Ethics and Codes of Conduct

Hi again, I hope you have all started the New Year in a good way. I’ve been having a look at some Codes of Conduct, and I have understood they are meant to regulate the work of public relations within a frame standard and keeping themselves acts with social responsibility. It is important to safeguard the credibility of public relations by a sustained mutual understanding, and by acting according to certain ethics.

After reading about this topic, it could be said that codes of conduct are guidelines for practitioners when there is an absence of laws on a certain field. The codes of conduct are generally more related to ethical moral than the law, because although the actions must be framed within the law, these actions might not be legitimate. This means that although the action is totally correct according to the law, it might be immoral according to ethics. “The advantage of such codes is found in the number of professionals who are part of designing and then implementing the standards. The disadvantage is that in achieving this breadth, specificity is often scarified.”(Seib and Fitzpatrick, 1995, p.13).
In the next few days I’m hoping to post an analysis of two different codes of conduct to compare the principals of each of them.