Ethics Communication in Journalism: Using Expert Sources with the Goal of Fostering Ethics Literacy

Abstract The last decades have seen a resurgence of ethicists in public discourse. In the news media, they are called upon to comment on current affairs and public policy. I argue that the epistemic status of their testimony and the scope of their expertise are not always clear to media consumers. Ethicists have a very distinct and limited kind of expertise and the main goal of expert ethics communication should be the fostering of moral understanding and ethics literacy. This goal, however, is in conflict with some of the goals of journalism that are grounded in the rationale of the media market. While good ethics communication thrives on caution, nuance and pointing out consensus, the media market has a tendency to prefer definitive answers and controversy. In this paper, I am spelling out specific conflicts that arise in various steps of the journalistic process and make proposals for how to solve those conflicts. Some, I argue, can be fixed easily, some less so. Help might come from science media centres as a place where ethical and journalistic expertise can occur together.