Name: Jiashuo Qin Date: 14/9/2014 PROFESSOR: Dr. Bernhard Debatin
Response Paper for J8130-Ethics, Internet, and society—Fall 2014-2015
Topic: Media ethics (Plaisance)
Ethics comes into our minds when we are finding rational justification for our actions. Aiming at giving his readers applicable key principles to moral philosophy and to responsible media practice, Plaisance introduces a broad collection of classical and contemporary philosophers. For example, in defining ethics, Aristotle focused on the actor; Kant emphasized on the action; while Mill focused on the consequence of the action. By introducing these definitions, he focuses on helping ordinary people think about ethical issues. Besides describing the philosophies, Plainsanse…show more content… Virtue ethics emphasizes the role of one’s character and virtues that one’s character possess when making decisions or evaluating ethical behavior. When one has to make an ethical decision, the best choice is to reach the golden mean, that is, as Aristotle argued, each of the moral virtues was a mean between two corresponding vices. Besides adhering to the “golden mean”, Aristotle also believed that ethics is practical. Ethical behaviors are to achieve internal goods or things that contribute to human flourishing, which results from rely on the collaboration of others. Duty ethics judges the morality of one’s behavior based on whether it adhere to a rule or not.There are various of duties: honesty, fidelity, reparation, gratitude, justice, and so on. The central philosophical concept in duty ethics proposed by Kant is categorical imperative. It is a way of evaluating motivations for action, which requires us not to think superficially about doing or not doing things. But nothing is absolute, unique differences are respected within specific conditions when evaluating. Consequentialist ethics, which is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the former one, says that right or wrong depend on the consequences of an action. The most corresponding words with this framework is utilitarianism,…show more content… It provides case studies that inform us conflicts in media practice, and how to evaluate them. It provides a procedure for thinking through media issues from ethical perspectives—the MERITS model, which helps people apply key ethical principles to media dilemmas. Since bias cannot be avoided when making choices or judgments, the author points out that general claims of bias can lead to omission of bigger picture as well as tend to ignore how we process information we received. Plaisance, putting ethics into the practice of media behavior, provides codes of ethics including those from journalism, advertising, and computer-based practice. He emphasizes that the elementary one is credibility. It is about how audience evaluates the news. Credibility not only requires journalists to tell the truth, but also need them to keep a sense of fair competition. One thing we need to notice is that thinking ethically does not equal to thinking step-by-step. It is more about questions instead of
