Ethics revolving around us

Chapter 4- Public Relations Ethics

Today's lecture was all about OCD and no, it is not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but stands for Organizing Chaos Daily, a service that provides its clients a way to handle clutter with an organized system. I found the name of the service very tactful as it is a name no one is likely to forget and organizing is already a part of being OCD in medical terms! So the lecture this morning was basically a guide to the major assignment we were given. OCD was our client and we are to be the potential PR to help the service provider build its

Besides the lecture, i did some reading on Chapter 4- Public Relations Ethics.
In this chapter, there were various key factors that are important to understand. Firstly, we must ask ourselves, what is ethics and what it means to be ethical.

So to answer the first question, we must understand that ethics is everywhere. There are both personal ethics and even more so professional ethics, such as for doctors, teachers, journalists, PR practitioners and so on. In basic terms, ethics is a standard of behaviour, on how our behaviours, as individuals and organizations, can affect the wellbeing of the society. These ethics involve morals and values, which have be instilled ever since a person was young. For example, a basic ethic for an individual that was instilled at a young age is "Don't lie and always tell the truth". These morals and values were instilled by our family, education, culture, religion, reference groups, experience and many more. Therefore, it is also likely that not everyone's ethics, morals and values will be the same.

Thus, after understanding what ethics are we need to consider how a person can be ethical and how at times being ethical is difficult. Howard and Matthews explain that ethical is obvious and natural and therefore choosing ethical behaviours should be "as normal and as unconscious as shaking hands". However, in my opinion, it is not easy to be ethical nowadays, especially in a world full of hurdles. There are now more ethical issues that many people are choosing to ignore and it is simply not "as normal and as unconscious as shaking hands".

We have encountered many unethical behaviours from professionals in like forever. Teachers having relationships with their students, doctors having relationships with their patients, journalists ignoring a person's privacy and so on. A PR practitioner also has its own history of crossing the lines of being ethical. The case study we did on plastic surgery advertising and how it is against the law to do so. However, even if it is against the law and unethical to do so, the PR agent managed to use the media to get media coverage. No, they did not go against the law because they 'used' the media and the media made it easy to be made use of, but, yes it was unethical.

Another particular aspect i learned was the convention of dividing ethics theory, which was put into three groups- virtue, deontology and consequentialism.

Larry Temkin gives an insightful summary on what each of the three are.

The first is the virtue ethics, which asks the question, "what kind of person ought i be". This is as i mentioned above, leans more on personal ethics. It is how a person builds their own values and morals. Even more so, to attain virtue ethics, a person must think for themselves and consider what type of person they want to be and behave.

The second is deontology and this asks the question, "what are my duties?". This form of ethics revolved mainly around the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant who believed that ethics were formed under rules for good behaviour. This would include rules from the bible "The 10 commandment" or codes of conduct from every professional and the most important one, the law itself.

The third and final form of ethic is consequentialism, which asks the question, "how ought the world be?". This for me was the hardest of the three type of ethics to understand. The method for this is to understand two terms: reversibility and universibility. Reversibility is by pretending and placing ourselves in the shoes of the public that will be affected by the actions we are about to execute. Then you think if these actions are acceptable or will they hurt the public in anyway. Universibility on the other hand, is asking whether the action you are about to undertake will make the people working for the firm and the people that you are working for happy.