3.3 Specific Ethical Guidelines

Philosophers have long thought about ethics, and they often define ethics in terms of two variables: means (or specific behaviors) and ends (or intentions). The means side looks at types of communication that are acceptable or unacceptable, and leads to guidelines such as “don’t publicly humiliate anyone” or “research the facts before making public statements about something.” Typically, those ethical guidelines can be sorted into “dos” and “don’ts.” Such guidelines have the appeal of being categorical and, depending on the length of the lists, easy to memorize. The problem, as hinted at earlier, is that it becomes difficult to apply these guidelines universally. A guideline saying “Never deceive anyone about who you are,” for example, doesn’t allow for investigative journalism or undercover police work. You could keep adding qualifiers and exceptions, but then the guidelines get harder to remember and apply.

The focus on ends is simpler in that you can boil it down to: did you intend good, or not? Even the law frequently acknowledges that intention is a key factor, and a defining element of crimes like fraud (you may have said something false, but if it was an innocent mistake and you did not intend to mislead anyone, it’s not fraud). Rather than having to stipulate all the behaviors that are acceptable or not, focusing on only one variable simplifies everything. Sort of…. The trouble is, this variable is invisible, sometimes even to the person themselves. If you’ve ever stopped and pondered, “Why did I do that crazy thing? What was I thinking?” it’s easy to see how difficult it is to figure out why someone else acted the way they did. People are great at coming up with nice-sounding justifications after the fact, so what they say their intentions are is not always reliable. And there is a time dimension as well: short-term and long-term goals can look very different from each other, so which “end” should we focus on? This is why the ends vs. means debate has been raging for centuries, and will probably never be resolved.

Another often-cited philosophical principle is the greater good: if an action benefits society as a whole, it is ethical, and if it benefits only a few people but harms many others, it is unethical. A con man who justifies his behavior by saying “Hey, I’ve got to put food on the table” is thinking of his own (and perhaps his family’s) needs, but not about what his actions are doing to the larger society. The simplest way to think about this criteria is to reverse it and think about what “ruins things for the rest of us.” For example, when you watch a YouTube video, it can be fun to read what other people think of the video — but if a few trolls invade the comments section and fill it with toxicity, the moderators shut off the whole discussion. So: don’t be a troll!

Sometimes the principle of greater good is easy to apply; other times it becomes a complicated numbers game. When Robin Hood “stole from the rich to give to the poor” in the Middle Ages, that sounded heroic…except to the rich, who were justified in being upset that now robbery was suddenly a good thing. Attempts to apply the Robin Hood approach to the modern stock market have gotten messy. And as mentioned earlier, this has been used by political zealots to justify all kinds of unethical behavior because they believe their party or candidate will save the world. Who gets to define “the greater good”?

If all of this sounds too abstract, Sherry Baker and David Martinson have boiled it down to five tangible guidelines, which they called The TARES Test.^[1] The acronym stands for:

T = Truthfulness of the message. This harks back to avoiding the 10 forms of lying outlined above, especially factual lies, paltering, and lies of omission. Baker and Martinson point out that, for a message to be accurate, the source must do some research to ensure that the message is truthful and must avoid the sin of “speaking beyond your expertise.” Think of people who forward urban legends without verifying them first.

A = Authenticity of the source.^[2] Is the speaker acting out of integrity, sincerity, and genuineness? Do they believe what they are saying? Note that this is defined mostly by personal adjectives and synonyms, and is harder to pin down than truthfulness. This is partly because of its relationship to intentions, and the difficulty of determining true intentions. It makes me think of celebrity spokespeople and influencers who pitch products that they themselves don’t use or believe in.

R = Respect for the audience. Does the speaker respect the dignity and rights of the listener? This is what the con man, above, is lacking: he thinks of his “marks” as suckers who deserve it, not as human beings. Baker and Martinson stress that this is “the heart of the TARES Test,” since the model as a whole is concerned with not doing harm to the audience.

E = Equity of the appeal. Are the speaker and the listener on a level playing field, each with the freedom to make their own decisions? Is the situation fair to both parties? You may know this as the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would like them to do to you”), which is an idea that pops up in all major religions throughout the world. The opposite would be a situation in which the speaker takes advantage of the vulnerabilities of the listener, such as picking on the less educated, the sick, or the desperate. If you are fed up with your romantic partner and feel the urge to blast them with a litany of everything that’s wrong with them and then end the conversation, the principle of Equity says you have to give them the opportunity to blast you back too.

S = Social Responsibility for the Common Good. Does your communication make society as a whole better, or worse? Are you its only beneficiary, at the cost of others? Are you leaving the world a better place than you found it, or are you spoiling it for everyone?

Since these are ethical principles, they are not always simple and easy to apply, especially to others, but they can serve as five core principles you can aim for. They can also be translated into responsibilities: to speak truthfully, be authentic, be respectful toward your audience and treat them as humans, play on a level playing field, and act for the greater good. If you take those responsibilities seriously, you can use the power of communication with a clear conscience.