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Liz Horgan COM 614 Reflection #3 - Ending a Friendship and Analyzing the

Rationale using Various Approaches to Communications Ethics

What is truth? Whose truth is true? Where did the truth come from? How was it

decided that it was true? Will it be true tomorrow? The chapter in Communication

Ethics Literacyoutlines the following approaches to truth and communication ethics:

Democratic - defined as open, public airing of diverse opinions with truth derived

from a majority vote.

Universal-Humanitarian - guided by principles, like duty, greatest good for the

greatest number of people, obligation, value of human life, etc. It gets messy when

applied to particular truths/situations.

Codes, Procedures and Standards - used to evaluate conduct. They frame

behaviors according to guidelines agreed upon by institutions/businesses.

Contextual - ethics vary based on culture, people and settings, there are different

standards for different audiences, cultures and relationships.

Narrative - a story-centered approach that impacts how people and groups evaluate

good; there are many narratives, each offering different guidelines for how people

live their lives.

Dialog - differing goods are discussed and shared meaning occurs through

discourse. The right answer emerges through dialog, and is dependent of time,

place, different narratives and points of view. Good is fluid and never fixed.

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Truth seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Just as no Truth exists in postmodern

society, rather there are many truths and these truths are always in flux, so too is truth

subject to interpretation.

I had a situation where I made a difficult choice to end a long friendship. I had a

friend, Jill, who had been a friend for almost 15 years, we had even lived together in

Boston, a new place for both of us after college, and we had both gotten married and

found ourselves in the same State of NC (she moved down to Raleigh shortly after I

moved to Charlotte). She was fun, lively, nice, and we had a long history together. Yet

she had been involved in incidents that I considered insurance fraud, and that bothered

me (she considered the events opportunities to get a little extra benefit from big-bad

insurance companies). One time her apartment was broken into and an old stereo

system was taken. She made a claim to the insurance company and lied, saying her

Rolex watch was stolen, along with a state-of-the art sound system, a tv, and a few

other things (highly inflating value and the crime itself). She made several thousand

dollars on the deal. When she moved to Raleigh, she scored another financial

victory where she used her homeowners insurance to replace an entire (old) wall to wall

carpet when she accidentally burned a hole in it. She was pleased at her strategic

way of getting new carpeting for her great room.

I was morally outraged. The more she bragged about her successes with these

insurance incidents, the harder I had to look at our friendship and question whether I

wanted to overlook this side of her and continue to be friends, or if this was a deal

breaker.

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I looked at the universal-humanitarian concepts of principle, of right which, in

this case, was honesty and not taking advantage of another entity. My ethical approach

was to protect and promote the good of truthfulness. Jills good, as I see it, was that

the little guy had to do whatever he/she could in the face of the big powers just to get

fairness a bit back in line as the little guy was always on the short end of things. I felt

that for Jill, the means (cheating) justified the ends (parity between big and small).

From a narrative perspective, the two of us had very different stories on the

insurance incidents. As alluded to above, Jill felt that she, as a little guy, had

triumphed over the big, bad insurance companies that always charged too much

anyway. Her story was of her cleverness at beating the system. My narrative centered

around how insurance premiums are set, (risk is spread out and the cost of a robbery or

other event is financially mitigated through the repayment of the monetary loss by an

insurance company), and looked at the cost of fraudulent claims as inflating the cost of

the premiums that regular people pay. Jills narrative was all about her gain, mine was

about the added cost I and others had to bear for her theft. We both were coming at

our own ideas of fairness, but from very different vantage points.

I dialoged with friends about my need to take a stand on the side of what I felt

was right. It was not enough for me to tell Jill I felt she had cheated, for I saw what I

believed was a pattern, and a fundamental belief system on her part that was counter to

the way I saw the world. Points of view I heard through dialog with others included were:

the good of protecting and promoting a friendship that was deep and long made

sense; that overlooking flaws in friends was what friends do; stealing is wrong; that we

are all dishonest in some way and that by ending a friendship because of what I viewed

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as a character flaw was not right as no one is perfect. The emergent reality that came

from these various dialogs was that, in the end, I agreed with the codes and standards

of society that deemed this cheating as wrong; I could not overlook it as Jill relished

her victories and bragged about her triumphs. I told her I thought what she had done

was wrong, and that I didnt want to continue a friendship with someone who thought

these kind of actions were ok.

In reviewing this decision in light of communication ethics, I realize the

complexities of both perception, framework, ground and context in arriving at an action

based on my constructed sense of ethics.

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