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A reasonable person, a communicator, must realize that freedom comes with responsibility.
Ethics emphasizes responsibility. Ethics is about the goodness and badness of actions,
of motives; the rightness and wrongness of actions and motives. In ethics, we always
ask the question, what should we do? What ought we do? Rather than, what is?
The core of my course, as I tell students, we learn all about the freedoms that come
with the First Amendment. But we must ask ourselves a question. We have a number of
rights, but is it right to exercise those rights?
That's an ethical question, a fundamental question that all communicators need to ask
themselves. Ethics, I think, cuts across all fields of communication. We train our students
to learn to communicate ethically no matter where they are.
So whether they are public relations officials, or they are in development, they know that
they have a certain power—the power of communication. They have the instrumentalities of communication
at their disposal, and they must learn to use them responsibly.