Utilitarianism in Media Ethics

Ensuring that data are accurate becomes a cardinal principle in professional codes of journalism ethics. Fabrications, fraudulent materials, omissions, and contrivances are both nonscientific and unethical. Data that are internally and externally valid are the coin of the realm, experimentally and morally. In an instrumentalist, value-neutral understanding of media practice, the definitions entailed by the procedures themselves establish the ends by which they are evaluated as moral.

Although it appeared in concentrated form during the 1920s, actually utilitarian rationalism has served as the prevailing paradigm in communications for more than a century. Consistent with philosophical ethics generally since 1890, communication ethics has presumed that individual rationality marks all legitimate claims about moral obligations, so that the truth of those claims can be settled by formal examination of their logical structure. Serious-minded communication ethics entails an ethical rationalism that requires autonomous moral agents to apply rules consistently, formally, and self-consciously to every choice. But utilitarianism’s dominant mode at present, professional and practical ethics has been unable to address many complicated problems adequately. Dramatic technological innovation and the negative side of market-driven global commerce have pulled the news profession away from its traditional role in facilitating democratic life. Hence there is need for an entirely new model of communication ethics. Rather than searching for neutral principles to which all parties can appeal, our ethical theory should rest on a complex view of moral judgments embedded in duty and thereby in society.

Utilitarian ethics has major weaknesses, despite its democratic appeal. It depends on assessing the consequences accurately, when in everyday affairs the results of our choices are often unknown, at least in the long term. Blogging is a revolution in journalism at present, but how can we calculate all the changes even a decade from now? The short-term benefits of exposing corruption in a political campaign may be offset by long-term negative consequences—public hostility to an overly aggressive press. The results are frequently complicated and intertwined so that a theory staking itself on results often does not provide adequate guidelines for morally acceptable action.

Utilitarianism as a single-consideration theory does not simply demand that we maximize general happiness, but renders irrelevant other moral imperatives that conflict with it. As Charles Taylor argued, the exactness of this one-factor model is appealing, but represents only ‘‘a semblance of validity’’ by leaving out whatever cannot be calculated. In some media situations, consequences are a reliable guide. But in many of the most crucial issues we face at present, utility is not adequate— for understanding distributive justice, diversity in popular culture, violence in television and cinema, truth telling, digital manipulation, conflict of interest, and so forth. We face the anomaly that the ethical system most entrenched in the media industry is not ideally suited for resolving its most persistent headaches.