Conclusion

In most situations, ethics is universally held and practiced. However, we could be prone to believe that there is no ethical issue when the decisions we make are justifiable (especially if we think they are socially acceptable). Practicing global public relations could be challenging when we have a set of universal ethics which are not applicable to all situations. Our adoption of situation-specific ethics requires specific training and evaluations of how and why decisions are made in a certain manner and the possible impact of these decisions. In particular, we should question how personal, organizational, professional, societal and global values affect the decisions made and how the decisions made would subsequently affect these values. Practicing ethical public relations requires us to also examine whether our ethics is consistent with our receivers’ ethics.