Okay, we are up to Chapter 6 now, and seem to be hitting a topic that might, just might, have application to the current political season that has started oh so early for the 2016 presidential race.
Public discourse ethics protects and promotes a place of conversation for diversity of ideas and persons. Public discourse ethics nourishes the public arena as a conversational space that provides a pragmatic welcome for difference. Private life, unlike public life, eschews difference, finding definition in commonality of interests and commitments. The public arena takes us into a world of difference, into what is termed the “marketplace of ideas” (Fraleigh & Tuman, 1996), where multiple ideas and communicative behaviors contend for status in the public world before us.
Arnett, Ronald C.; Fritz, Janie; Bell, Leeanne M. (2008-08-04). Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference (Kindle Locations 2156-2160). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
With that bold claim, the chapter then introduces three more “metaphors of communication ethics praxis”:
- Public Discourse
- Public Decision Making
- Differentiation of Pubilc and Private Space
The authors start with public discourse as the public “good”, and list three different approaches that can be used to conceptualize that good. You can study the principles of decision making, the enactment of free speech, and the way civilty is expected and used.
They start throwing the term “public discourse ethics” around, and bring up the concept of “idea gardening” in the public arena. This requires keeping the soil healthy, rotating crops, and being careful what you consider a weed. The diversity is what leads to the health that nourishes the garden.
When they get to public decision making, the good is public accountability.
Public accountability involves three communicative commitments: (a) diversity of ideas, (b) engagement of public decision making, and (c) a public account for continuing a communicative practice or changing that practice.
Arnett, Ronald C.; Fritz, Janie; Bell, Leeanne M. (2008-08-04). Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference (Kindle Locations 2208-2209). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
From this definition the authors suggest two unethical acts in public discourse: Not allowing contrary opinions to reach the public domain, and refusing to make a decision after listening to the various views, in other words, lack of access, and lack of accountability.
Actors in the public space need to be able to make decisions, and be able to change them as times and circumstances change, and new perspectives arise. They need to be able to change, and know why they are changing.
Differentiation of Public and Private Space is important to the authors, because each strengthens and informs the other. They use the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to show how he offered his private position to bring opposition to the public position of the Nazi regime of that time. The differentiation of the two brought clarity about what was going on in the public realm, just as the public realm can lend clarity to one’s private realm.
Learning within a public realm assists knowledge of one’s own private position. The intimate, tied to the private, and the more distant, tied to the public, reinforce the unique identities of each.
Arnett, Ronald C.; Fritz, Janie; Bell, Leeanne M. (2008-08-04). Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference (Kindle Locations 2277-2278). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
But they then go on to discuss the banality of our age: where the public world invades the private and the private the public. Our technology makes it easy for each to invade the other, and to confuse one with the other. Myself, I think this type of invasion is one of the chief atrocities of the 1984 Big Brother government.
If we are to protect the public space, we must protect the private.
As a culture, we have been convinced, incorrectly, that imagined familiarity increases the quality of our communicative lives. This chapter assumes otherwise.
Arnett, Ronald C.; Fritz, Janie; Bell, Leeanne M. (2008-08-04). Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference (Kindle Locations 2349-2350). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
Now we come around to a part of the chapter that I think can reflect back to my original comment about the presidential race. Many of the candidates seem to express the idea that speaking louder and taking up more space is what is needed in the public arena. Instead it works better when one does not try to dominate that space.
How does this dialogic ethic manifest itself?
- Listening without demanding
- Attentiveness to the self, other, historical moment
- Dialogic negotiation with temporal ethic answers
- All the above combined into ethical competence
And now the conclusion of the chapter, the example from Les Miserables. Valjean keeps his private life of convict separate from the public life of mayor, where he keeps the good of the village in mind. When the two try to cross, where he risks exposing his private persona, he still does so to protect the public domain at his own expense.
At The Rainbow 