posted Jun 20, 2003
in Communication Ethics

Communication Ethics book part for A Natural Balance . (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

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This symmetry has always been with us; as I mentioned in Ethical Drift, we've forgotten after so many years of the current status quo. A nice side effect of re-recognizing the symmetry of communication, that all people have equal rights to communicate, is that it provides us a nice balancing point. This principle provides a natural way of examining the relationships between various entities and considering how ethical they are. Is one side elevating itself over the other? Is the other side justly compensated for this elevation? (Mere compensation is not enough; if you paid me a penny for forty hours of work, you are unjustly taking advantage of me, even though I am "compensated".) Is a larger entity using its size abusively? Just this one simple, nearly-forgotten principle has a lot of resolving power when the proper questions are asked.