminatory. For more information, check out the article from the Purdue OWL on “ Stereotypes and Biased Language s .” For more information on avoiding stereotypes and using gender-inclusive language, see the Tech Whirl article “ Gender-neutral Technical Writing .”

As you put together professional documents and begin writing in the workplace, it is important to understand your ethical responsibilities as a technical communicator. Technical writers have a responsibility to their readers and their employers to follow ethics when writing reports. Technical writers must use words that demonstrate valid appeals to reason and avoid emotional words and phrases that appeal to basic emotion instead of justifiable reasoning. In addition, technical writers must use valid references to support ideas and strategies. Technical writers must also use accurate numbers to report data, avoiding charts and tables that skew data. Using any type of fallacies in technical writing is unethical and could result in dire consequences (see the “ Space Shuttle Challenger “and the “ Behind the Lion Air Crash ” articles as examples).

Ethics of Language

Sometimes the very words and phrasing technical communicators choose can result in unethical practices. Consider the following sentence:

The prosecutor argued that the defendant, who was at the scene of the crime, who had a strong revenge motive, and who had access to the murder weapon, was guilty of homicide.

How might this sentence be considered unethical? If we look at it carefully, we see that the main point (or main clause) is simply: The prosecutor argued that the defendant… was guilty of homicide . Rather than starting the paragraph with that sentence, note how the writer has chosen instead to break it up by using a list of parenthetical points about the defendant (he was at the scene of the crime, he had a strong revenge motive, and he had access to the murder weapon), which in this case works to subordinate (or de-emphasize) the main point. By the time the reader reaches the sentence’s point, which is only that the prosecutor argued that the defendant was guilty of homicide, they have likely formed an impression of the defendant’s assumed guilt.

We can make this sentence more ethically responsible by simply putting the main clause up front and then following it with the three supporting points:

The prosecutor argued that the defendant was guilty of homicide. According to the prosecutor, the defendant was at the scene of the crime, had a strong revenge motive, and had access to the murder weapon.

Even though it essentially says the same thing, the arrangement of information in this example creates a more ethical approach to the sentence: it allows readers to draw their own conclusions about the defendant’s alleged guilt. It also follows a logical and recognizable structure of stating the main point first and then following it with reasons, examples, and/or other forms of evidence.

*To see an example of this lesson in the classroom, watch Will Fleming’s video on ethics :

* While this is just a brief introduction to the much wider and more complex field of ethics, as a technical communicator you should remember that what we write and say affects others; therefore, we have a responsibility to our audience, to ourselves, and to the companies and organizations we represent to be honest, fair and ethical.

Watch the following video, “ Appropriate Language in Technical Writin g ” from Tamara Powell, who explains, among other things, how language becomes an ethical concern if it is imprecise or disrespectful:

Additional Resources

“ Research Ethics ” from WritingCommons.org
“ Introduction to Ethics .” Open Technical Communication

Ethics: its Meaning, Principles, and Importance

This essay about ethics explores its role in guiding human conduct, morality, and interactions. It delves into various ethical paradigms throughout history, including virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and utilitarianism. The essay also discusses contemporary ethical dilemmas in fields like bioethics and environmental ethics, as well as the importance of ethics in professional contexts. Ethics serves as a fundamental framework for navigating moral complexities, from personal decisions to global challenges, ensuring equitable and righteous outcomes in an ever-evolving world.

How it works

Ethics represents a facet of philosophy delving into fundamental inquiries concerning human conduct, morality, and the delineation of right and wrong. It entails scrutinizing the principles governing individual and collective behaviors, furnishing a framework for comprehending the manner in which individuals should exist, act, and engage with one another. Despite often being linked with professional ethics or moral comportment, ethics transcends specific domains, proffering a roadmap for navigating the intricacies of human civilization.

At its nucleus, ethics entails comprehending and evaluating human conduct in terms of justice, equity, and virtue.

Philosophers across epochs have endeavored to elucidate diverse approaches to ethical deliberation. Among the earliest and most influential ethical paradigms stands Aristotle’s virtue ethics, which accentuates the nurturing of moral character attributes or virtues like fortitude, rectitude, and moderation. Aristotle posited that by fostering these virtues, individuals could attain eudaimonia, or human flourishing, perceived as life’s ultimate pursuit.

In contradistinction to virtue ethics, deontological ethics, espoused by Immanuel Kant, revolves around rules and obligations. Kant contended that moral actions should align with universal principles that one could consistently apply to all individuals sans contradiction. For instance, an individual advocating for truthfulness should be willing to witness truth-telling become a universal precept. Kantian ethics is distinguished by the concept of the categorical imperative, positing that individuals ought to act in manners amenable to universal laws.

Utilitarianism, another pivotal ethical framework, adopts a divergent approach. Forged by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism champions actions maximizing aggregate happiness or well-being, spotlighting outcomes over intentions. In utilitarian calculus, an action is deemed morally commendable if it engenders the greatest benefit for the greatest number of individuals. This variant of consequentialism finds applications across diverse spheres, from public policy to economics.

Beyond these archetypal ethical theories, contemporary ethics grapples with pressing modern quandaries. Bioethics tackles ethical conundrums in medicine and biological exploration, contemplating patient rights, the ramifications of genetic manipulation, and the ethical allocation of scarce resources. Environmental ethics scrutinizes the moral obligations humans bear toward the ecosystem, wildlife, and posterity, oft advocating for sustainable practices and preservation.

Ethics also assumes a pivotal role in professional milieus, where it is frequently codified into a corpus of norms dubbed professional ethics. Professions such as jurisprudence, medicine, journalism, and engineering have devised ethical codes to steer practitioners in rendering decisions not only legally compliant but also morally defensible. These directives aid in fostering trust between professionals and the populace, ensuring that their deeds align with broader societal anticipations.

The significance of ethics cannot be overstated. In an era of escalating interconnectivity, ethical deliberations underpin decisions impacting entire communities and polities. Ethical frameworks facilitate the negotiation of moral quandaries posed by technological breakthroughs, globalization, and societal metamorphosis. For instance, issues like data confidentiality, artificial intelligence, and climate transformation all present conundrums necessitating ethical scrutiny to ensure equitable and righteous outcomes.

Furthermore, ethics shapes our personal existences, guiding us in discerning the optimal course of action in scenarios challenging our value systems. The principles we espouse steer our relationships, aspirations, and obligations, both individually and communally.

In summation, ethics furnishes an elemental framework for comprehending how humans ought to comport themselves, whether steered by virtues, precepts, or repercussions. It permeates every facet of human existence, from individual choices to international policies. Through engagement with ethical precepts, individuals and societies can aspire toward impartiality, rectitude, and an enhanced quality of life for all. A grasp of ethics is imperative in navigating the vicissitudes of our swiftly evolving world, ensuring that advancement and advancement are congruent with shared values and the collective welfare.

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Essay on Ethics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on ethics.

Essay on Ethics – Ethics refers to the concepts of right and wrong conduct. Furthermore, ethics is basically a branch of philosophy dealing with the issue of morality. Moreover, ethics consist of the rules of behavior. It certainly defines how a person should behave in specific situations. The origin of ethics is old and it started from the Stone Age . Most noteworthy, over the centuries many religions and philosophers have made contributions to ethics.

Branches of Ethics

First of all, comes the descriptive branch of ethics. Descriptive ethics involve what people actually believe to be right or wrong. On the basis of this, the law decides whether certain human actions are acceptable or not. Most noteworthy, the moral principles of society keep changing from time to time. Therefore, descriptive ethics are also known as comparative ethics. This is because; it compares the ethics of past and present as well as ethics of one society and another.

Normative ethics is another important branch of ethics. Moreover, Normative ethics deals with certain norms or set of considerations. Furthermore, these norms or set of considerations dictate how one should act. Therefore, normative ethics sets out the rightness or wrongness of actions or behaviours. Another name for normative ethics is prescriptive ethics. This is because; it has principles which determine whether an action is right or wrong.

Meta-ethics consists of the origin of the ethical concepts themselves. Meta-ethics is not concerned whether an action is good or evil. Rather, meta-ethics questions what morality itself is. Therefore, meta-ethics questions the very essence of goodness or rightness. Most noteworthy, it is a highly abstract way of analyzing ethics.

Applied ethics involves philosophical examination or certain private and public life issues. Furthermore, this examination of issues takes place from a moral standpoint. Moreover, this branch of ethics is very essential for professionals. Also, these professionals belong to different walks of life and include doctors , teachers , administrators, rulers.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Applications of Ethics

Bioethicists deal with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, and philosophy. Furthermore, Bioethics refers to the study of controversial ethics brought about by advances in biology and medicine .

Ethics also have a significant application in business. Moreover, business ethics examines ethical principles in relation to a business environment.

Military ethics involve the questions regarding the application of ethos of the soldier. Furthermore, military ethics involves the laws of war. Moreover, it also includes the question of justification of initiating military force.

Public sector ethics deals with a set of principles that guide public officials in their service. Furthermore, the public sector involves the morality of decision making. Most noteworthy, it consists of the question of what best serves the public’s interests.

In conclusion, ethics is certainly one of the most important requirements of humanity. Furthermore, without ethics, the world would have been an evil and chaotic place. Also, the advancement of humanity is not possible without ethics. There must be widespread awareness of ethics among the youth of society.

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Importance of Ethics in Communication Essay

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Article contents

Introduction

Brief History of the Discipline

General Characteristics: Heterogeneity, Interconnectivity, and Historicity

Integrity: Truth, Truthfulness, and Trust

Power: Justice, Normativity, and Force

Relation: Alterity and Compassion

Discussion of the Literature: Five Modes of Ethical Reasoning

Addendum: Some Key Themes of Communication Ethics

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35 Communication Ethics and Virtue

I. Introduction

II. A Turn to Virtue Ethics

III. Virtue Ethics in Journalism and Media Studies

ii. Representative Scholarship

IV. Virtue Ethics in Human Communication Studies

ii. By Way of Narrative

iii. Virtue Ethics in Human Communication Studies

V. Conclusion

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Communication Ethics: A Vital Resource in an Ever-Changing World (October 2016): Dialogic Ethics—Communication Ethics’ Most Significant Contribution

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