Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue And Difference

"Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue & Difference" offers a learning model of communication ethics literacy from a dialogic perspective, framing communication ethics as arising from a good or set of goods found within particular narratives, traditions, or virtue structures that guide human life. Communication ethics protects and promotes a particular good or goods through communicative action. We examine multiple approaches to communication ethics, revealing the good protected and promoted by each ethical perspective. We assume that discourse is not neutral and always carries a substantive and/or procedural good. In particular communicative contexts, a communication ethic protects and promotes a good particular to that context-for example, the good of relationship is protected and promoted in the context of interpersonal communication; in organizational contexts, the good protected and promoted is a "dwelling place." The book frames the pragmatic need for this historical moment as dialogic learning about one's own narrative ground and associated goods protected and promoted through communicative action, and attentiveness to the narrative ground of the Other. We engage narrative and virtue contention with pragmatic hopefulness that, in learning from the Other, we will make understanding and learning the central goods of communication ethics in an era defined by difference.