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Universalism versus Communitarianism in Media Ethics
The question is whether we must choose between communitarianism and universalism when establishing a theoretical framework for media ethics. Both are alternatives to the individualistic rationalism that has served as the primary basis for mainstream communication ethics. However, in their offering a new perspective, they appear to be at odds with each other. Communitarianism contends that the community is axiologically (in terms of values) and ontologically (in terms of being) prior to persons; therefore ethical principles reflect community values and arise from dialogue among persons-in-relation.1 Universal human solidarity, on the other hand, is considered the most far-reaching alternative to both individual autonomy and communalism. Transnational and crosscultural principles are seen as necessary for guiding the global mass media, with individual decision-making and community-based ethics out of sync with today’s worldwide technology. Zygmunt Bauman puts the debate this way: “To the defenders of the situated self (‘communitarians’ as they came to be known), universalistic ambitions and universalizing practices are, of course, an outrage – vehicles of oppression, an act of violence perpetrated upon human freedom” (1993, p. 41).
The answer to the question revolves around the definitions of universalism and communitarianism. In the Enlightenment version of universals, and a functional understanding of community, these two concepts are in opposition. This chapter presents a counter-Enlightenment perspective on universals and a dialogic communalism that enables both ideas to feed off one another rather than contradict each other.
The intellectual strategy for a media ethics that is international, crosscultural, gender inclusive, and ethnically diverse goes like this: Individual autonomy is the problem and its analysis is the first step. Instead of addressing this problem by appealing to the community, the second step is developing universal protonorms. Third, since we live in community and practice our professions within them, the final step is establishing principles for the media that are consistent with universals. Obviously not all communities are morally upright; therefore standards from outside them are needed to establish a common good. Rather than stopping with universalist generalizations, universal principles become a crucial step toward a media ethics that is actionable and pluralistic.
Universal Theories
A foremost challenge is the structure of theory itself. Rigor in and agreement regarding the formation of universal theories will enable us to work fruitfully on the universal–communitarian problem. A universal theory is not just a system of conduct binding on all rational creatures, the content of which is ascertainable by human reason. Theories of ethics that are credible transnationally are ontological instead, constitutive of our humanness. This latter kind of theory can be the centerpiece of a new generation of communication ethics.
Enlightenment universals
Ethical rationalism has been the prevailing paradigm in Western communication ethics. Consistent with mainstream philosophical ethics generally, media ethics has presumed that 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. “Since Parmenides, Greek philosophy assumed the identity of being and reason…. In the thought of Aristotle only the active nous, precisely the mind which is not involved in the soul, is immortal; and for Plato the immutability of ideas is regarded as proof of the immortality of the nous” (Niebuhr, 1964, pp. 6–7). Through confidence in reason, we dare to disobey divine and cultural regulations. Philosophical ethics in this tradition is “based on the common principle” that we ought to “do the good which stands the test of reason” (Landmann, 1974, p. 110).
This is the unilateral model carried forward by René Descartes (1596–1690), the architect of the Enlightenment mind. Descartes insisted on the noncontingency of starting points, with their context considered irrelevant. His Meditations II presumed clear and distinct ideas, objective and neutral. His Discourse on Method (1637) elaborated this objectivist notion in more detail. Genuine knowledge is built up in linear fashion, with pure mathematics the least touched by circumstances. The equation two plus two equals four is lucid and testable, and all valid knowledge in Descartes’ view should be as cognitively clean as arithmetic.
Descartes contended, in effect, that one could demonstrate the truth only of what can be measured. The realm of the spirit was beyond such measurement, a matter of faith and intuition, not truth. The physical became the only legitimate domain of knowledge. Descartes’ spiritual world was left to speculation by the divines, many of whom shared the Cartesian bias that theirs was an ephemeral pursuit. A split between facts and values was bequeathed to the Western mind as science gained a stranglehold on truth. In terms of philosophical mapmaking, entire regions of human interest which had engaged the intense efforts of earlier cultures and non-Western peoples, simply ceased to appear.
The eighteenth century carried over Cartesian mathematics in conceiving of human nature as defined by rational choice. Instead of using the primitive tools of theology and the arts, morality could be ordered with sophisticated procedures of induction and logic. Kant (1724–1804) represented this linear rationality, schooled as he was in Descartes, mathematics, and Newtonian physics. In 1755, his first major book, Universal History of the Nature and Theory of the Heavens, explained the structure of the universe exclusively in terms of Newtonian cosmology (Kant, 1981). What is called the Kant-Laplace theory of the origin of the universe is based on it.
Then, in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Kant assimilated ethics into logic. Society was presumed to have a fundamental moral structure embedded in human nature as basic as atoms in physics, with the moral law the analog of the unchanging law of gravity. The rational individual derives universal laws mentally, by identifying those imperatives that one calculates ought to be true for everyone. Through the mental calculus of willing an individual’s action to be universalized, imperatives are understood to emerge unconditioned by circumstances – treat others as ends in themselves, do not kill, no harm to the innocent, do not deceive, obey the law, for example. By the formal test of calculating rules without exception one concludes, for example, that everybody ought to keep their promises.
Reason made the human species distinctive and only through rationality were moral canons legitimate. Humans act contrary to moral duties only by enduring the illogic of self-contradiction. In the Cartesian version, reason was considered “the same for all thinking subjects, all nations, all epochs and all cultures” (Cassirer, 1951, p. 6). By making cognitive processes explicit and combining them with the ancient Western emphasis on reason’s universality, basic rules were constructed that autonomous moral agents considered obligatory and against which all counter claims about moral obligation could be measured.
Just as Western science has held that there are universal truths about the world, discoverable through reason and accessible in principle to people of all times and places, so Western philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant have held that there are timeless moral truths, arising out of human nature and independent of the conventions of particular societies (Paul, Miller, and Paul, 1994, p. vii).
In a context-free rationality, moral principles are derived from the essential structure of a disembodied reason. This is a correspondence view of truth with an extremely narrow definition of what counts as morality. Instead of prizing care and reciprocity, for example, our moral understanding becomes prescriptivist, arid, and absolutist. This scientific version of universals is what communitarians object to. They are linear abstractions laid out like the arcs of longitude and latitude over the globe. Instead of transcendent metaphysical universals, we need norms that are historically embedded across space rather than absolutist over time. For communication ethics to be meaningful over the long term, a new kind of universal is necessary.
Alternative theories of universals
I introduce here the latest scholarship on this new kind of universal in ethical theory. These are credible attempts to shift the field unequivocally from individual autonomy to universal humanity. These universals are compatible with communitarianism. In recovering the idea of moral universals, they recognize this must be done without presuming first foundations, without the luxury of an objective reality from which to begin.
1 Seyla Benhabib (1992, cf, 2002) has developed the principle of interactive universalism, not subject to Lyotard’s (1988) objection that grand narratives are no longer possible. She defends universalist ideals in moral and political life by addressing the contemporary assault on universals. In the process, she gives serious attention to the respective contributions of feminism, communitarianism, and postmodernism. She argues that a universalist communication ethics must respond adequately to these perspectives (1992, pp. 1–21, chapters 1, 2, 6, 7). For example, the concept of participation in communitarianism (that community emerges from common action) must be carried into a universal theory for it to be legitimate. In her reformulation of discourse ethics, she depicts humans as dialogic selves whose moral agency follows norms implicit in Habermas’ ideal speech situation: universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity (Bracci, 2002, 128–130). Her idea of interactive dialogic rationality keeps ethics close to people’s everyday experience, so that diversity in cultures is recognized and differences do not disappear into an abstract metaphysics.
2 Kwasi Wiredu (1996) writes from an African philosophical perspective: the human species lives by language.2 It is through the intrinsic self-reflexivity of natural language that we arbitrate our values and establish our differences and similarities. The shared lingual character of our existence makes intercultural communication possible. Through the commonness of our biological-cultural identity as homines sapientes, we can believe that there are universals, notwithstanding that concomitantly we live in our local communities. In his words, “human beings cannot live by particulars or universals alone, but by some combination of both.” Their incompatibility in philosophy and anthropology is illusory. “Without universals intercultural communication must be impossible,” while our natural formations are in the vernacular (Wiredu, 1996, pp. 1, 9). Wiredu’s argument can be summarized this way: All 6500 known languages are equally complex in phonetic and phonemic structure. All humans learn languages at the same age. All languages enable their speakers to deduce and generalize, to make inferences and identify abstractions. Languages are the sine qua non of cultural formation. All languages can be learned and translated by native speakers of other languages; in fact, every language includes speakers who are bilingual.
In Wiredu’s terms, as cultural beings we are sympathetically impartial to other cultures. “Human beings do have a basic natural sympathy for their kind,” the difficulty being that this “sympathy is often quite sparse and … easily extinguishable” (1996, p. 41).
The survival of human society is possible in the face of quite a lot of defaults and defections from the observance of the ethical principle, but unless it held a certain minimum of sway in the thought and action of some individuals at least, there would be a collapse of human society. This necessary connection of the principle with the survival of the group and, by and large, of the species, invests it, as in the case of non-contradiction, with the status of an evolutionary force (1996, p. 41).
Universals are not driven by cognition, but a mosaic of cultural habitats in which we engage sympathetically and impartially at the same time. We embrace an Other with deep personal sympathy, and simultaneously universalize impartiality – wishing conceptually that the whole human race were like the Other, and defining the Other as the universal ideal.
3 In a study of ethical principles in 13 countries across four continents, the sacredness of human life3 was consistently identified as a universal value (Christians and Traber, 1997; cf. Christians, 2008). The rationale for human action was affirmed to be reverence for life on earth – respect for the organic realm in which human civilization is situated. Veneration of human life represents a universalism from the ground up. Various societies articulate this protonorm in different terms which they illustrate locally, although every culture can bring to the table this fundamental norm for ordering political relationships and social institutions such as the media. There is at least one generality of universal scope underlying systematic ethics. Rather than generating an abstract conception of the good, the primal sacredness of life is a catalyst for binding humans universally into an organic whole. Its universal scope enables us to avoid the divisiveness of appeals to individual interests, cultural practices, and national prerogatives. The sacredness of life, evident in nature itself, grounds a responsibility that is global in scope and self-evident regardless of cultures and competing ideologies. Its dynamic and primordial character contradicts essentialist and static views of human nature. The veneration of human life is a protonorm similar in kind to the proto-Germanic language – proto in Greek meaning underneath – a lingual predecessor underlying the Germanic languages as we know them in history. Out of this primordial generality basic principles emerge such as truth, human dignity, and nonviolence. The notion of protonorms is a way of rooting our universals in ontology, rather than in the rationalist epistemology of the Western tradition.
4 Cees Hamelink (2000) finds in international human rights the foundation for freedom, justice and peace in the world, and thus for the moral standards of the media as well. He estimates human rights to provide the only universally available principles for the dignity and integrity of all human beings. The world political community has recognized the existence of human rights since the adoption of the United Nations Charter in 1945 and has accepted the attending international legal machinery for their enforcement. Member states of the United Nations have pledged to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights. They have also committed themselves to upholding the dignity and worth of the human person, to foster social progress, and to safeguard the right of recognition before the law without any discrimination. Core human rights include the right to life, to food, to health care, to due process, and – not least – to free expression and to open public deliberation. To ensure democratic participation, in principle and practice, therefore, all peoples must have the right of access to communication channels in a manner independent of governmental or commercial control.
5 Martha Nussbaum (2000, cf. 2006) uses extensive research into the daily lives of women in the nonindustrial regions of India to argue for capabilities that are true of humans universally as they work out their existence in the world. The idea of capabilities respects “each person’s struggle for flourishing; it treats each person as an end, and as a source of energy and worth in her own right” (2000, p. 69). There are common values that are evident from people’s daily toil to meet their basic needs. Various social goods emerge which people aspire to reach and are capable of achieving. Bodily health is one example: “Being able to have good health, including reproductive health, to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter” (2000, p. 78). Affiliation is another social good: “Being able to engage in various forms of social action; to have the capability of justice and friendship; freedom of assembly and political speech” (2000, p. 79). All human beings are fully capable in principle of achieving these standards of a quality life. The countless ways of doing them overlap and establish the possibilities of universals. Social arrangements are just when people have the opportunity to develop the full range of their abilities. That, in turn, means that it should be possible to work out a conception of what all people must have to flourish. For Nussbaum, “theory is valuable for practice; … universal norms of human capability can provide the underpinning for a set of constitutional guarantees in all nations” (2000, pp. 35–36).
Universalist positions have discredited themselves over history by breeding totalitarianism. Those who claim knowledge of universal truth typically use it to control or convert dissenters. In the face of this objection, it must be reiterated that the universalist appeals from Benhabib to Nussbaum are not foundational a prioris. Interactive universalism, sympathetic impartiality, the sacredness of life, international human rights, and overlapping capabilities in the theoretical models are not objectivist absolutes. They are presuppositions that intellectual work needs as a starting point. Infinite regression is conceptually impossible. These five theories are interpretive schemes that arise from and explicate our fundamental beliefs about the world. They yield meaningful portraits, and not rationally precise formulations derived from artificially fixed conditions as in Enlightenment science. Theorizing is redefined not as an examination of external events, but the power of the imagination to give us an inside perspective on reality. As an intellectual strategy, it shifts transcendental criteria from a metaphysical and vertical plane to horizons of community and being, but universal norms they remain nonetheless.
The Communitarian Paradigm
The idea of universals needs to be revolutionized for universalism and communitarianism to live together in harmony rather than in opposition. It also requires a specific form of communitarian thinking. Communitarians cut their teeth on liberal democracy. This social philosophy has matured into a dialogic version that is more ecumenical in character and broader in scope intellectually. Dialogic communitarianism works in concert with ontological universalism, with the latter feeding into the former rather than standing isolated in its own domain.
Political philosophy
Communitarian’s basic formulation is in political theory and it is this version that cannot account for universals. It developed in the 1980s as a challenge to individualistic liberalism. In the sociopolitical theory of Michael Sandel, Carole Pateman, and Charles Taylor, an atomistic democracy of individual rights should be replaced by social, deliberative democracy instead. These scholars (plus Michael Walzer and Alasdair MacIntyre) are not promoting a political movement as is Amitai Etzioni, who aims at restoring traditional community values. The philosophical communitarians understand the issues in fundamental terms as revolving around the relationship between persons and community, the nature of the common good, and the impact of the excesses of individualism on morality (Sandel, 1984).
The communitarian argument can be summarized in three steps: First, in a politics of individual rights, the process of fairness has priority over a conception of the common good. Second, we can accept such a priority only by presuming that our individual identities can be established in isolation from history and culture. Third, since our human identities are actually constituted within a social conception of the good, we cannot make individual rights the cornerstone of the political order.4
In the communitarian worldview, what is worth preserving can only be ascertained within specific social situations where human identity and interests are framed. The communal – our commonness, communitas – is the context in which ethics can be understood. Individualist democracy since John Locke confuses an aggregate of individual goods with the common good. Our selves are understood to be constituted antecedently, that is, in advance of our engagement with others. A sense of community describes a possible aim of individuated selves but is “not an ingredient of their identity” (Mulhall and Swift, 1996, pp. 49–52; cf. Sandel, 1995, pp. 59–65) Liberal political theory presumes that people are distinct from their ends; the domain of the good is extrinsic. Intrinsic valuing is defined out of existence. Individual liberty has priority over the moral order, and therefore ethics is exterior.
For Sandel, however, the utilitarian picture of persons as separate from their conceptions of the good is unacceptable. “Who, the communitarian asks, is the shadowy ‘person’ that exists independently of, and able freely to choose, the ends that give her life meaning and value” (Mulhall and Swift, 1996, p. 10)? A voluntaristic relation between a self and its ends, in Sandel’s view, leads to an impoverished understanding of political community. Communal goods are then only one contender among many. Community is a possible aim but not an ingredient of our human identity. In this perspective, citizens think of themselves as “participants in a scheme of mutual cooperation, deriving advantages they could not have gained by their own efforts, but not tied to their fellow citizens by a bond whose severance or alteration would change their identity as persons” (Mullhall and Swift, 1996, p. 54, cf. Sandel, 1995, pp. 15–23). In communitarianism as a political philosophy, unless our freedom is used to help others prosper, our own wellbeing is negated. Citizenship is not achieved through a voluntary contract with other citizens, but arises from and depends on the reciprocal bonds which constitute human existence.
Dialogic communitarianism
Communitarianism that works itself in and through dialogic theory is the most mature version of communal normative theory at present. It embodies the commitments of the political version and the insights of feminist social ethics (cf. V. Held, 2006), while benefiting from the breadth and range of dialogic communications theory. A normative dialogic paradigm is a decisive alternative to relativism and a fruitful framework for communications in an age of globalization and multiculturalism.
In terms of the dialogic perspective, when we talk with each other about our mutual responsibilities, we seek to discover a good reason for acting. We are not simply being open to the other party’s perspective. We are actively listening and contributing with a view to uncovering nonidiosyncratic truths capable of withstanding the test of critical dialogue. A reason to act is a nonarbitrary thought-satisfying determination supporting one course of action over others. The thinking person finds the reason convincing and is compelled to act upon it precisely because the determination it makes is nonarbitrary. In the contribution of feminist ethics, dialogic theory does not think of morality as an impersonal action-guiding code for an individual, but rather as a caring process in which individuals continually adjust their positions in light of what others have said and done (Koehn, 1998, pp. 156–161). Emmanel Levinas (1905–1995) shifts the starting point in dialogic ethics to the Other, thus displacing motivations from oneself to engrossment in the needs of the Other (1985). Charles Taylor summarizes the fundamental character of the dialogic this way:
We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through … rich modes of expression we learn through exchange with others. Discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others. … In the culture of authenticity, relationships are seen as the key loci of self discovery and self affirmation (Taylor et al., 1994, pp. 32, 34, 36).
Whereas political communitarianism centers on the North Atlantic liberal tradition since Locke and Mill, the dialogic version is articulated in various areas of the world not conditioned by Enlightenment thinking. Their lineage cannot be traced to a single source. Good ideas are seldom unique; often they surface in several places at the same time triggered by similar conditions and needs.
Martin Buber is typically used as the supreme example of dialogic ethics. For Buber, restoring the dialogic ought to be our primary aim as humankind (1965, pp. 209–224). He makes the dialogic fundamental in his famous lines, “in the beginning is the relation” (1970, p. 69) and the relation is “the cradle of actual life” (1970, p. 60). He thinks of the interhuman relation ontologically as a category of being. Human relationships, not individuals per se, have primacy. “Persons appear by entering into relation with other persons” (1970, p. 112). For face to face encounters and community life, “the one basic word is the word-pair I-Thou” (1970, p. 3). This irreducible phenomenon cannot be decomposed into simpler elements without destroying it. There are not three components, sender-message-receiver, to be dismembered for scientific analysis. Buber (1970) speaks prophetically that only as I-Thouness prospers will the monologic I-It modality recede.
Mark Fackler’s description of communitarianism focuses on relationships in virtually the same terms as describe Buber: “The identity of the individual in communitarian theory emerges as an ontological recognition of the primacy of relationships…. Communitarianism insists that mutuality defines and constitutes the person. Without relationships and therefore communicative sharing, the idea of personhood vanishes” (2009, pp. 305–306). Verlinden, in his work on media ethics and globalization, also integrates Buber and the communitarian worldview. Buber’s Judaic dialogism he considers the best alternative to “abstract universalist imperialism” (2008, p. 199). Buber’s antifoundationalism can be summarized this way: “ ‘True norms,’ Buber says, never become a maxim: they do not command our obedience to authority but they command our-selves; they address us directly in the situation where we are and leave us to respond with our whole being” (Verlinden, 2008, p. 202; cf. Buber, 1965). For Buber, the I becomes We when people come together affirming Thouness to one another. “True community is not just a collection of individuals pursuing common interests, needs or appetites, but is instead the ‘vital interaction’ between complete and thoroughly responsive persons” (Verlinden, 2008, p. 206).
In Paulo Freire’s (1970) language, only through dialogue do we fulfill our ontological and historical vocation of becoming fully human. Following the work of the Spanish philosopher Eduardo Nicol (1965), Freire makes dialogue the distinctive element in his emancipatory strategy. Without dialogue, Freire argues, there is conquest, cultural invasion, manipulation, and imprisonment in antagonistic relationships. Society is macroanthropos rather than microcosmos, and dialogue is therefore the only morally acceptable tool for liberation. In analyzing dialogue as a human phenomenon, Freire understands the word to be the essence of the dialogic itself. However, the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible. It has two constituent elements – reflection and action – in continual tension. “There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Freire, 1970, p. 75). Liberation is a process of self-reflection achieved in dialogue. Freire argues that the fundamental right of dependent or oppressed societies is exactly that of gaining its own voice, the right to pronounce its own word.
Thus a revolution in our language is an integral component in the process of human liberation. Freire confronts the evils of starvation, poor housing, environmental abuse, unemployment, health hazards, and a lack of essential commodities. These problems, however, cannot be solved in the absence of a true word about the human condition, a word which enables us to decenter the reality in which we live, no transformation is possible. In the face of a culture of silence, Freire insists on a theory of our universal humanness, not as romanticism but as a barrier against nihilism. While tearing down our idols and rejecting evil structures, Freire refuses to condemn all our cultural creations. His program of resistance ruptures our situated experience, while retaining a redemptive ambience through a language of possibility.
In his work on human rights and Asian values, China scholar William deBary (1998) uses a historical approach to develop the relationship between Confucianism and communitarianism. He defines values as “the core or axial elements of a culture, the traditional ground on which rest the culture’s most characteristic and enduring institutions” (p. 1). While endorsing the standard conclusion that the civil cultures of Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and the People’s Republic have been deeply influenced by Confucianism, he elaborates on the nuances and applications through the major dynasties in China, and accounts for different kinds of allegiance to Confucianism in different periods, and for today’s “tough environment and limiting conditions” (p. 13). In his effort to illuminate human rights in the Orient, he resists the “individualistic West” versus “communitarian Asia” formulation. Rather than argue that Confucianism has produced the premiere version of communitarian thought because the two understand reality in similar terms, deBary outlines a more general task, that is, “to consider what communitarianism has meant in the Confucian context, in the longer development of Confucianism and especially of neo-Confucianism” (p. 12).
Two cases are of special interest to him as evidence of “Confucian communitarian thought”: community schools and community organizations known as community compacts. Community schools in villages, outside the bureaucratic system – for farmers in some periods – were rooted in both the moral uplift of the Great Learning and communitarian values (chapter 4, pp. 41–57). The ritual of compacts (xiangyue) survived into the twentieth century, where members of communities entered into a contract of voluntarism, mutual aid in distress, rotating leadership, engagement in rites and customs in order to limit the intervention of the state in local affairs (chapter 5, pp. 58–89). These examples of communitarianism are “authentically Confucian” in that they illustrate “the wider range of efforts by Confucians to strengthen community life and build consensual fiduciary institutions” (p. 13). These communitarian efforts under authoritarian regimes did not survive, but if they had flourished “they might have contributed to a Confucian version of a civil society” (p. 14).
Ubuntu is a traditional African concept in the Zulu and Xhosa languages that is typically translated as “humanity toward others.” The term is derived from the Zulu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, meaning “a person is a person through other persons” or “I am because of others” (Louw, 2004, p. 2). Ubuntu defines humans as social beings, with human dignity central to and integrated into both rationality and morality. Prinsloo (2003) explains that “according to ubuntu thinkers, there is no dualism in this position because both rationality and morality are acquired from community life and do not follow from so-called universal categories or fixed ideologies. In this sense one can speak of communitarian morality and rationality” (p. 43).
For Khoza (Prinsloo, 1998, p. 41), ubuntu represents “the collective consciousness of the people of Africa,” and in Louw’s (2004, p. 2) perspective, ubuntu is an indigenous aphorism that “serves as the spiritual foundation of African societies.” “Despite Africa’s cultural diversity, threads of underlying affinity do run through the beliefs, customs, value systems, and socio-political institutions and practices of the various African societies” and one of the value systems “found in most of these societies is the ubuntu system” (Kamwangamalu, 1999, p. 26). In this sense, ubuntu is the basis for sustainable African values and the African renaissance. Simultaneously ubuntu is understood as a universal value, with humans everywhere able to understand human life according to its terms.
Since ubuntu is not merely African, but embodies a fundamental truth about humanity, it serves in this essay to illustrate dialogic communitarianism as a normative system for understanding the press (cf. Christians, 2004b, pp. 241–251). Schutte (1993, p. xii) observes that although ubuntu is “opposed to the dominant forces of contemporary European thinking…. it finds sympathetic echoes in many non-African ideas” such as Schumacher’s “small is beautiful,” Ivan Illich’s “conviviality”, and Simone Weil’s “need for roots.” Dialogic communitarianism likewise contradicts Western liberalism, thereby making its intersection with ubuntu conceptually congenial (see Masolo, 1994).
Humans as cultural beings
In the philosophical framework opposed to Descartes’ rational being, the definition of humans as cultural beings is the best pathway to dialogic communitarianism. The philosophy of language provides the basis for a shift to the lingual definition of humans. Communities as linguistic entities, by reason of this fact, are moral in character, and this phenomenon is central to the dialogic version of communitarianism.
Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929/1953–1957, 1996) brought this intellectual domain to fulfillment.5 In Cassirer’s view, “we are language-using and culture-incorporating creatures whose forms of experience, conduct and interaction take shape in linguistically and culturally-structured environments, and are conditioned by the meanings they bear” (Schacht, 1990). His four-volume work in the 1920s brought to completion the symbolic tradition established by Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics (1916). For Cassirer, symbolization is not merely the hallmark of human cognition, but our representational capacity that defines us anthropologically. Cassirer (1944) titled his summary monograph, An Essay on Man. He identified our unique capacity to generate symbolic structures as a radical alternative both to the animale rationale of classical Greece and of Descartes’ modernity, and to the biological being of evolutionary naturalism. Cassirer’s creative being is carved out against a reductionism to intellectus and disciplined thinking on one hand, and a naturalistic neurophysiology and biochemistry on the other.
In his definition of homo sapiens as animale symbolicum, Cassirer sees the symbolic realm as intrinsic to this form of living being.6 Humans alone of animate creatures possess the creative mind, the irrevocable ability to reconstruct, to interpret. From this perspective, communication is the symbolic process expressing human creativity and grounding cultural formation. Culture is the womb in which symbols are born and communication is the connective tissue in culture building. Realities called cultures are inherited and built from symbols that shape our action, identity, thoughts, and sentiment. Communication, therefore, is the process of building and reaffirming through symbols, and culture signifies the constructions that result.7
James Carey (1989) described communication-as-symbolic-process the ritual view. Rituals are ceremonies or sacraments through which we define meaning and purpose; they are events of celebration such as weddings and birthdays where values are affirmed, and not merely exchanges of information. Humans have enveloped themselves in linguistic forms, artistic images, and religious rites and therefore their reality is known through their own symbolic matrix. When defining humans as cultural beings, culture is understood as a created reality that establishes a meaningful cosmos. Communication is the catalytic agent, the driving force in cultural formation, and if cultures are sets of symbols that orient life and provide it significance, then cultural patterns are inherently normative. Assuming that culture is the container of our symbolic capacity, the constituent parts of such containers are a society’s values. As ordering relations, values direct the ends of societal practice and provide implicit standards for selecting courses of action.
In this shift from rational being understood through mathematics to cultural being understood through language, symbol systems are not a vehicle of private meaning but belong to a community where they are nurtured in reflection as well as action. Communities are knit together linguistically; however, the lingual is not neutral but value laden, so our social bonds are moral claims. Defining humans as cultural beings moves discourse from its Enlightenment home in cognition to an interpretive axis in values, beliefs, norms, the human spirit, that is, in culture. If the interpretive domain is lingual, then human bonds are not through reason or action, but through the moral imagination. Our communal relations are not inscribed, first of all, in politics or economics, or in the transportation or data. Our mutual humanness is actually an ethical commitment rooted in the moral domain all humans share. Communities are woven together by narratives that invigorate their common understanding of good and evil, happiness and reward, the meaning of life and death. Recovering and refashioning moral discourse help to amplify our deepest humanness and provide the soil in which democracy can flourish.
Community-Universals Convergence8
Universals that are ontological reach toward diversity, and dialogic communitarianism has a worldwide and crosscultural orientation. These definitions of universalism and communalism eschew dichotomies and open pathways to convergence. Three such trajectories are suggestive of a media ethics that is oriented first of all by the universal rather than by individual autonomy: (1) universals anchor community values and professional ethics;9 (2) moral literacy becomes the press’ primary mission; and (3) global journalism and cosmopolitan democracy take center stage.
Universals as framework
Not every community ought to be celebrated. Some are sexist and others have racism in their language and institutions. Matt Hale’s Worldwide Church of the Creator is blatantly anti-Semitic and thrives on hate rhetoric. Through universal norms we raise questions about communal values that are exclusionary and oppressive. Cultures need norms beyond their own values in order to be self-critical. “Only an ‘outside’ lets us know that we are limited, and defined by those limitations; only an ‘outside’ shapes us” and enables us to evaluate and move forward constructively (Fleischacker, 1992, p. 223).
For media values and practices, universals serve as the ethical framework also. As an illustration, note how the sacredness of life as one universal protonorm applies. As we begin systematizing the idea that the lives of all humans are sacred, it entails ethical principles such as truthtelling, human dignity and nonviolence. Given the three step strategy that the convergence model suggests, after moving from the problem – step one, to its alternative – step two, universals need to shape community structures and professional practices in step three. What follows is a summary of how these principles grounded in the sacredness of life work communally.
Of the three principles, we have concentrated the most in communications with the first and second – truth and human dignity. Truth is central to media practice and appears everywhere in our codes of ethics, mission statements, classes, and textbooks on communication ethics. We disagree on the details, not always sure what truth means and how it applies. There is still in news a heavy emphasis on facts and unbiased information that is no longer defensible epistemologically. The general concept of truth is an unwavering imperative.
However, if we broaden our understanding of truth from the Occidental tradition to a definition rooted in the sacredness of life, the view of truth as accurate data is too narrow. With a framework oriented to the universal, the concept is more sophisticated as authentic disclosure. Truthful statements entail a comprehensive account of the context which gives them meaning. The fact-value dichotomy of Eurocentric science no longer is credible. “The facts never ‘speak for themselves’. They must be selected, marshaled, linked together, and given a voice” (Barzun and Graff, 1992, p. xii). News defined as disclosure of the inside meaning rings true, that is, it is authentic as both fact and interpretation to those being covered. This kind of news brings to light the underlying issues that enable communities to work constructively on social problems themselves.10
Increasingly, human dignity has taken a central position in media ethics. For two decades now, media professionals have worked on ethnic diversity in hiring, racist language in news, and sexism in advertising. Human dignity that arrives on the media’s agenda from the universal, takes seriously lives that are loaded with cultural complexity. Gender, race, class, and religion are understood as decisive contexts for fashioning human identity. The imperative of human dignity grounded in the sacredness of life moves the field beyond an individualistic morality of rights to a social ethics of the common good. It enables media organizations and practitioners to recognize that the flourishing of all the voices of self-discovery, and self-affirmation among a society’s cultural groups, are urgent for the civic agenda.
However, the third ethical principle, nonviolence, is still underdeveloped. Flickers of peace are emerging on our media ethics repertoire, but only glimmers compared to truth, and of late, human dignity. Johan Galtung has developed the principle most thoroughly as peace journalism, concerned not only with the standards of war reporting, but nonviolent resolution of all types of human conflicts (e.g. 2004). Peace journalism recognizes that military coverage as a media event promotes the very violence it reports, and therefore is developing strategies that make peace paramount (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005; Lynch, 2008). However, the broad task remains of bringing this third principle to maturity (cf. Christians, 2007). We need a rich venue at present for doing so – international magazines and newspapers, town hall discussions, the world wide web, educational multimedia presentations, documentaries, online journalism, theater, and music – together bringing nonviolence into its own across cultures and from the bottom up.
Moral literacy
The argument of this chapter is that the ontological version of universals obligates us to choose the dialogic version of communitarianism. If in the dialogic model, communities are moral orders and not merely functional structures, moral literacy ought to be privileged in the media’s mission. Rather than merely providing readers and audiences with information, the aim of the press is morally literate citizens.
Dialogic communitarianism challenges reporters to participate in a community’s ongoing process of moral formation. The possibility exists in principle. Moral judgments may appear to be instinctual, but “agents manifesting them are often capable of explaining just what it is about human beings that merits” reactions or involvement; in other words, “we articulate our intuitions by developing a particular ontology of the human” (Mulhall and Swift, 1996, p. 103). Our moral intuitions are often “purely instinctual, like reactions of nausea to certain tastes.” However, humans are capable of explaining what merits their obligations and they typically do so in terms of their beliefs about the nature of humanness. Agreements and disputes about the good life can be articulated and sifted. Discussions among people typically specify the character and identity of our moral intuitions. Therefore, as journalism deals with the moral dimension in news, editorials, features, investigative reporting and so forth, it is meeting a crucial human need. In communitarian perspective, media practitioners open windows on the moral landscape in interactive terms – with reporters, those in persuasion, script writers, and producers resonating critically with the same debates over authentic social existence as the public themselves. Citizens are helped to distinguish beneficent communities from bad ones, and to articulate a common good within the fallible and irresolute voices of everyday discourse.
In other words, given the character of dialogic communitarianism, the various technologies of public communication ought to stimulate the moral imagination. This language often appears in a sanitized sense: “Do these programs have any redeeming social value?” In this regard, investigative reporting has been deficient and it ought to be rectified:
The hard-hitting stories, the investigative stories, lack a morally sensitive vocabulary. They don’t talk about moral issues in moral terms. They go to great lengths to do what, in a morally technical language, might be called “objectifying morality” by taking moral claims and making them appear to be empirical claims (Glasser, 1992, p. 44).
Recovering and refashioning moral discourse helps to amplify our deepest humanness and provide the soil in which democracy can flourish. Whenever one observes reenactments of purposeful history and justice, one sees the results of moral literacy.11
Despite unrelenting pressure from media commercialism, public broadcasting often resonates with a redemptive accent and stirs the human conscience.12 We all know stations and reporters who have refused infotainment and sought to awaken the civic conscience. Major league awards are still won by professionals in journalism who distinguish themselves for public service. In the Tsunami disaster, December 2004, the news included the overwhelming acts of kindness around the world, and our moral imagination was invigorated. Historical documentaries on the horrifics of the Holocaust sometimes include the benefactors of Anne Frank in the Netherlands, and the resistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Out of the turmoil in the Middle East are the inspiring stories of Jews and Muslims working on water projects in Palestine, and teaching their children each other’s religion. Editorials have raised consciousness of anti-Semitism and heightened our moral awareness of racism and gender discrimination. In the debates over war and worldwide trade in military arms, the moral issues in terms of just-war theory and pacifism have emerged at various times in news and commentary. Affirmative action, environmental protection, health care reform, gun control, unemployment, and immigration policy raise moral conflicts that journalists can help the public negotiate. Building on the unique capacities of news as a genre, and with ontological universals and dialogic communitarianism as the ethical framework, reporters can empower us toward moral literacy by appealing to our conscience.
Global Journalism
Current thinking on democracy is moving beyond deliberation to cosmopolitanism. Political theorists are seeking to make democracy more responsive to, and more viable in, a world where global trade and communication have fundamentally altered the demands of nation state democracy. Political participation now extends beyond national boundaries and requires forms of democracy sensitive to regimes of power not defined by geography. David Held (2006) thus calls for implementing a model of “cosmopolitan democracy,” one that extends and deepens the mechanisms of democratic accountability across the globe. He envisions an assembly of democracies rather than an inclusive United Nations with governments of all kinds (1995, pp. 228–229). The model is not that of a world government, but “the development of democratic decision-making in emerging cross-border and transnational communities and associations” (Gould, 2008, p.21). These include, for example, international agencies working on economic issues, Internet forums, and larger regional associations like the European Union.
Held’s cosmopolitanism focuses on what he understands to be a new and pressing need for a global democratic order, to deal with those international issues confronting democratic life at present – global warming, food supply and distribution, risks of nuclear and chemical warfare, health and disease. This structure recognizes local, national, and regional authority but also coordinates it in ways that build an even larger democratic community: “an international community of democratic states and societies committed to upholding democratic public law both within and across their own boundaries” (2006, pp. 229–235).
Along with David Held, Nigel Dower uses cosmopolitanism as his framework in his World Ethics: The New Agenda (2007). He speaks of a number of cosmopolitan theories that have two common aspects: “First, a set of values as values to be accepted everywhere. Second, some notion of active responsibility to further those values” (chapter 5). Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006) settles for the term as well, while rejecting the superiority complex of the so-called cosmopolitan frequent-flyer who does not engage the world deeply in its diversity. Kathleen Roberts and her colleague Ronald Arnett have drawn the same conclusion, calling their recent book Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality.
Actually polites – citizen-of-the-cosmos – has had resonance since the expression was first introduced by the cynics of the fourth century BC. In its complexity it designates two interwoven strands: (1) the idea that we have obligations to others, beyond our kin and communities, and (2) the idea that we value not just human life in general, but human lives specifically (Appiah, 2006). Instead of the fragmented “act locally and think globally,” we think and act locally and globally simultaneously. Local allegiances and human solidarity have rarely functioned well in philosophy – even among those with cosmopolitan instincts. However, for the twenty-first century we have no other option but to get it right. Cosmopolitanism sets the highest and most accurate standard for our theoretical work at present as the sociopolitical context for understanding the ethics of news.
Stephen Ward (2005) has developed a global journalism ethics that rethinks journalism’s principles and standards by adopting a cosmopolitan perspective. Cosmopolitanism regards people as citizens of the world. It emphasizes such international principles as human rights, freedom, and justice. The cosmopolitan values “humanity’s common aspirations, vulnerabilities, and capacities, as well as its potential for suffering…. The cosmopolitan attitude does not deny that particular cultures and traditions are valuable for life and may be psychologically necessary for the development of ethical character. The claim of humanity acknowledges that we live simultaneously in two communities: the local community of our birth and a community of common human aspirations. It insists only that … we should not allow local attachments to override fundamental human rights and duties” (Ward, 2005, p. 15). For journalists to serve cosmopolitan’s claim of humanity, they must follow three imperatives (p. 16): act as global agents for a well-informed and tolerant public; serve the world’s citizens and not only local and national readers and audiences (cf. Comers, 2008, pp. 86–93); and enhance nonparochial understandings with a diversity of perspectives. The media-connected world brings together a daunting array of ethnic groups, traditions, religions, political agendas, technological inequalities, and cultural conflicts; Global journalism ethics makes sure “we do not withdraw into an insular ethnocentrism” and insists on “reporting from an informed and nuanced international perspective” (p. 5). The convergence of universals and communitarian thinking encourages this enlargement of the boundaries of media ethics.
Conclusion
The different trajectories in this article converge on the view that media ethics in an age of global technology requires a more sophisticated theoretical framework than hitherto available. Communication ethics rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, and therefore emphasizing personal decision-making, cannot serve journalism with its global reach and technological complexity. Kantian-style categorical imperatives are absolutes across time and space that require a Newtonian cosmology and have no credibility post-Einstein and Heisenberg. Appeals to face-to-face communities or political communitarianism are not sufficiently crosscultural. However, theories in which ontological-linguistic universals and dialogic communitarianism converge are not reductionistic and open the pathways to media ethics of the future. Such theories do expect diversity of opinion and epistemological differences in the pursuit of a new generation of media ethics, but in good faith anticipate salient agreements beyond the status quo.
Our communal identity is defined by what we consider good or worth opposing. As a result for journalism, its moral framework cannot be reduced to professional ethics. The focus ought to be not on professional practice, but on the moral life as a whole. How the moral order works itself out in community formation is the issue, not first of all what practitioners consider virtuous in their own codes of ethics. To resonate intelligently with a community’s values means that professional communicators need to know ethical principles that they share with the public at large, such as truthtelling, justice, human dignity, keeping one’s promises, and no harm to the innocent. Theories of universals and community, properly understood, converge on that demanding but inspiring task.
Notes
1 Referring to African communitarianism, Fackler (2003) concludes that for the Nigerian A. Okechukwu Obgonnaya and the Ghanian Kwasi Wiredu, the world is constituted communally. They regard “community as nothing less than ‘the way things are’, a presupposition, a prima facie truth. To speak meaningfully is to address social reality in communitarian terms” (2003, p. 320).
2 Wiredu was head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Ghana until his retirement in 1999. His first major book, Philosophy and an African Culture (1980), deals with African philosophy in terms of the folk thought preserved in oral traditions and critical reflection. He contends that philosophical work is culture-relative but can be universal too. African philosophy uses historical resources and engages them in indigenous languages but then actually does philosophical work relevant outside these boundaries. As editor-in-chief of the Blackwell Companion to African Philosophy (2004) he provides comprehensive coverage of African philosophy across the ages – including Ancient Egypt, North African thinkers, precolonial philosophy, and African political thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
3 The term “sacredness” is standard in religious vocabulary, referring to deity. It is also an anthropological term with its etymology from the Latin sanctum, meaning “set apart.” The protonorm is presuppositional, pretheoretical, deep, primordial. On that level, sacredness as a term grants extraordinariness to human life, but is not invoking the higher level of organized religion, its doctrines, and institutions.
4 These three propositions are adapted from Amy Gutmann (1985).
5 Cassirer (1960) developed the most systematic treatment to date of the nature of the cultural sciences. See especially his “Naturalistic and Humanistic Philosophies of Culture” (1960, pp. 3–28) and “Nature-Concepts and Culture-Concepts” (1960, pp. 117–158). Cassirer is particularly valuable for the counter-Enlightenment orientation of this chapter, since he refers to Vico’s humanism throughout his career, using Vico’s philological emphasis as the most compelling alternative to Enlightenment rationality.
6 Symbolism as a special endowment of the human species, to the exclusion of other organic beings and their sign language, is a fundamental question that is not resolved in Cassirer. His basic task in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is to trace the evolution of cultural symbols from early history to modern times, where he of necessity focuses on the origin and role of language in homo sapiens. What is needed to contradict Cassirer’s exclusivism is proof that any animal has made the decisive step to propositional language, that is, advancing from direct or indirect sign-responses to symbols of meaning.
7 This is a semiotic definition, which stands in contrast to anthropology where culture refers to entire civilizations as complex wholes, and in contrast to common parlance where culture is identified as refined manners. Most definitions of culture are expansive, encompassing under the term virtually all human activity. Culture is thus said to involve technologies, customs, arts, sciences, products, habits, political and social organizations that characterize a people. Others such as Jacob Burckhardt (1943) find the broad definition inchoate and distinguish culture from political and social structures, from direct efforts to understand nature (such as chemistry, physics, astronomy), and from religious institutions. Culture thus becomes essentially people’s communicative activities and refers primarily to the products of the arts and languages. The term is used here in Burckhardt’s sense.
8 This section serves as a propaedeutic, the concept in the humanities for introductory principles that serve to guide future thinking and research.
9 Having community life judged by universal norms follows the intellectual strategy of Jürgen Habermas (1984). For an ethics of discourse to operate effectively in the public sphere, he presumed an ideal speech situation as its context. His communicative rationality opposes objective reason as does the concept of ontological-linguistic communities proposed in this chapter. Presuming an inherent desire in speech acts for mutual understanding, Habermas argues for an ideal speech formulation of full participation, mutuality and reciprocity as a goal for citizens and a critical standard by which to judge consensus. In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990), Habermas argues that the principle of universalization acts as a rule of argumentation and is implicitly presupposed by discourse (pp. 86–94). In moral consciousness, universals are the bridging principle which makes agreement possible (pp. 57–68).
10 For an elaboration of news as authentic disclosure in theory and practice, see Christians (2004a).
11 For a historical review of the way communitarianism applies to the mass media and sociopolitical life, see Fackler (2008, pp. 306–312). Fackler (2003) applies communitarian theory to the media in Africa, including the oncoming internet technologies (pp. 318–126).
12 Fackler challenges communitarianism to “provide an account of the conscience” for the sake of its long-term vitality (2008, p. 313).
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