Communication Ethics and Virtue

Abstract

Virtue approaches to communication ethics have experienced a resurgence over the last decades. Tied to rhetoric since the time of Aristotle, virtue ethics offers scholars in the broad field of communication an approach to ethics based on character and human flourishing as an alternative to deontology. In each major branch of communication scholarship, the turn to virtue ethics has followed a distinctive trajectory in response to concerns about the adequacy of theoretical foundations for academic and applied work in communication ethics. Recent approaches to journalism and media ethics integrate moral psychology and virtue ethics to focus on moral exemplars, drawing on the work of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, or explore journalism as a MacIntyrean tradition of practice. Recent work in human communication ethics draws on MacIntyre’s approach to narrative, situating communication ethics within virtue structures that protect and promote particular goods in a moment of narrative and virtue contention.