Ethics in PR

At the beginning of class, Michaela put up a question about ethics. The question asked whether you would stop a train from killing a lot of people by detouring its tracks to kill just one person. I was reminded of a question I have heard many times which asks, if you were standing over Hitler's cradle, would you kill the young innocent baby boy? Tricky question on many levels. When I first heard the question I responded immediately, yes yes yes. No question about it, a very stern yes. The person who asked me this smiled and said, you see its not that simple, and began to explain the complicated ways why. They said: what happens if what Hitler did was written somewhere.. as in it was meant to be, and if you killed him someone else was bound to take his place and do even worse? This stumped me, I hadn't thought about it in this angle. Another was, perhaps it was his upbringing, his nurture, as Freud explained, and you could change his destiny by changing his educational upbringing. The final angle was an obvious one, which i chose to overlook, and this was, Hitler wasn't Hitler yet, just a young baby in a cradle, innocent and helpless. I thought about The Minority Report, the movie with Tom Cruise, where criminals get arrested before their crime is committed. Great idea in theory, horribly unjust in another. Ethics is a very tricky study and people will always disagree with one another on the right ethical choice. Just like this question, where there is no right or wrong, just a simple idea that raises many ethical questions.
I also thought about Erin Brockovich's story and her battle to reveal the truth. Brocovich, with her little training in law, went up against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) of California in 1993, and won. The movie has many scenes in which she and her boss meet with the company's PR team in order to "negotiate" settlements. In each scene the PR people downplay their company's role in the water contamination of the nearby Southern California town of Hinkley. This movie definitely portrays PR as evil.
Have a look


I was also reminded of the movie SuperSize Me, where independent filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, documents his one-month McDonald diet and this lifestyle's drastic effects on his physical and psychological well-being. The film also explores the fast food industry's corporate influence, including how it encourages poor nutrition for its own profit. At one point in the film Morgan enters one of McD's head offices and he speaks to a PR representative. He tells this man that McDonald's is killing America, and the man continually denies it. Morgan shows him evidence and reads statistics and is eventually escorted out of the office. At the end of the movie the credits reveal that this man eventually quit his job because of Morgan. Apparently his conscious got to him...
Michaela's slides says it well: "PR is about reputation.. it builds and maintains a reputation", but do we as future PR people do the greatest good for the greatest number (Bentham),or do we do as Kant says, "the right thing". Both will inevitably bring up massive ethical arguments.. and so the ethical debate continues...