ABSTRACT
Personal codes versus public codes Most people have their own personal code against which they can measure their behaviour. Some people’s codes are pretty basic, whereas others have a much stricter personal code. Whatever a person’s code is, it has to be self-policing; if it is breached, only he or she will know. Since people generally have a good idea about the motivation of their behaviour and most of the circumstances involved in a particular problem, they can act as both prosecutor and judge to determine whether this act or that breaches their personal code. However, codes which are externally regulated – that is, public codes – are more complex. It is no longer a question of acting as your own judge and jury.
A public code involves trying to work to a universal statement which is universally applied; if it is wrong for one person to do something under certain circumstances, then it must be wrong for another person to do the same thing under the same circumstances. This is obviously different from a personal code where an action I may well consider to be wrong would be considered perfectly acceptable by someone else. Because I work for Global News Corporation, for instance, I might consider it morally wrong to be disloyal to my employer by covering a story about corruption in GNC. However, a reporter from another news organisation could cover the same story with enthusiasm. Of course, I might consider any corruption to be wrong and would attempt to cover such a story for my news organisation. I might then be dismissed or be obliged to resign for damaging my employer’s business. For the universal application of moral codes, everyone has to be clear about and accept what the code has to say. Because of this, codes tend to be limited to areas of general agreement and phrased in a way that covers all circumstances. So, for instance, a code could stipulate that it is wrong that I should lie to get a story about GNC corruption, whichever company I worked for.
