Introduction

We have all been told about telling the truth since we were little, but is telling the truth the only ingredient in ethics?
“Ethics is more than simply following the letters of the law. It is a fallacy to assume that everything that is legal is also morally correct.” (Patricia J Parsons, 2004, p.9).
Law and morality are related, but sometimes practitioners have to make decisions and sometimes, although these decisions are legally correct, in some cases they are not morally correct or, in other words, they are not ethical.
Being ethical is very complex, because as human beings we are all different, therefore our moral varies depending on our culture, religion or many other external factors. What I’m trying to say is that, when we act in a certain way, we are trying to be ethical according to our own moral.

In the PR world we have a lot of different practitioners, with different goals to achieve. However, it is true that all of them are not the same; some of them want to make profit out of everything, without thinking about the negative side of acting unethically, others want to make profit making sure they act in an ethical way. For the first kind of practitioners, I would say that “not getting caught doing something wrong does not make it right.” (Patricia J Parsons, 2004, p.9)

Public Relations have sometimes been related to persuasion, the public may think that practitioners play by not telling the truth about what they are trying to sell, and although persuasion and PR are totally different things, there is one situation in which telling the truth is not the most ethical course of action. “If telling the truth outright is likely to harm one or more publics, then it seems that it is probably more ethical to avoid that full disclosure.” (Patricia J Parsons, 2004, p.17)