Frameworks for Ethical Reasoning
One of the nagging questions to emerge from the great corporate scandals at the beginning of the 21st century is “Where were the public relations people at all those companies?”
The two largest companies convicted of accounting fraud—Enron and WorldCom—each had highly paid public relations officers. They managed to get their CEOs—and even their chief financial officers—on the covers of leading publications. Both companies consistently ranked at the top of reputation surveys, lauded for their innovation and reliable earnings growth. Yet, when the music stopped, both companies ended up in bankruptcy, their most senior executives went to jail, and thousands of their employees lost their jobs. Their public relations people were apparently as clueless as the rest of us regarding the financial shenanigans underway deep within their corporate offices.
Maybe they were not part of the “dominant coalition,” as sociologists describe an organization’s leadership. And, if they were, maybe they were not sufficiently curious or appropriately skeptical when talk of cutting accounting corners came up. More likely, they were not around when the books were actually cooked, which usually happens in darkened backrooms with as few witnesses as possible. After all, even the companies’ certified public accountants claim to have been hoodwinked. And they are supposedly expert at ferreting out fraud. So those public relations leaders may not deserve indictment. But they—like we—probably wish they had been more observant and that they had a firmer framework from which to judge the ethics of what was going on around them.
Virtue, Duty, and Consequences
We have now reviewed the major theories of ethical reasoning. Generally, these three approaches differ in their primary focus:
1. Virtue-based ethics is primarily concerned with the character of the person making the decision.
2. Duty-based ethics examines the action in which the person is engaged or considering.
3. Consequence-based ethics considers the results or consequences of an act.
Each of these theories has advantages and limitations. A virtue-based ethic has the advantage of focusing on the specific behavioral characteristics necessary for us to flourish as ethical public relations practitioners. For example, it puts a high premium on truthfulness and honesty, among other virtues. But it also has limitations. It does not provide much guidance on what to do in genuine dilemmas. For example, sometimes ferreting out the truth is not easy, and there can always be good arguments on both sides of what is truly fair. What then? There is no canonical list of virtues and no standard for weighing their relative importance. What if virtues conflict? Is justice more important than loyalty?
A duty-based ethic has the advantage of certainty, identifying the basic obligations we have as rational human beings. For example, Kant reasoned that every rational human being has inherent value. He cautioned us to respect every person’s right to reason and to avoid using people simply as means to accomplishing our own goals. People should never be tricked, manipulated, or bullied into doing things. W. D. Ross (1939, 2002) built on Kant’s theory by recognizing that everyone has multiple duties that need to be balanced in specific situations. Included among those duties is not only to avoid harming others, but to actually do good.
But a duty-based ethic also has some limitations. In practice, it is hard to reconcile conflicting duties. As public relations professionals and practitioners, for example, we have multiple duties to multiple parties—to our employer, to our client, to our family, to our colleagues, to our client’s customers, to our employer’s shareowners, to the practice of public relations, and to society as a whole. Those duties can pull us in different directions, and it is not always obvious which duty should prevail.
A consequence-based ethic solves that dilemma by declaring the right choice in any situation is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Focusing on results is flexible and takes circumstances into account. It considers the consequences for everybody, including society as a whole. And when it is impossible to produce good results, it at least tries to do the least harm. But it also has limitations. It is often difficult to predict the consequences of our decisions. And some consequences are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. How do you measure and compare fear, anger, despair, joy, and uncertainty, which are all potential consequences of public relations practice? Dealing with those issues can slow decision making, which produces bad consequences in itself.
Focusing only on consequences ignores ethically important factors such as intentions and fairness. So an act with good results done by someone intending harm is as good as if it was done by someone who intended to do good. And a total focus on consequences can be inconsistent with human rights. For example, based solely on the consequences, it might appear ethical to move a billionaire to the top of a heart replacement list if he pays for 1,000 other transplants. That might produce a lot of good, but it could produce disastrous consequences for the person currently at the top of the list, who might die.
No one has come up with the perfect ethical theory, one that would bring certainty to the thorniest dilemma and be easy to apply in every situation. Thousands of years into thinking about ethics, we are still pretty much on our own. That is one of the reasons the major public relations associations have drafted ethical codes for their members. Anticipating the most common situations in which public relations people will find themselves and drawing on these ethical theories, they have drafted some basic principles, or rules of the road, for their members.
Codes of Ethics
The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), the International Public Relations Association (IPRA), and the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications Management (GAPR) have all produced thoughtful codes. Copies are easily available online.1
All four codes are in general agreement on the basic principles of ethical behavior, as well as many instances of practical application. For example, they all strike a blow against Astroturfing, masking the source of messages so they appear to come from unbiased people at grassroots of society. The IPRA code, for one, directs members to “be open and transparent in declaring their name, organization and the interest they represent” and not to “create or use any organization to serve an announced cause but which actually serves an undisclosed interest.”
However, as might be expected, the emphasis of each association’s code differs somewhat, reflecting the nature of its members’ work. IABC, which has many internal communications people among its members, is unique in emphasizing cultural sensitivity and “good taste” in its code. PRSA, whose membership skews more toward mid-level public relations practitioners, puts more emphasis on client loyalty, keeping confidences, conflicts of interest, and objectivity. GAPR is focused on positioning public relations as a bona fide profession so it emphasizes continuing education and a practitioner’s duties to the broader society as well as to clients. And appropriate to its global membership, the IPRA Code of Ethics draws heavily from the ideals of the United Nations’s Charter, focusing significant attention on the obligation to respect human rights and “the dignity and worth of the human person.”
PRSA and GAPR urge their members to perform “responsible advocacy,” but leave it to individual practitioners to define what that means in practice. For its part, IPRA suggests responsible advocacy requires that its members “seek to establish the moral, cultural and intellectual conditions for dialog, and [to] recognize the rights of all parties involved to state their case and express their views.” All four codes urge their members to be “truthful,” but are relatively silent on its practical meaning, leaving the door open to communication that muddies the waters of public debate to delay rather than aid decision making.
But the most serious flaw in these codes is their voluntary nature and lackluster enforcement. The PRSA, in particular, has moved away from even pretending to enforce its code, while reserving the right to expel any member “who has been or is sanctioned by a government agency or convicted in a court of law of an action that fails to comply with the Code.”2
A Universal Code?
So the “universal, multilaterally honored code of ethics” envisioned by public relations ethics scholar Dean Kruckeberg in 1989 still seems quite remote. The closest we have come to such a code is IPRA’s, which claims to be “endorsed and subscribed to by professional communicators in all transnational corporations worldwide.” It is unique in throwing cold water on the assertion that bribery is an ethical custom in some countries, warning that members should not “directly nor indirectly offer nor give any financial or other inducement to public representatives or the media, or other stakeholders,” nor should they “propose nor undertake any action which would constitute an improper influence on public representatives, the media, or other stakeholders.”
IPRA is the granddaddy of public relations associations, tracing its roots to a 1949 meeting in London between two Dutch and four British public relations practitioners. Since then, IPRA has grown into an association of senior-level public relations managers in more than 100 countries. One of the IPRA’s most potent contributions has been a decades-long exploration of ethical standards going back to its founding and guided by such leading educators and professionals as Sam Black and Tim Traverse-Healy.
The current version of the IPRA code, ratified in 2011, is a decidedly pragmatic document, warning against “poaching” clients from other members “by deceptive means” and cautioning members “not [to] intentionally injure the professional reputation of another practitioner.” It tells members to “avoid any professional conflicts of interest and to disclose such conflicts to affected parties when they occur.” And it warns that members should “not obtain information by deceptive or dishonest means.”
But it is IPRA Code’s intellectual and moral underpinnings that really set it apart. The original version of the IPRA Code of Ethics was authored by Lucien Matrat of France, adopted at a membership meeting in Athens in May 1965 (known as the Code of Athens), and slightly modified during a meeting in Teheran in April 1968.3 That document put the practice of public relations firmly within the framework of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. While acknowledging that public relations practitioners possess a “power that has to be restrained by the observance of a strict moral code,” it set a constructive purpose for public relations, starting with a firm declaration that “public relations practitioners can substantially help to meet [people’s] intellectual, moral and social needs.” Indeed, the code, as originally conceived and amended in 1968 and 2009, gave public relations people a positive and uplifting charge, including:
To contribute to the achievement of the moral and cultural conditions enabling human beings to reach their full stature and enjoy the indefeasible rights to which they are entitled under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
To establish communications patterns and channels which, by fostering the free flow of essential information, will make each member of the group feel that he/she is being kept informed, and also give him/her an awareness of his/her own personal involvement and responsibility, and of his/her solidarity with other members.
To establish the moral, psychological and intellectual conditions for dialogue in its true sense, and to recognize the rights of these parties involved to state in their case and express their views.
To act, in all circumstances, in such a manner as to take account of the respective interests of the parties involved; both the interests of the organization which he/she serves and the interests of the publics concerned.
Furthermore, in the interests of informed decision making, it instructed public relations professionals to “recognize the right of each individual to judge for himself/herself.” And in requiring members to tell “the truth,” it banned the distribution of information “not based on established and ascertainable facts,” suggesting that information be held to an objective standard of whether it is provably true or false. That is a higher standard than required by many codes, including the current IPRA version. Looking back over his 66-year career, Tim Traverse-Healy, one of the IPRA’s founding members, pinpointed what gives public relations societal meaning and community worth. “In almost equal measure,” he wrote, “these ingredients are truth, paramount concern for the public good, and genuine dialogue.”4
We are unabashed fans of the Code of Athens. At the same time, we understand the need to bring greater focus to the few critical rules of the road that should guide public relations people in their day-to-day practice. For all their limitations, such codes are essential in addressing the ethical challenges professionals and practitioners face in the course of a normal day, from identifying and resolving conflicts of interest to developing strategic communications plans. After all, few public relations practitioners want—or have the time—to apply ethical theory to every decision they have to make, especially not under the pressures of time or conflicting demands.
But in unique situations, or when the codes themselves provide ambiguous guidance, we need more. When we are traveling treacherous roads, or even if we are on a familiar road with unusual twists and turns, no ethical code can provide much more than a high-level map. What we need then is a way to analyze a situation at ground level and measure it against the theories that underlie the codes. We need to be able to build ethical decisions on a relatively sturdy and reliable framework.
That is the Holy Grail of ethical study. And as it happens, many public relations ethicists have developed their own versions of such frameworks. We will briefly outline several before tackling the construction of a personal framework tailored to our own unique needs and perspective.
TARSE Test
The most basic of these ethical frameworks is the TARSE test, which is an acronym for its components—Truthfulness, Authenticity, Respect, Social Responsibility, and Equity. Developed by Sherry Baker and David Martinson in 2001, it draws heavily from the concept of virtuous communication. The idea is that in any persuasive or advocacy campaign, a public relations practitioner should consider five interconnected factors (Baker and Martinson, 2011):
• Truthfulness of the message. Public relations communication must result in an audience with enough information to make an informed choice on the issue being presented.
• Authenticity of the persuader. Public relations practitioners must ask themselves if this message will benefit someone other than their client.
• Respect for the person being persuaded. Communicators should see their audience as “human beings,” and ensure that their messages are shaped and transmitted with appropriate respect.
• Social responsibility for the common good. Public relations campaigns should serve the interests of the public at large. And,
• Equity of the appeal. Public relations practitioners should avoid communication that intentionally takes advantage of the vulnerabilities of a specific audience.
A company called Legacy Learning could have saved $250,000 and a major hit to its reputation if it had applied the TARSE test to its marketing plan. Legacy created a set of DVDs and written materials to teach people how to play guitar and it marketed them through bloggers who claimed to have taken the course and endorsed it, both on their sites and elsewhere on the web. Legacy also linked to the endorsements on its own website. But what people did not know was that the company paid each blogger a commission when its endorsement produced a sale. And some of the bloggers—including a professional musician—had never actually taken the course.
The company’s marketing was not truthful because it withheld a material fact—the bloggers were paid for their endorsements and some of them never took the course. Materiality is defined as a fact that would lead someone to make a different decision had they known it. Knowing that someone is being paid to praise a product would cause most people to question the sincerity of their endorsement. By omitting that information, the company was not giving potential customers the full truth about its product.
This ties in to the second element of the TARSE test—authenticity. Authenticity means a message is genuine or real, exactly as it appears. But Legacy’s message was inauthentic—the people who claimed to have used it to learn to play guitar only said that because they were paid to. No one who knew that would have bought the course.
The next step is to respect consumers, including their right to make a voluntary, intelligent decision. Legacy and its paid bloggers did not respect potential consumers because they withheld relevant information from them.
Equity asks whether a company is treating consumers fairly in its communications. Legacy had a hidden advantage because consumers had no way of knowing its endorsements were not genuine. They were more likely to think the reviews were from regular people like them, not someone being paid off by the company.
The Federal Trade Commission eventually filed a complaint against Legacy for failing to disclose its payments, and the company settled for a $250,000 fine. But the company could have avoided the whole controversy if it had used the TARSE test
Another checklist-like framework teases some broader questions out of the ethical principles we have discussed. These questions potentially apply to more than persuasive communications, and they approach ethical issues from Aristotelian, deontological, and utilitarian perspectives of virtue, duty, and consequences. Each question is relatively simple but carries significant implications.
1. Does this action represent the kind of person I am or want to be? Does it represent the kind of organization I want to belong to? Being an ethical person means more than following rules; it means developing habits of acting in a way that we think good people should act.
2. Am I fulfilling my duties in this situation? Identify the obligations we have in this situation—to ourselves, our client, our employer, and anyone who might be affected. Do those obligations conflict in any way? How can we resolve those conflicts? Do some obligations trump the others? Why? And what should we do about that?
3. Are the people affected by my decision able to make their own choices? We should respect others as individuals who have an innate right to make their own choices free from coercion and interference. We should allow them to make an informed choice. For example, would they choose differently with additional or different information?
4. Am I respecting the rights of everyone involved in this situation? Some rights are codified in laws, which can vary from country to country. Others spring from the intrinsic value we all have as human beings. The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists what many consider essential human rights. The acid test of a right is to ask whether you would claim it for yourself.
5. Will what I propose to do or say produce the best outcomes for everyone affected? Am I maximizing good and minimizing harm for everyone? Do your best to predict the probable short and long-term outcomes and to determine their relative value to different individuals and groups. Then select the action that produces the greatest benefits over costs for everyone affected.
6. Am I doing my part to look out for the common good in this situation? We all live in a community, which requires us to pay attention not just to our own welfare, but also to the general welfare, including the social systems, institutions, and environments on which we all depend. Since we all benefit from these common goods, we all have obligations to protect and grow them.
Each of these questions has strengths and weaknesses, and they probably work best in concert. The character and duties tests could benefit from consideration of outcomes. The best outcomes test might benefit from also considering the common good test. And so forth. There is an approach that combines elements of all these tests. It is called the professional responsibility theory.
Professional Responsibility Theory
Many public relations practitioners straddle two worlds, often uncomfortably. On the one hand, they are advocates for clients, accountable for representing their interests in the marketplace of products and ideas. On the other hand, clients also expect them to be their social conscience, helping them meet their responsibilities to the public at large.
To reconcile the seemingly contradictory roles of professional advocate and social conscience, ethics professors Kathy Fitzpatrick and Candace Gauthier (2001) suggest public relations practitioners conceive of themselves as “professionals.” They believe public relations people, like attorneys, best serve society by attending to the special interests of their clients or employers. While their first loyalty is always to their client, part of that duty is voicing the opinions and interests of the organization’s stakeholders.
They suggest that public relations practitioners should measure their actions against three principles:
1. First, they should carefully consider the harms and benefits of what they propose to do. Harms should be avoided or at least minimized and benefits should be promoted at the lowest cost in terms of potential harms.
2. Second, they should ensure that their actions demonstrate respect for everyone affected. People should be treated with dignity and never solely as means.
3. And third, they should ensure that all rewards and costs implicit in their action should be distributed as fairly as possible.
This tripartite approach promises to bridge the gap between advocacy and social responsibility by giving both roles equal weight. Of course, Fitzpatrick and Gauthier recognize that, in practice, these principles will often conflict with one another. In those cases, they suggest practitioners should fall back on their own values, moral intuition, and character to determine which principle is most important and most controlling. So in essence the theory of professional responsibility includes all three major theories we have discussed—virtue, duty, and consequence.
Kantian Approach
Public relations professor Shannon Bowen has developed an approach that leans heavily on Kant’s concepts of autonomy and respect while building on James Grunig’s concept of two-way symmetrical communications. In fact, Bowen (2004) proposes that ethics could be seen as the “tenth generic principle” of Grunig’s model of public relations excellence. While originally applied to the function of issues management, this approach has obvious relevance to the full practice of public relations.
Bowen’s model starts from the implicit assumption that an issue important enough to examine in detail will usually involve a number of managers from different functions, including public relations. She takes pains to caution that before even starting their inquiry, these managers need to satisfy themselves they have sufficient autonomy to address the issue based on their best reasoning, untainted by self-interest or outside interference, such as concern “this could affect my career” or “the client will look for a new agency if I disagree with her on this.”
“Autonomy releases the public relations practitioner from blinding subjectivity, worrying about the loss of a job, negative repercussions, reciprocity, or maintaining appearances of loyalty before an employer or client,” she writes. “Autonomy frees one to make decisions based on ethics rather than on prudence” (Bowen, 2004, p. 72). Thus freed, the managers can engage in an open discussion of the issue, consulting subject matter experts and even the people affected to gain a clear understanding of the issues at stake. At this stage, managers begin to identify alternative options and can use Kant’s categorical imperative to analyze the ethics of the decisions they are contemplating. For example, to reveal any hidden subjectivity in the managers’ thinking, they could ask the following:
• Could we obligate everyone else who is ever in a similar situation to do the same thing we are considering?
• Would I accept this decision if I were on the receiving end?
• What is my moral duty in this situation, both in regards to myself and to others?
• Does this decision convey to our publics that we have seriously considered their view on the issue?
• Does this decision make us worthy of earning trust, respect, and support from our publics?
Instead of focusing on an uncertain cost–benefit analysis, these questions would encourage public relations people to consider their ethical duty in the situation, to respect the dignity of the people affected by their decision, and to demonstrate that it comes from a morally good intention. In keeping with the two-way symmetrical model, the participants would communicate with stakeholders about their decision-making process from its initial stages through final decision. “Communication should be ongoing and used to contribute to the decision-making process, as well as to communicate with publics about the decision,” Bowen (2004, p. 83) suggests. Indeed, she believes continuous communication with affected publics should be the hallmark of issue management, identifying emerging issues as they arise so they can be addressed and resolved.
Ironically, the principal obstacle Bowen (2004) sees in implementing this approach would be familiar to most senior practitioners—autonomy. “Loyalties to client, employer, the media, and the self as a moral decision maker often conflict in an ethical dilemma,” she observes. But the process she recommends requires a practitioner to “diligently strive for an objective view of the situation,” removing himself or herself from personal considerations and retributive concerns (p. 84). Indeed that would require an unusual degree of self-confidence rooted not only in an assessment of one’s skills and judgment, but also in an unassailable grasp of what is right.
Bowen argues that, “answering the question, ‘what is ethically right?’ commands consideration of the consequences of a decision, without requiring a decision to be dictated by those consequences.” And she adds that “the ramifications of a decision” should be “thoroughly considered” and might even “modify” the decision to do “what duty indicates is ethically right” (Bowen, 2004, p. 86).
Summary
In this chapter, we have considered a range of approaches to ethical decision making, from the starkly pragmatic to the deeply philosophical. Look closely enough and you will see elements of all three major theories we have studied in each —virtue, duty, and consequences. Each approach has advantages and limitations. The lofty principles of codes of conduct, for example, are subject to widely varying interpretation. The TARSE test is most easily applied to persuasive communications, but has limited application to other areas of practice. The six questions and professional responsibility approaches ask the right questions, but offer little help in resolving conflicts when answers inevitably clash. And even though Bowen’s approach is deeply rooted in Kantian notions of autonomy and universality, it leaves room for a consideration of consequences.
We agree, but it seems to us the loophole Bowen opens should be the main portal to any ethical decision—how will this affect the people concerned? W. D. Ross (1939, 2002) gave us that bridge between duty and consequences. We should use it, which is exactly what we will do in the next chapter.
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1 All four association codes are available online. The IABC Code of Ethics for Professional Communicators is at http://news.iabc.com/index.php._s=40&item=10,html. The International Public Relations Association Code is at www.ipra.org/about/ipra-codes. The Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications Management Code of Ethics is at www.globalalliancepr.org/website/page/code-ethics. The Public Relations Society of America Member Code of Ethics is at http://www.prsa.org/aboutprsa/ethics/codeenglish/#.VbAmdehViko. Accessed September. 7, 2015.
2 From the Preamble of the PRSA Member Code of Ethics. http://www.prsa.org/AboutPRSA/Ethics/CodeEnglish/#.VfMTR51Viko
3 Code of Athens. (1965, amended 1968 and 2009). http://www.ipra.org/pdf/Code_of_Athens.pdf. Accessed July 22, 2015.
4 Traverse-Healy, T. (2014, March 3). Public relations credo by Tim Traverse-Healy. S. Waddington Blog Public Relations, Marketing and Social Media Thinking and Doing. http://wadds.co.uk/2014/03/03/public-relations-credo-tim-traverse-healy/. Accessed July 22, 2015.