Using outcomes as a measurement of ethics will not, therefore, provide an accurate way for professionals to measure whether decisions are ethical. Professionals must be able to evaluate decisions and choices with concrete ethical guidelines instead of hoping that certain outcomes will result in them having made an ethical choice.
Many scholars in public relations identify these issues, as well as others, as evidence that utilitarianism, sometimes called consequentialism due the concept relying on the consequence of a decision, is not as strong of a fit for public relations professional ethics. The second prominent concept, deontological ethics, is associated with the father of modern deontology, Immanuel Kant.
These challenges are definitely ones that should be considered when relying on this as an ethical system. However, despite these concerns, many have found that deontology provides the strongest model for applied public relations ethics. That ideological consistency gives the theory posed here a solid theoretical foundation with the practice of public relations as well as a normative theory function. They need ethical principles derived from the fundamental values that define their work as a public relations professional.
Finally, a third and growing area of philosophical reasoning with ethics is known as virtue ethics, one that has gained more attention in public relations scholarship in recent years.
This philosophy stems from Aristotle and is based on the virtues of the person making a decision. For example, if the virtue of honesty is the of utmost importance to a good public relations professional, then all decisions should be made ethically to ensure honesty is preserved.
The process for determining how the basic structure should be arranged is based on a thought experiment in which rational, mutually disinterested individuals choose principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance , a condition that specifies they do not know specific details about themselves e. In other words, when we value something — or when we have a particular set of values — we think that what we value or the values we have give us reasons to act in particular way.
However, when choosing these principles, the parties do possess general social, psychological, and economic knowledge, and they also know that the circumstances of justice obtain in the society to which they belong. The first, known as the equal Liberty Of central importance to liberalism — both as an economic and a political system — is the notion of liberty. Liberal theorists, however, disagree as to the nature of liberty in liberal societies.
Constrained by the veil of ignorance, the parties in the original position as mutually disinterested rational agents try to agree to the principles which bring about the best state of affairs for whatever citizen they represent within society.
Since the parties are all unaware of precisely what social role they will occupy, they strive to maximize their individual shares of primary goods. An individual who holds a right is thereby entitled to whatever that right guarantees. He further argues that the parties would support using the difference principle to regulate the distribution of wealth and income instead of a principle of average utility constrained by a social minimum because the difference principle provides a stronger basis for enduring cooperation among citizens.
The full application of justice as fairness can be regarded as a 4-stage sequence. The deliberations concerning the two principles occur at the first stage. With the two principles established, the parties then progressively thin the veil of ignorance and, as they acquire more specific knowledge about society at the subsequent stages, determine more specific principles of justice.
At the third stage, the parties agree to laws and policies which realize the two principles within the context of the agreed-upon constitutional framework. At the fourth stage, the parties possess all available information about their society and apply the established laws and policies to particular cases.
One of Rawls major tasks in presenting justice as fairness is to show that the society it generates can endure indefinitely over time. To achieve this aim, Rawls deploys the just savings principle , a rule of intergenerational savings designed to assure that future generations have sufficient capital to maintain just institutions.
Good may be used to refer to anything — it is a general term that expresses positive value about something or assigns positive value to something. Nevertheless, in philosophy the term takes on special meaning and that meaning is particularly related to ethics. As a result, the society generated by adherence to justice as fairness is stable and can be expected to endure indefinitely over time. Notably, however, the arguments for the stability of justice as fairness that Rawls presents in A Theory of Justice do not prove convincing.
Rawls does not account for reasonable pluralism, a critical aspect of any constitutional democracy with the guaranteed liberties that Rawls specifies. Thus, Rawls recasts his arguments for the stability of justice as fairness in Political Liberalism and strives to demonstrate that citizens, despite reasonable disagreement about many issues, will agree on a limited, political conception of justice through an overlapping consensus of their individual viewpoints.
Utilitarianism states that actions are morally right if and only if they maximize the good or, alternatively, minimizes the bad. Thus, actions are morally right, on this view, if and only if they maximize pleasure or well-being or minimize suffering. This approach is sometimes called hedonistic utilitarianism.
For hedonistic utilitarians, the rightness or our actions are determined solely on the basis of consequences of pleasure or pain. Utilitarian theories may take other goods into consideration.
Preference utilitarianism , for example, takes into account not just pleasures, but the satisfaction of any preference. Utilitarianism can also be divided along other lines. Act-utilitarianism claims that we must apply a utilitarian calculation to each and every individual action.
For example, assume a hospital has four people whose lives depend upon receiving organ transplants: a heart, lungs, a kidney, and a liver. If a healthy person wanders into the hospital, his organs could be harvested to save four lives at the expense of one life. This would arguably produce the greatest good for the greatest number. But few would consider it an acceptable course of action, let alone the most ethical one.
So, although utilitarianism is arguably the most reason-based approach to determining right and wrong, it has obvious limitations. Amber is a resin material that is formed from fossilized conifer tree sap during years of constant pressure and heat. This yellow to reddish-brown translucent material has been used in a number of ways, including to make jewelry, in Egyptian burials, and in the healing arts. Amber also plays an invaluable role in research.
In some cases, amber contains inclusions, such as insects, whole or parts of animals, and plants that are trapped and preserved. The ability to hold a piece of history untouched by time has resulted in a number of scientific discoveries and advances such as feathers on a non-avian dinosaur dated 99 million years ago and the biosynthesis of gene clusters for novel antibiotics.
One of the oldest amber deposits in the world, dating back million years, is located in the Northern region of Myanmar.
Myanmar amber is plentiful, high quality and contains inclusions within the resin. The mining of these amber specimens in Myanmar is the center of many legitimate and blackmarket sales to university researchers and private collectors alike. Over the last ten years, more than one billion dollars in legal revenue has been generated from the mining and sale of amber.
Myanmar is a small southeast Asian country that contains about diverse ethnic groups recognized by the government. There is no official state religion but the Myanmar government favors the majority Theravada Buddhism population. This favoritism has created ethnic and religious conflicts resulting in government-enforced discrimination.
For example, the government has made it difficult for Christian and Islamic groups to gain permission to repair or build new places of worship. For many years this mining area has been protected by the Kachin Independence Army.
However, in the Myanmar government dropped leaflets from helicopters informing the population in northern Kachin that civilians and Kachin militants who remain in the region will be considered hostile opposition to the government military forces. The government then forced more than inhabitants from their homes and villages, as well as from the amber mines. This hostile takeover of the profitable Kachin amber mines ensures that amber purchases from researchers and private collectors will help fund the government side of the Myanmar ethnic civil war.
While some researchers and universities feel as though they should refrain from making such amber purchases, their failure to participate enables many private collectors to remove collections from the public or to charge researchers an exorbitant fee for access. Furthermore, many of the miners in the Kachin region, on both sides of the conflict, are not fully aware of the value of the amber that they are selling and are therefore being exploited by the wholesalers who purchase from them.
Myanmar classifies amber as a gemstone, not a fossil, so it can be legally removed from the country, unlike fossils that have restrictions on removal. If you were a university scientist, how would you decide whether it is ethical for you to buy amber from Myanmar?
If you took a deontological approach, what would your reasoning look like? What moral principles would you take into account?
If you took a utilitarian approach to answering this question, what would your reasoning look like? What facts would you weigh in making the decision? In deciding whether it is ethical for you to buy amber from Myanmar, do you need to guard against the self-serving bias unduly affecting your decision?
If so, how would you go about guarding against it have a deleterious impact?
0コメント