Made in Japan: Connecting the Dots through Contemporary Communitarianism’s Intellectual History

Abstract

ABSTRACTTwenty-five years ago, Christians, Ferré, and Fackler’s (1993) Good News: Social Ethics and the Press proposed the then-radical notion of communitarianism as an alternative moral philosophy for media ethics. This article evaluates communitarianism as a media ethic, but not only according to the work already done by Christians and colleagues. Instead, this article extends the communitarian ideal by connecting it, in a new way, to notions espoused a half century earlier by Tetsuro Watsuji, a Japanese philosopher whose prescriptions of ethics in Rinrigaku in 1937 have been largely ignored by media scholars.