Navigating Ethical Persuasion in Modern Public Relations

Where the orators of the ancient world aimed to use their definitions of morality and described their innate virtues, the practitioners of today’s media aim to convert philosophical thinking into purposeful persuasion of the public. In close analysis of the original motives and articulations of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates, one can correlate the new theories to the originals and, in doing so, grasp with greater understanding the ethics of media persuasion. In practice, this allows today’s public relations practitioners to engage with ancient wisdom in order to uphold their integrity and to be more effective persuaders.

 

From antiquity, there have been those whose role in society is to moralise the events of the day. Once it was philosophers who orated rhetoric to inspire change. This informative role now lies in the hands of media practitioners, both journalists and public relations (PR) representatives.  To this end, what must be considered is, to what degree are these two professions ethically obligated to the public to whom they speak? 

 

This essay will largely avoid ethical challenges at the extremes in order to better focus on modern media ethics. While extremes of Nazi propaganda for example are - a separate and important issue, the relationship between philosophy and media ethics is determined by the ideas that it shares and not the extremes at which it is practised by some. Through the focused application of individualised ethics to media practice, practitioners are offered countless, potentially paralysing, theories and considerations. This essay aims to describe the relationship between the core foundations of moral philosophy, with its successor, media ethics, discussing the ways human nature, morals and other factors inform how media practitioners think and act when conducting media work

 

To understand what impact ancient Greek and Roman philosophers have on media communication, one must first understand the subject and context of their original discourse. It is important at this stage to acknowledge that there is more to this discussion than the rhetoric that these philosophers emphasised. To gain a holistic view of rhetoric the content of the moral foundations must be considered. 

 

To begin, a moral, is the way a dialect is used to characterise actions within a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ framework. In a media context, ‘good’ is a published piece of work that causes limited harm, in contrast, a published piece of work that causes harm would be considered morally wrong. In Greek philosophy these antithetics were born from the epics, heaven and earth were swapped out for ‘chaos’ and ‘nous’ and thus began the consideration of human nature as a force to be understood and not merely reckoned with (Alexander, 1918). Moral relativism, in the wider context of life, opposes the media's ability to establish rules that allow moral absolutism. Abridging the numerous definitions and to hold focus on the discussion allows this multi-century rhetoric tradition to be compressed and understood within the short history of PR practice. In conjunction with the consideration of morals, that stand as something individualised, ethics stands adjacent, considered in the larger framework that predicts action within a given sphere of consideration. Dorothea Frede (2017), Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Hamburg University, further complicates these distinctions through her relativist stance, explaining ,

 

“If ethics is widely regarded as the most accessible branch of philosophy, it is so because many of its presuppositions are self-evident or trivial truths: All human actions, for example, serve some end or purpose; whether they are right or wrong depends on an actor’s overall aims.”

 

Fredes’ explanation, a reflection on Plato's considerations of mortality, demonstrates there is some level of ambivalence in his work. While Plato contemplates truth, he also contemplates right and wrong. This was the turning point in his work, where his own self-awareness grew into an increased awareness of the predispositions that defined morality. Where at first, Plato assumed a cultural constructivist view, he began inadvertently combining this theory with that of psychological constructivism and cognitive constructivism to form a hybrid understanding of the source of morality (McCarthy, 1994; Kalina & Powell, 2009). While Plato had no knowledge of these theoretical concepts, his initial philosophical ideas inspired their further study.

 

In PR and more widely in the area of media persuasion, these ideas designate how practitioner's approach different right-wrong, ethical-unethical issues. Through a close analysis of Jürgen Habermas's communicative ethics, the overlap between the basic ideas of human action, the role of the practitioner, and the subsequent 4 rules, adhere to his right-wrong ‘trivial truths’ structure (Habermas, 1990). “It must be comprehensible, It must be true, It must be appropriate for the audience, It must be sincere” could all be rules for the practice of sophism at Plato’s academy, this demonstrates that much of which is media ethics, is also Platonic philosophy. The role of a media practitioner and that of a sophist is bound by their ethical intentions and actions that inform their rhetoric.

 

In Joe Sachs’s (2021) summary Nicomachean Ethics (340 BC) he translates Aristotle’s idea that, “human action depends upon the combining of all the powers of the soul: perception, imagination, reasoning, and desiring.”  By fusing and reflecting on Aristotle and Plato’s philosophical approaches to the reasoning and motivation behind human action, it is possible to grasp their rhetoric and it becomes more individualised. In this same sense, The Four guiding principles of persuasion (Broom & Sha, 1962) are informed by the philosophical analysis of action and intention. In Isocrates' speech, On the Antidosis (355 B.C) a similar explanation is given, however there is an emphasis on praxis (Dobson, 1919: 181).

 

“My own view of philosophy is a simple one. It is impossible to attain absolute knowledge of what we ought or ought not to do; but the wise man is he who can make a successful guess as a general rule, and philosophers are those who study to attain this practical wisdom.” 

 

This speech, contextualised by the practice of philosophy, extended commitment to learning beyond the ‘academy’ and into the betterment of attaining a level of meaningful wisdom. In this ‘meaningful wisdom’ lies the ability to avoid media harm, through an understanding of the ethical place of human nature. This is the basis of what Immanual Kant described as Practical Philosophy (1999), a branch that aimed to classify human autonomy and understanding, as the greatest form of truth (Rohlf, 2017). In this way, it took much of what was pondered by the ancients, and forced it to have some tangible effect on the way one lives their life. In this consciousness we find its same ethos as in that of media ethics. Kant put into action the considerations of the sophists that preceded him and in doing so paved the way for practical reason, the foundation of media ethics theory. 

 

In media studies similar concepts are discussed under the guise of Habermasian deliberative theory (Garsten, 2011). This theory emphasises and encapsulates much of what is important to this topic. It bridges the theoretical paradigms of ancient philosophical moral theory, and renders as current Kantian media ethics. Habermas’ deliberative theory, going on from his communication ethics, emphasises what American media studies calls the “marketplace of ideas” (Blasi, 2004), in an attempt to check and balance truth and justice through an increased understanding of information production and self-awareness (Brietzke, 1996; Landwehr, 2021).

 

Through the consideration of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers with Kant’s input, media rhetoric and ethics can be better understood as a reinterpretation of these core ideas. Media theorists, using moral theory established by these thinkers, were able to create a media ethics framework that took into account the wealth of human experience, the importance of the balance of good-bad and the role an individual plays in producing and publishing their thoughts. The enduring impact the ancients have had on media communications is very substantial because, at its core, communication is deliberative, it is practical, it is self-evident and of course it is founded on a level of empiricism that is widely shared among humans across the vastness of time. Ethical deliberation, the core of ancient rhetorical philosophy, and the first step in the media ethics process, is the cognitive task that binds both these important societal functions. The ancient and modern philosophers offer an important legacy to public relations practitioners: to be deliberative and to understand the ethics of persuasion through a deep human awareness of effect.

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References

 

Alexander, H. B. (1918). Plato’s Conception of the Cosmos. The Monist, 28(1), 1-24.

 

Blasi, V. (2004). Holmes and the Marketplace of Ideas. The Supreme Court Review, 2004, 1-46.

 

Brietzke, P. H. (1996). How and why the marketplace of ideas fails. Valparaiso University Law Review, 31, 951.

 

Broom, G & Sha, B. (1962). Effective public relations. Pearson Education India.

 

Broom, G & Sha, B. (2013) Cutlip and Center's Effective Public Relations, 11th Edition, Pearson. 

 

Crisp, R. (Ed.). (2014). Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics. Cambridge University Press.

 

Dobson, J. F. (1919). The Greek Orators. Methuen & Company Limited.

 

Garsten, B. (2011). The rhetoric revival in political theory. Annual Review of Political Science, 14, 159-180.

 

Habermas, J. (1990). Moral consciousness and communicative action. MIT press.

 

Kalina, C., & Powell, K. C. (2009). Cognitive and social constructivism: Developing tools for an effective classroom. Education, 130(2), 241-250.

 

Kant, I. (1999). Practical philosophy. Cambridge University Press.

 

Landwehr, C. (2021). Deliberative Theory. In The Palgrave Handbook of EU Crises (pp. 213-228). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

 

McCarthy, T. (1994). Kantian constructivism and reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in dialogue. Ethics, 105(1), 44-63.

 

Rodrigo, P. (2011). The Dynamic of Hexis in Aristotle's Philosophy. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42(1), 6-17.

 

Rohlf, M. (Ed.). (2017). The Modern Turn. Catholic University of America Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1w6tfng

 

Sachs, J. (2021).  Aristotle: Ethics. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 20 November 2021, from https://iep.utm.edu/aris-eth/