The Ethics Pyramid: Making Ethics Unavoidable in the Public Relations Process

To move from the realm of good intent to verifiable practice, ethics needs to be ap-proached in the same way as any other desired outcome of the public relations process: that is, operationalized and evaluated at each stage of a public relations campaign. A pyramid model—the “ethics pyramid”—is useful for incorporating ethical reflection and evaluation processes into the standard structure of a typical public relations plan. Practitioners can use it to integrate and manage ethical intent, means, and ends, by setting ethics objectives, considering the ethics of each campaign tactic, and reporting whether ethical outcomes have been attained. The Need for Practical Ethics Tools Few public relations (PR) scholars or practitioners would dispute Bowen’s (2004) claim that “public relations is a field fraught with ethical dilemmas ” (p. 65). There is widespread awareness of ethics as a key issue and growing discussion by academics and practitioners about how to ap-proach professional ethics. Yet, as Bowen also argued, “too few works on public relations ethics have been published to serve as guidelines to practi-tioners ” (p. 65). Scholarly work, as is the nature of healthy academic de