Abstract
Clifford Christians, a leading authority in media ethics, first proposed the idea of constructing a new ethical theory for the field as early as 1977. Since then, Christians has produced a prodigious amount of scholarly work, proposing and developing concepts that were to form part of his theory. In 2019, in the book Media Ethics and Global Justice in the Digital Age, he synthesized the ideas that he had been developing throughout his productive career. In this article the author uses primarily a selection of Christians’ work from 1977 to 2017. He first identifies the elements of the theory, then offers a critical evaluation of the theory’s plausibility as a globally normative media ethics based on Christians’s claims. He affirms the theory’s promising position to be so ‘from the perspective of its final proposals or conclusions’ yet points out the theory’s difficulties ‘from the point of view of its philosophical foundations or premises’. He concludes by offering concrete suggestions in harmony with the framework of Clifford Christians, that can serve as directions for future research that would help to settle the theory more securely within an enhanced human-centeredness while rendering it less susceptible to relativism.
Highlights
Clifford Christians, one of media ethics’ leading authorities, first proposed the idea of constructing a new ethical theory for the field as early as 1977 (Christians 1977; Cortes 2019)
25 promising position to be so “from the perspective of its final proposals or conclusions,” yet points out the theory’s difficulties “from the point of view of its philosophical foundations or premises” (Cortes forthcoming). He concludes the article by offering concrete suggestions he believes are in harmony with the framework of Clifford Christians with the end of settling it more securely within an enhanced human-centeredness while rendering the theory less susceptible to relativism
A Chinese professor with formidable credentials reinforces this subtle claim in the Afterword of the same book by affirming that Christians “expounds a theoretical paradigm... which endows the classical principles of ethics with new meanings... and... restructures theory toward an ontological theory of international communication ethics” (Chen 2019, 335)
Summary
A critical evaluation of Clifford Christians’s media ethics theory: a précis. Communication and Culture, Taylor & Francis, 2020, 5 (2), pp.157186. HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés
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