Etiología

The topic of ethics in public relations has undergone substantial develop-ment in recent years. Although this review is not meant to be exhaustive, it does attempt to explicate major developments in the field (for recent de-tailed reviews, see Curtin & Boynton, 2001; Day, Dong, & Robins, 2001;

Seeger et al., 2003; Seib & Fitzpatrick, 1995). Specifically, there are a num-ber of major schools of thought regarding how ethics intersects with public relations (Curtin & Boynton, 2001).

One approach to public relations ethics is the advocacy model. This ap-proach argues that organizations are free to have their own distinct points of view and, as a result, are entitled to representation and counsel (Barney &

Black, 1994; Edgett, 2002). It is the ethical duty of public relations counsel to energetically defend a client’s point of view to the public. Lying or the use of deception would, of course, be considered an unethical form of persuasion in this model.

More socially responsive ethics have been proposed as well (Daugherty, 2001). Grunig’s excellence theory (1992a; Bowen, 2004) argues that orga-nizations should act only in a way that gives equal consideration to both a company’s interests as well as the public interest. Similarly, K. A. Leeper (1996) applied concepts of communitarianism to public relations ex-changes, maintaining that organizations have an obligation to mitigate the effects of corporate actions on the communities that they affect. More re-cently, Fitzpatrick and Gauthier (2001), for instance, developed an ap-proach for public relations counselors rooted in three tenets: avoid or at least minimize harms while promoting benefits, show respect for persons (i.e., treat people with respect and dignity), and practice distributive justice (i.e., distribute the benefits and burdens of an action as fairly as possible).

Others relate general ethical theory to public relations crises, applying both teleological and deontological approaches to provide crisis managers with meaningful guidance. Pratt (1994), for instance, used a situational analysis method to assess the ethics of Perrier in 1990 when the company disclosed that it had discovered the presence of benzene in its water source.

Similarly, Williams (1997) used both teleological and deontological stan-dards to offer an ethical analysis of the discourse surrounding the Intel

Pentium chip controversy of 1994. In so doing, both Pratt and Williams ar-gued that, when constituting their response to a crisis, organizations and their managers must consider both the motives for their decisions as well as the outcomes that their decisions have on stakeholders.²

More specifically related to the study of ethics as a distinctively commu-nicative phenomenon, there are those who take a discursive approach to ethics. One example of this kind of approach seeks to apply the work of Habermas (1979) or other critical theorists to a public relations context (R.

V. Leeper, 1996). In the same way, Botan (1997), van Es and Meijlink (2000), and Kent and Taylor (2002) attempted to utilize a communication approach to develop a public relations ethic; they proposed the use of dialogic ethics, first articulated in a communication context by Johannesen (2001). The dialogic approach asserts that people are not to be exploited by corporations and given limited communication choices but instead should be nurtured and actualized. In addition, individuals should not be treated as a means to an end, but instead should be given the freedom to question the assumptions behind the communication. Finally, the emphasis during a communication exchange should be on mutually creating meanings rather than using communication as merely information transfer. To date, this ap-proach has not been applied to the crisis context, although one suspects that when an organization’s very survival is at stake, the response is unlikely to be consistent with a dialogic approach to ethics. This, of course, begs the question of whether a dialogic approach is to be recommended.

Although these and other ethical analyses are useful to demonstrate the ethical considerations relevant to individuals and organizations that com-municate regularly with core stakeholders, they are less helpful when ap-plied to a crisis situation. These models are primarily designed to address the ethics of typical, everyday kinds of communication, rather than those crisis situations in which an individual’s or an organization’s high-priority values (i.e., health, survival) are threatened (Weick, 1988). Such a threat means that an organization in a crisis situation faces a direct communication con-flict between the ethical and the economic (although such concon-flicts make up the day-to-day business of a company, they are more immediate and in-tense during a crisis). Hence, for an ethical analysis, such as Kernisky’s (1997), to be useful, it must speak directly to the context in which an organi-zation’s very survival is at stake, and the organiorgani-zation’s standard ways of communicating are dramatically changed (i.e., are reduced and more centralized; Billings, Milburn, & Schaalman, 1980).

2When we refer to “stakeholders,” we mean it in the sense of parties who have a moral claim on the apologist by virtue of having a stake in the apologist’s actions. Perhaps they are affected directly by the apologist’s actions, or maybe they are in a relationship with the apologist, or perhaps they have certain rights in play. In any case, our conception of stakeholders is not limited to those one might pay attention to strictly from a self-interested point of view.

Moreover, it is important to realize that an important distinction needs to be made between the ethics of the act triggering the apologia versus the ethics of the communication after the act. This book attempts to cover the broad range of apologetic communication, including individuals, corporations, and institutions that face severe ethical criticism. By and large, it deals with the guilty (although, as demonstrated in chaps. 5, 6, and 7, it is fair to question whether said individuals and institutions are indeed guilty of the criticism in some cases). As a result, any ethic developed here should be recognized to be a communication ethic that deals with the communication after the (alleged) wrongdoing, rather than the ethics of the alleged wrongdoing itself. Said an-other way, this chapter seeks to sketch out an approach that provides a stan-dard by which to judge the communication that occurs after an ethically questionable act. Individuals and organizations, then, may follow up their ethically questionable act with unethical or ethical communication.

CASUISTRY

The case-based approach of this book is highly compatible with an ethical de-cision-making procedure known as casuistry. Casuistry has become increas-ingly popular since 1988, with the publication of the influential The Abuse of Casuistry by Jonsen and Toulmin. It has been applied to journalism, public policy, medicine, research ethics, and other fields. (For more on casuistry, see Arras, 1993; Boeyink, 1992; Borden, 1999, 2002; Keenan & Shannon, 1995;

Kirk, 1936; Leites, 1988; Miller, 1996.) The study of casuistry represents a rich and historical ethical tradition that dates from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with roots in classical rhetoric (Jonsen & Toulmin, 1988).

The idea of casuistry is that it is possible to develop ethical cases that serve as paradigms, or exemplars, of demonstrably moral or clearly immoral acts. Jonsen and Toulmin (1988) argued that “these type cases are the mark-ers or boundary stones that delimit the territory of ‘moral’ considerations in practice” (p. 307). Hence, to take what we know about individual and cor-porate communication resulting from an ethical challenge, it is possible to develop a paradigm, or standard, by which to judge crisis communication.

We intend to articulate what is ethically ideal (Borden, 2002). However, by comparing ethically ambiguous cases to this ideal, future analyses will be able to specify degrees of ethical communication: what is more ethical and what is less ethical, how far one can depart from the ideal and still remain in the realm of what is ethically acceptable, and, finally, what measure of differ-ence from the ideal results in a paradigm shift from ethically acceptable to ethically prohibited. This permits a more nuanced perspective on the moral choices of individuals and institutions caught in a wrong than do analyses that oversimplify the process of ethical evaluation as consisting only of black-and-white decisions.

Casuistry is an inductive method similar to the analogical reasoning used in case law. The method starts with a situation in which the ethical considerations are so clear-cut that different people can readily agree on whether it is ethically acceptable. This so-called “paradigm case” then functions as a standard against which to measure more complex, ethically perplexing situations. To the degree that a more difficult case resembles the paradigm in terms of its ethically relevant features, the second case will receive the same assessment as the paradigm—much as a precedent func-tions in legal reasoning. In other words, if the paradigm case is found to be ethically sound, an essentially similar case also will be judged ethically sound (Jonsen & Toulmin, 1988).

To the degree that a more difficult case differs from the paradigm in terms of its ethically relevant features, the second case will receive a different as-sessment. Said another way, if the paradigm case is found to be ethically sound, an essentially different case will be deemed ethically deficient. It is crucial to specify which aspects of the paradigm case matter to its ethical as-sessment. Otherwise, it is easy to get distracted by merely superficial differ-ences (e.g., whether an instance of plagiarism involved an article about fish rather than an article about cars). Once these relevant characteristics have been adequately articulated, one has a somewhat more general basis to com-pare cases while at the same time retaining a direct link to the specifics that give ethical principles concrete, practical meaning (Boeyink, 1992).

A key insight of the method is that general principles are not always the most helpful starting point for ethical decision making. This is especially true in situations in which it is difficult to agree at the outset on a priori assump-tions (Jonsen & Toulmin, 1988). That being said, we believe that the judg-ments one reaches with casuistry ultimately rely on the larger world of ideas provided by ethical theory, but only opaquely unless the casuist makes an ef-fort to make these other ethical ideas transparent (Borden, 1995). Casuistry fell into disuse after its high point in the Middle Ages precisely because it failed to consider the broader perspective provided by ethical ideas embodied in theories such as consequentialism and deontology (Jonsen & Toulmin, 1988). Therefore, we inform our application of casuistry with ethical stan-dards reflecting relevant considerations from deontology, consequentialism, and care ethics. These standards, explained later in this chapter, include re-spect for autonomy, minimizing harm, and nurturing relationships.

Bound up with rights to reparation are the right to know and the right to be protected from unnecessary or undue harm flowing from the duties of fi-delity and nonmalfeasance (Ross, 1930). Both of these are inevitably in-volved in any apologetic episode, because harm has occurred and may be prevented in the future depending on the ethical nature of the apologia.

Also, the apologist has information that the injured party is entitled to know in order to understand what has happened and to make a reasonable

assess-ment of the damage that has been wrought and what might be done to repair it. In short, the victim needs the information to exercise his or her auton-omy. Duties of justice also are relevant in a variety of ways, because the apol-ogists often are in a position to take unfair advantage of the victims as the vulnerable parties in a crisis communication context. The victims, there-fore, are entitled to protection from abuse of power. Also, the offenses that are the subject of apologia often involve the fair distribution of goods, such as the monetary worth of products or stock. Finally, there is the issue of ev-eryone getting their due—the victims receiving their compensation, and the apologist receiving his or her punishment.

Feminist ethics also calls our attention to the importance of relationships and the experience of caring and being cared for within those relationships (Noddings, 1984). The strength of the relationship between each injured party and the apologist varies, but in each case there is a preexisting relation-ship that has somehow been disturbed by the apologist’s offense and that probably would continue to be mutually beneficial and satisfying if it could somehow be restored or, at minimum, placed on the public record. There-fore, some of the characteristics of the ideal paradigm speak directly to the dynamics of the relationship between apologist and injured parties, includ-ing the inevitable loss of trust that accompanies betrayal. The offense, in other words, is not just against the people and groups involved, but, in a sense, against the very relationship itself.

The paradigm locates the ethical analysis in the primacy of the victims;

that is, in those who have been most wronged and who least willingly con-sented to the risk of injury (see chap. 2). Although the paradigm case thus gives primacy to the victims—and the need for reconciliation between the apologist and the victims—it should not be taken to mean that the victims are the only parties of interest. All stakeholders—be they stockholders, communities, suppliers, watchdog groups, governmental agencies, or even the media functioning as accusers in an apologetic crisis—have an interest in a restorative outcome to the crisis. Thus, even though attention tends to focus most heavily on the victims during an apologetic crisis, we presume that all stakeholders deserve moral consideration.

Audience interest in a positive conclusion to a crisis is supported by re-cent research. Bradford and Garrett (1995), for instance, dealt with the im-portant question of audience expectations during allegations of ethical misbehavior on the part of organizations. They found that not just victims but consumers in general regularly look for organizations caught in a wrong to be direct and to take a conciliatory approach to their wrongdoing in an apology. Any attempt by an organization to explain or justify its misdeeds is rated by stakeholders as negatively as is choosing a strategy of silence.

One example supports this point. During the Intel Pentium chip con-troversy, the constant barrage of criticism by consumers drove the price of

Intel’s stock into a downward spiral. Only after Intel apologized, the case was settled, and irate consumers could return their computers for a re-placement chip did the value of Intel’s stock return to its precrisis level (Hearit, 1999). Hence, by ethically responding to the victims in the case, even stockholders were able to achieve a positive outcome to the apolo-getic crisis.

Now that we have articulated some of the relevant ethical consider-ations, we can begin describing an exemplary, or paradigmatic, apologia when the individual or institution is guilty of the perceived offense. We be-gin with a discussion of the morally relevant characteristics that have to do with the manner, or form, of the communication.