ABSTRACT
You may have found yourself in a situation similar to Taylor’s, facing a choice about what to say in a difficult situation. If you are like most people, you want to say the “right thing” and help promote a good outcome for everyone involved. Taylor faces some difficult choices about honest communication in a friendship. Difficult communication choices raise ethical issues. Ethics is the study and practice of what is good, right, or virtuous. Practicing ethics involves discerning ethical issues and making decisions about how to act. Ethical discernment is the ability to recognize ethical issues and make ethical distinctions in order to formulate judgments about what is good, right, or
virtuous. In ethical decision making, an individual uses those judgments to guide her decisions about how to act ethically. Practicing communication ethics involves discernment and decision making about what is good, right, or virtuous to communicate. The failure of decision makers to communicate ethically is evident around us. Media reports of deceptive statements by people in business and government are all too common. In a technological twist on deceptive communication, one corporate executive used an assumed name to write messages on an Internet bulletin board about business finance. For seven years, his anonymous communication praised his company and sometimes criticized his corporate competitors. Most readers thought these messages were written by someone outside the company (Martin). Communication ethics, however, involves more than issues of honesty and deception. Because communication can impact everyone involved in the communication process, communication ethics concerns what is good, right, or virtuous for everyone involved in the communication process. When you have a question about whether your communication is fair, how to communicate care to someone, your freedom or responsibility to communicate, or the integrity of communication, you face issues of communication ethics.
