The Handbook of Communication Ethics

George Cheney, Steve May, Debashish Munshi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135846664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Handbook of Communication Ethics serves as a comprehensive guide to the study of communication and ethics. It brings together analyses and applications based on recognized ethical theories as well as those outside the traditional domain of ethics but which engage important questions of power, equality, and justice. The work herein encourages readers to make important connections between matters of social justice and ethical theory. This volume makes an unparalleled contribution to the literature of communication studies, through consolidating knowledge about the multiple relationships between communication and ethics; by systematically treating areas of application; and by introducing explicit and implicit examinations of communication ethics to one another.

The Handbook takes an international approach, analyzing diverse cultural contexts and comparative assessments. The chapters in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical perspectives on communication and ethics, including feminist, postmodern and postcolonial; engage with communication contexts such as interpersonal and small group communication, journalism, new media, visual communication, public relations, and marketing; and explore contemporary issues such as democracy, religion, secularism, the environment, trade, law, and economics. The chapters also consider the dialectical tensions between theory and practice; academic and popular discourses; universalism and particularism; the global and the local; and rationality and emotion.

An invaluable resource for scholars in communication and related disciplines, the Handbook also serves as a main point of reference in graduate and upper-division undergraduate courses in communication and ethics. It stands as an exceptionally comprehensive resource for the study of communication and ethics.

1
Encountering Communication Ethics in the Contemporary World

Principles, People, and Contexts

George Cheney, Debashish Munshi, Steve May, with Erin Ortiz

Communication, as both a discipline and an “interdiscipline” or field, is poised to play a unique role in advancing discussions of ethics because the field offers an array of concepts and principles attuned to the examination of ethics writ large. That is to say, the conceptual and practical orientation of communication studies enables us to probe questions about how ethics come to the forefront of consciousness and experience (or not). Communication is especially well suited for meta-ethical analyses as well as examinations of specific ethical issues, dilemmas, and decisions because of how it is attuned to the very construction of arguments about what “counts” as relevant information, opinion, and choice. The rhetorical framing of ethics broadly considered, where ethics can be treated as integral to the life-world or ancillary to it, is but one obvious but powerful example.

This edited volume embraces the following senses of communication ethics. First, the book includes treatments of communication phenomena from the standpoint of ethics and morality, with attention to such clearly communicative phenomena as deception, openness, free expression, and so forth. In fact, these are the types of issues that come most readily to mind for most scholars, practitioners, and students when they hear the term communication ethics. Following the linguistic turn in mid-20th century philosophy, we take the position that communication is action but also recognize that such is most apparent in cases where the very accomplishment of something is almost completely encompassed by a communicative act (such as an apology or a promise; see Austin, 1965). At the same time, and especially from a theoretical standpoint, a number of our authors deal directly with the question of how communication itself has inherently ethical or moral dimensions. This line of thinking can be traced back at least to Plato’s (1994, 2002) considerations of different types of messages and their ethical–moral implications (including the capacities for seduction and corruption). This point of view is most fully developed in our day by the work of Jürgen Habermas (1979), for whom ethical communication is implicated by our reflexive uses of language and indeed reinforced in one way or another by our every interaction. From this point of view, it is impossible to step outside the context of ethical considerations in our uses of symbols with one another, although the question of what constitute ideals, constraints, and possibilities for free and open (or profoundly democratic) communication is still subject to debate. Third, there are chapters which consider how material conditions (such as the economy and the environment) are necessarily framed, “translated” (Latour, 1993), and affected by our use of symbols (see, e.g., Cheney, Lair, & Kendall, 2010). Therefore, the debates over issues such as human rights for species other than Homo sapiens, the urgency of global warming or climate change, and the need for economic justice fall indirectly though importantly within the domain of communication ethics. Along the way, the chapters of this book also question the very notion of ethics as a separate sphere of thought, discussion, and practice; indeed, this is one of the most important lessons of the still-emergent area of comparative and multicultural ethics (see, e.g., Singer, 2002).

WHAT ARE KEY DIALECTICS IN THE STUDY AND PRACTICE OF COMMUNICATION ETHICS?

While no introductory or overview essay could possibly account for all the visions and nuances of communication’s relationship to ethics, we would like to offer five dialectics as means of charting key issues at this intersection and suggesting how each of the following chapters in this volume might be viewed in relationship to at least one dialectic. This exercise risks being a bit reductionistic in the placements of chapters; however, we offer these pairings in a heuristic spirit to stimulate further thought, discussion, and research.

Theoretical-Practical

This is a classic division: it is well-recognized in current discussions of the disjuncture between ethical theory and ideals and “on the ground” experience (e.g., Sabini, 1982). The theory and practice of ethics are only possible by placing the ethical dimensions of communicative acts in conversation with ethical dimensions of everyday life. As Appiah (2008) writes, “because making a life is an activity [emphasis added]…we should expect to learn more from experiments in living than from experiments in philosophizing” (p. 203). The theory–practice divide is beginning to be transcended in the arena of applied ethics today as the ancient method of casuistry is reclaimed for our present day, putting cases in ongoing conversation with theory and therefore allowing for the modification and even supplanting of certain theoretical perspectives.

A number of chapters in this volume give special attention to theory–practice relations. These include contributions by Buzzanell; Christians; Ess; Gastil and Sprain; L’Etang; Mumby; and Stewart. Patrice Buzzanell’s chapter takes, as a starting point, that the field of communication can offer a fundamentally different lens on ethics—one that cuts across dualisms that pervade ethics literature and contributes to contemporary debates. She explores the means by which feminist scholars have integrated theory and practice. More specifically, Buzzanell proposes the metaphor of discursive acts “to accommodate inconsistencies and tensions on micro and macro levels” (p. 77), including socially constructing context, promoting dialogue through human values, designing vision, reframing, embedding iterativity, and making processes and outcomes transparent. In his discussion of power, ethics, and communication. Dennis Mumby similarly notes that the field of communication is well positioned to address the ethics–power nexus in the context of a nonfoundational world. He explicates the ways in which theorizing about power and ethics has been limited because scholars rarely view them as complex and frequently contradictory phenomena, in practice. He suggests that a viable “communicative ethic always recognizes the social character of self and other as they are situated within a broader political, economic, and historical context that embodies particular configurations of power” (p. 95). John Stewart, in a chapter on ethical theory and praxis, argues that ethical inquiry has much to learn from empirical work and vice versa. He reminds readers that “important ethical dimensions that are warp and weft of the fabric of interpersonal, organizational, cultural, and mediated communicating, but also of the contributions to ethical analysis and theorizing that emerge from studies of events of verbal–nonverbal articulate contact; that is, of communication” (p. 15).

Clifford Christians contends that both the theory of and practice in the journalistic profession are at a crossroads, with the primary challenge being cultural relativism. He suggests that four explicit issues for theory and practice stand out as the most demanding and complicated for journalism ethics: social justice, truth-telling, nonviolence, and human dignity. In his view, the most productive framework for addressing each of them is social responsibility theory. In his chapter on the ethical dimensions of new technologies and media, Charles Ess reminds us that responses to current and emerging issues such as privacy and online participation must recognize how diverse cultural values and communicative preferences shape and influence these responses. He calls for a “pluralistic” global information and communication ethics that conjoins theory and practice via both “shared ethical norms along with the irreducible differences between diverse cultural traditions and communicative preferences” (p. 205), thereby avoiding ethical relativism and ethical monism.

John Gastil and Leah Sprain explore the ethical challenges in small group communication by discussing the range of scholarly research that clarifies how groups, in practice, conceptualize and confront ethical dilemmas and how these microdecisions in small groups intersect with the larger social system. Jacquie L’Etang similarly identifies a range of ethical dilemmas common to public relations that require healthy debate among scholarly and professional groups. Developing core ethical practices in the profession, she argues, requires “taking into account competing, multiple discourses including the official occupational aims (encompassed in codes of ethics and the formal statements of professional bodies), the normative literature, and empirical evidence regarding aims and impacts” (p. 221).

Academic/Philosophical Discourses-Popular/Lay Discourses

Somewhat mirroring the theory–practice divide in ethics is the disjuncture between philosophical discourses about ethics and lay understandings of ethical situations. For many communication practitioners, ethics is more about “doing the right thing” in a given situation (that is, a decision focus) and less about philosophical treatises on virtue, morality, deontology, or eudaimonia (currently translated into English more as flourishing than as happiness, per recent writings in applied ethics and classics). Just as theory and practice lean on each other, philosophical and popular discourses have important points of intersection. If indeed, the “end of philosophical ethics is to make sense of the project of eudaimonia,” Appiah (2008) maintains, it “cannot do that on its own” (p. 203). There is a need to mix the accustomed analytical purity of philosophy with the moral messiness of everyday situations, where the clash between ethical principles is in fact more the norm than the exception. Still, relatively little has been written about the framing of ethics writ large in popular or lay discourses, including popular culture, although more has been said about how, for example, the media treat specific ethical issues such as scandals. Recent meta-ethical discussions have featured not only abstract analyses of multiple ethical systems but also broad views of the ways ethics are approached or framed in a variety of spheres, including politics, the media, work, and the home.

While many of the chapters in this volume comment upon lay or popular as well as on scholarly or academic discourses, several are especially attuned to making observations across that boundary. These include the contributions of Cubitt and Politoff; DeLuca; D’Souza; Goldzwig and Sullivan; Hyde; and Schaefer, Conrad, Cheney, May, and Ganesh. Michael Hyde, for example, explores how a focus on rhetorical analysis, as a middle ground between the academic and the popular, is concerned “not only with what a given text means, but also and primarily with how it means: the various ways that its discourse produces understanding, attitudes, and beliefs, calls for critical judgment, and encourages action” (p. 32). Arguing that ethics, rhetoric, and discourse lie at the heart of human beings, he explains how the nexus of these three phenomena should be understood, empirically, from the ground up, “from the fundamental spatial and temporal fabric of existence to the constructed social and political domains that we create and inhabit on a daily basis” (p. 32). Schaefer et al. consider the variety of ways that economy, ethics, and communication intersect, in popular as well as academic discourses. They focus on the master narrative of neoliberalism especially because of the way it has masked its own ideological, persuasive, and power-related dimensions.

Sean Cubitt and Violeta Politoff also explore the boundaries of the academic and the popular in their chapter on visual communication and ethics. There, they consider a diverse range of images. They explore the scholarly and popular understandings of these images as the “increasing ease of production, manipulation and circulation of images forms the condition for contemporary ethical obligation” (p. 254). Kevin DeLuca similarly explores the framing of academic and popular discourses that impact environmental ethics and the practices surrounding it. He claims that displacing a historical emphasis on wilderness with a new focus on social justice ironically limits the environmental movement. As DeLuca argues “justice within the frame of humanism and identity politics renders environmentalism incapable of responding to the crucial issues of global warming, ocean pollution/depletion, and other catastrophic global threats” (p. 415).

In the realm of law, trade, and networked communication, Radha D’Souza addresses a comparable issue with regard to the bifurcation of scholarly and popular arenas of knowledge. D’Souza explains, for example, that “ethical problems in trade and networked communication are usually examined within disciplinary enclosures of law, trade, and communication technologies, each with their own normative codes” (p. 475), creating a disjuncture between theoretical inquiries in communication ethics, on the one hand, and popular, applied communication ethics at the user end, on the other. Steven Goldzwig and Patricia Sullivan acknowledge that scholars of communication ethics in political contexts “have moved away from prescriptive models in suggesting possibilities for negotiating ethics along a continuum balancing the interests of individuals and community, private and public spheres” (p. 276). Regardless of how political discourse circulates in both scholarly and popular realms, though, they suggest that “rhetors have the responsibility to communicate with humility, frame narratives of integrity, and invite critical responses from their audiences…and audiences also have the responsibility to be engaged as critical receivers” (p. 284).

Universal-Particular

The tension between the universal and the particular is a classic division in thought and debate about ethics. This matter is entangled with the dominance of particular perspectives: for example, in the ways Western European (e.g., Enlightenment-based) conceptions of ethical standards and, indeed, the ethical sphere itself, have been taken as universal without question except, notably, in cultural anthropology. The Canada-based indigenous scholar, Taiaiake Alfred (1999), for example, links presumably universal ideas about ethics to the colonialist agenda in that colonial regimes equated peace with their concepts of order and stability and then used the idea of maintaining “order” to oppress native peoples. In fact, he makes a strong argument for what he calls the “ethic of courage” which involves a “struggle for personal transformation and freedom from the dominance of imperial ideas” (p. 11). Clearly, context is a core dimension of communication ethics (the traditional attention to the importance of audience reminds us of this), and it is the context of the particular that is often in tension with what is deemed to be universal. Indeed, as Henderson and Waterstone (2009) put it, “ethical positions are themselves sites of contestations and struggle” (p. 191).

Within this volume, several chapters provi...

Table of contents

• INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (ICA) HANDBOOK SERIES
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Encountering Communication Ethics in the Contemporary World
• Unit 1 THEORY OLD AND NEW
• Unit 2 CONTEXTS OF APPLICATION AND THEORY DEVELOPMENT
• Unit 3 CONTEMPORARY ISSUES
• Index