MORALITY IS NOTHING MORE THAN SELF-INTEREST

Morality is Nothing more than Self-Interest

Morality is Nothing more than Self-Interest

Introduction

Moral philosophy intersects public relations in the areas of ethical decision making, issues management, and corporate responsibility. In modern society, corporations are faced with a mandate to be good corporate citizens: to behave in the public interest as well as their own interests. Employing moral philosophy contributes to organizational effectiveness by aligning the interests of the company with those of its publics.

Moral philosophy is defined as the theoretical study of ethics. Philosophers study the composition of moral principles and expound on their justification using many methods of analysis. These methods of analysis can range from the weighing of consequences to the use of various tests, including concepts such as duty, fairness, justice, equality, and right. Philosophers concerned with defining moral principles ask such questions as “What is universally good?” and “What is the role of intention in determining the morality of an action?”

Discussion

For instance, a generally accepted moral principle is that lying is wrong. Philosophers can arrive at this principle through a multitude of moral tests. Through a utilitarian test, lying is wrong because it produces more harm than good. Through deontology, it is wrong because lying does not uphold the dignity and respect of others and because we would not want to be lied to ourselves. Although these moral tests are simplifications of the actual philosophies they represent, they allow us to see the principle that lying is morally wrong. But what about lying to save the life of a potential murder victim? What is the morality of those who lied to Nazi soldiers in order to save the lives of Jews? Moral philosophy takes on such difficult questions of moral obligation, intention, consequences, duty, fairness, responsibility, and justice and provides consistent methods for solving such dilemmas.

There are three broad purposes or types of conceptual approaches that moral philosophy can take: meta-ethics, defining what constitutes ethics; normative ethics, determining what rules or principles should guide ethical decisions; and applied ethics, the application of normative rules to specific ethical dilemmas. Normative ethics is the most prominent type of moral philosophy. Normative moral principles are of interest to public relations because they can guide the decision making of public relations practitioners in a multiplicity of situations.

Moral philosophy studies ethics, the application of moral principles to decision making. Ethics assumes that an objective morality does exist and attempts to discover the rules, values, and principles that govern—or should govern—behavior. Ethics provides logical decision-making methods based on moral principles of right and wrong, whereas moral philosophy deals with the more abstract questions about what actually constitutes moral character, norms, values, and beliefs across societies.

Consequentialism instructs that the ethical decision is the one with the most favorable consequences. The morality of the decision is judged by the expected outcome of the decision (utility) rather than the decision itself. The “utility” of a decision is what it produces in terms of the outcome of implementing the ...