This pedagogical essay explores the tendency of undergraduate media ethics students to do what Bernard Gert calls “morality by slogans” and their tendency to misuse Aristotle's golden mean slogan. While not solving the dilemma of morality by slogans, the essay suggests some ways of rectifying the misuse of the golden mean and encouraging its more authentic application.

This essay discusses the impact of the situationist challenge to Aristotelian virtue ethics for media ethics instruction. Since virtue ethics is a theory that is centered around character building,...

ABSTRACTAdvertising and public relations executives claim the rules for ethical practices are changing. On the basis of 29 in-depth interviews with advertising and public relations executives, and an analysis guided by identity theories and moral justifications, new insights address the most pressing issues faced today, greater opportunities to behave unethically, and the lack of ethics training received. Some of the executives perceive a personal responsibility to be ethical, whereas others adopted a self-interested attitude by suggesting it’s the publishers’ or consumers’ (...) responsibility to make ethical decisions. Emerging marketing practices have increased the need for more ethics training and more sophisticated perspectives on professionalism and virtuous behavior that are also flexible enough to apply to envelope-pushing strategies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study conducts a textual analysis of Thomas French’s longform journalistic work Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives as an example of how narrative might foster a nuanced understanding of environmental conservation and its complexities. It draws on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre to argue for a virtue-based mediated conservation ethic that ties media producers, audiences, and the shared environment to narratives of human experience. Specifically, narrative offers a means to deconstruct false dualisms, to overcome the limitations of (...) deontological and teleological approaches, and to see ourselves as part of the larger shared story of the natural world. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of virtuous journalism as demonstrated in the award-winning movie Spotlight. It analyzes Spotlight using key concepts from virtue ethics theory – arête, p...

ABSTRACTVirtue ethics, a topic of growing interest in media ethics and philosophy more broadly, poses challenges for classroom instruction because it is rooted in long-term development of character. This article explores approaches for incorporating virtue into media ethics instruction and assessing associated student learning, based on an analysis of how students in a journalism ethics class demonstrated their understanding and application of virtues through activities tailored to virtue ethics. The analysis, in addition to suggesting the value of assignments such as (...) an exemplar paper for learning and assessment, highlights several challenges instructors should consider in both teaching and evaluating virtue instruction. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study aimed to throw light on the implied and tacit moral philosophical features of rulings from an apparently effective and well-respected press council. Statements from the Norwegian Press Council are analyzed from the perspective of 3 ethical theories. The analysis shows that the institutionalized media ethics as presented by this authoritative body have distinct features of discourse ethics, while perspectives of virtue ethics are surprisingly absent. The Norwegian Press Council is preoccupied with procedural norms for the public discourse and (...) pays less attention to the character of the journalist and the quality of the journalism. Some reflections in accordance with ethics of proximity can be traced in the council’s statements but take second place in relation to other considerations. (shrink)

Roger Silverstone proposed media hospitality as an important element of media ethics. I agree that media hospitality can make a valuable contribution to media ethics. However, I have doubts about grounding media hospitality in what has been referred to as the “deductive abstractions and absolutist language of much media ethics theorizing” founded on Enlightenment assumptions. Despite his own reservations about Enlightenment theorizing, I propose that Silverstone's account ultimately suffers from these problems of abstraction and absolutism, as seen most clearly from (...) the vantage point of Alasdair MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics. (shrink)

Drawing upon contemporary virtue ethics theory, The Model of The Principled Advocate and The Pathological Partisan is introduced. Profiles are developed of diametrically opposed archetypes of public relations and advertising practitioners. The Principled Advocate represents the advocacy virtues of humility, truth, transparency, respect, care, authenticity, equity, and social responsibility. The Pathological Partisan represents the opposing vices of arrogance, deceit, secrecy, manipulation, disregard, artifice, injustice, and raw self-interest. One becomes either a Principled Advocate or a Pathological Partisan by habitually enacting or (...) embodying the virtues or vices in the context of professional practices. (shrink)

The claim that we live in a post-truth era has led to a significant body of work across different disciplines exploring the phenomenon. Many have sought to investigate the role of fake news in bringing about the post-truth era. While this work is important, the narrow focus on this issue runs the risk of giving the impression that it is mainly new forms of media that are to blame for the post-truth phenomenon. In this paper, we call attention to the (...) ways in which journalistic practices in traditional forms of media also play an important role in contributing to a post-truth environment. We will do so by focusing on one particular practice common in news journalism. False balance involves presenting two sides of a debate as more equal than is justified by the evidence. We will argue that although false balance does not constitute fake news, it does contribute to an environment in which truth is devalued. By obscuring what counts as evidence and who qualifies as an authority, false balance legitimizes post-truth attitudes. We finish by outlining the virtues that journalists should develop in order to guard against false balance. While fake news is made more likely when journalists possess the vices of dishonesty, prejudice or corruption, we argue that focusing too much on guarding against these vices may actually make false balance more likely. In order to be responsible gatekeepers and to avoid false balance, journalists must also develop the virtues of wisdom, vigilance, courage, care and justice. (shrink)

The use of the term "applied ethics" to denote a particular field of moral inquiry (distinct from but related to both normative ethics and meta-ethics) is a relatively new phenomenon. The individuation of applied ethics as a special division of moral investigation gathered momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, largely as a response to early twentieth- century moral philosophy's overwhelming concentration on moral semantics and its apparent inattention to practical moral problems that arose in the wake of significant social and (...) technological transformations. The field of applied ethics is now a well established, professional domain sustained by institutional research centers, professional academic appointments, and devoted journals. As the field of applied ethics grew and developed, its contributors predominantly advocated consequentialist and deontological approaches to the problems they address; but lately a significant number of moral philosophers have begun to bring the resources of virtue ethics to bear upon the ever-evolving subject matters of applied ethics. (shrink)