Introduction
As deaths from COVID-19 steadily grew across Europe in March 2020, governments locked down their populations, in many countries permitting work-related travel only for those classified as key workers; in Spain and Britain, these included journalists reporting on the pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 put center stage the critical importance of the provision of reliable information and of stories told in words and pictures about the victims, villains, and heroes of the pandemic. These stories shamed some who flouted instructions to observe social distancing and honored others who risked their lives doing their jobs. They showed the vital work journalists do, albeit often imperfectly, to let us know about the reality of our daily experience and the directions in which truth and falsity lie.
This chapter argues for an approach to journalism ethics that foregrounds the centrality of truth-seeking practices, serving each person and the larger human community, and that cultivates values and virtues such as honesty, justice, and compassion. It can be argued that these practices and virtues are constitutive of journalism itself; without them the occupational practice becomes something else: propaganda, public relations, or show business. Journalism without ethics, in other words, is no longer journalism.
I first examine the subject of ethics itself, taking human action as its subject matter and recognizing that our judgments of it derive from the platforms of understanding constituted by variables such as gender, age, faith, education, and ethnic origin. Sweeping cultural, technological, and social changes have made us more alert to the imbalances in power and resources that have privileged certain ethical accounts over others. As fellow authors recount in this volume (chapters 3, 8, and 11, for example), Western, male stories have dominated our understanding of journalism ethics since the mainstream development of journalism from the 17th century onwards (Ward, 2015). Thinking about ethics from the perspective of diverse religious and cultural traditions is a welcome corrective to narrowly framed accounts (see chapters 10, 12, 16, and 45). Nevertheless, I argue that one shared language (there may be others) that allows us to characterize and describe ethics in a way that makes conversation between us meaningful can be found in the virtue ethics tradition. I take it to be the ground upon which an ethics for journalism can stand in its emphasis on human agency and flourishing, truth-seeking and truth-telling, and orientation to the common good.
Second, I address a fundamental issue posed for journalism ethics, placed into sharp focus by the digital transformation of news and information curation and dissemination (see Van Dijck, Poell & de Waal, 2018). The institutional ethos of journalism advocated by liberal pluralists (see below) has been that of a journalism characterized by truth-seeking, free speech at the service of the public, and democratic values. However, this has long been seen by critical political economists as incompatible with the market business model within which journalists must largely work. For these scholars, media institutions, far from speaking truth to power, speak the “truths” of the powerful and ill serve the powerless because of the political economy by which they are structured (see Herman & Chomsky, 2010). The evident crisis of the news business model also underscores the increasingly problematic status of journalism as a practice that can serve the political ethos of democratic states (see Pickard, 2020), already undermined by citizens’ loss of trust in mainstream political leaders. Part of the remedy for this, I finally argue, lies in nourishing and teaching the values and virtues that constitute journalism through ambitious educational programs for all of us.
Getting to the heart of ethics
The enterprise of thinking about ethics and practicing ethical behavior often gets a bad press. It can be seen as hopelessly idealistic and theoretical or a muddle of feelings and unverifiable opinions. Scientific domains such as evolutionary biology, psychology, and neurology have taken up E.O. Wilson’s call for ethics to be “biologicized” (1975, p. 562). And while these domains have produced insights into some of the empirical bases of human behavior (see Haidt, 2012), they have also fostered a reductionist narrative about ethics, which can ultimately undermine its very existence as an intellectual or practical project. This is also true of post-modern thought that construes humans as society’s constructs, encapsulated in Richard Rorty’s pronouncement that: “Socialization goes all the way down” (1989, p. 185). In this view, we are cultural artefacts with a biological residue at our core, acting out pre-ordained scripts. These views remove the possibility of human agency and, hence, the sense in blaming or praising human beings for actions that are purely the result of biological or cultural imperatives. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and big data also apparently threaten human agency through their substitution of decision making by algorithms (O’Neil, 2017) and the questioning of what it is, in fact, to be human.
Can we, then, still claim that ethics is a distinct domain of knowledge and practice in light of scientific advances? I would argue that the key to answering this question is our understanding of human agency, which, to a certain extent, depends on our pre-scientific experience and knowledge based on our gender, age, (non)-faith tradition, cultural, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. We are “dependent, rational animals,” as MacIntyre put it in his book of that name (1999), not autonomous, disembodied reasoners. However, while accepting that these dependencies color our responses, we can still understand and, therefore, pose the question as to whether human beings are subjects who can act and are not simply acted upon. In other words, are we capable of intentional voluntary action, the type of action that can be ethical or unethical because we can be held responsible for it?
Observing the trials of Nazi war criminals, the philosopher, Hannah Arendt, was struck by their claim not to have been responsible for any intentional action in carrying out the acts that led to the murder of millions of their fellow human beings. She wrote:
The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities, as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven. They protested time and time again that they had never done anything out of their own initiative, that they had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, and that they only obeyed orders.
In one of his annual memoranda to middle managers at Berkshire Hathaway, the billionaire Warren Buffett (2006) warned of a differently motivated but similar abdication of responsibility for personal actions:
Every time you hear the phrase “Everybody else is doing it” it should raise a huge red flag. Why would somebody offer such a rationale for an act if there were a good reason available? Clearly the advocate harbors at least a small doubt about the act if he (sic) utilizes this verbal crutch (para 4).
Arendt’s words highlight the Nazis’ alleged lack of intentions, and Buffett’s memorandum warns about the claim that there are no apparent reasons for an action other than the fact that others are doing it. In both cases, human beings fail to be agents. However, actions that register the presence of motives, intentions, sentiments, and consequences that matter both for the agent and for others belong to a different class of action to that we are coerced to do or to that which is done involuntarily, such as a sneeze. Once we admit the very notion of ethics, we are suggesting that human conduct is not simply instinctive, that is, that agency exists and that we are acting subjects with the capacity to own our actions, to be responsible for them. The “moral perspective,” as Rhonheimer (2000, p. 18) has termed it, refers in part to the distinction we make in our decisions and actions between getting things right or wrong not only in a technical sense, but in the sense of them contributing to our living a well-lived life. What constitutes ethical action depends on practical judgments made in differing and specific situations, and, in this sense, ethics always has an element of subjectivity.
Key to the ethical perspective (and to our entire legal system) is the notion of the human being as an acting subject. This is the starting point for a tradition of ethical thinking that has persisted since Aristotle and Confucius (see chapter 4) and has come in for renewed attention in contemporary times: The tradition of virtue ethics (see, for example, Foot, 2001). Modernist approaches to ethics, such as Kantian and utilitarian ethics, seek to establish an objective “rule” to identify the morality of human actions: Kantian ethics establishes the rule of practical reason, the categorical imperatives, as our measure of morality; utilitarianism, in its multiple forms, establishes the rule of utility or consequences as the measure. Both approaches explore the grounds for judgments about what we ought to do. In a sense, they are decision-making theories. Both traditions have immeasurably enriched our debates about ethics.
Virtue ethics takes, as Rhonheimer puts it (2000, p. 42), a “first person perspective.” It begins with an understanding of human beings as beings who act – change jobs, marry, drink a glass of wine – with the intention of achieving specific ends that appear to them to be good for a reason. The very same actions may, of course, be performed out of compulsion or in a state of mental incapacity, and then they would cease to have an ethical quality. Virtue ethics does not propose a particular decision-making procedure. In almost all circumstances, considering an action from the point of view of its consequences for the many will always be appropriate. However, this is not taken to be, as in utilitarianism, the sole basis upon which a decision may be made. The moral question is not so much what I should do or not do, but rather what kind of person do I become by doing or not doing a certain action. I may technically be a bad driver. I become morally a bad one when, motivated by my desire to show off to others, I race another and cause a fatal accident. Virtue ethics ultimately examines what it means for human beings to lead good lives personally and in community. It moves beyond a narrow focus on what makes an individual action good or bad to what makes for a well-rounded, human life.
Virtue ethics also uses philosophical arguments, which are based not on authority, myths, or the majority opinion, but on reason and commonly accessible human experience. It makes use of the findings of psychologists such as Forsyth (1980), Kohlberg (1981), and Haidt (2012) and of neuroscience (Han, 2016) to enrich debates about the factors affecting moral development and decision making (see chapter 5 and Plaisance, 2014), including the role of emotions and the limitations of our traditional accounts of rationality (Mercier & Sperber, 2017). These latter developments respond to Eli...
