A critical evaluation of Clifford Christians’s media ethics theory: a précis

摘要

Clifford Christians, a leading authority in media ethics, first proposed the idea of constructing a new ethical theory for the field as early as 1977. Since then, Christians has produced a prodigious amount of scholarly work, proposing and developing concepts that were to form part of his theory. In 2019, in the book Media Ethics and Global Justice in the Digital Age, he synthesized the ideas that he had been developing throughout his productive career. In this article the author uses primarily a selection of Christians’ work from 1977 to 2017. He first identifies the elements of the theory, then offers a critical evaluation of the theory’s plausibility as a globally normative media ethics based on Christians’s claims. He affirms the theory’s promising position to be so ‘from the perspective of its final proposals or conclusions’ yet points out the theory’s difficulties ‘from the point of view of its philosophical foundations or premises’. He concludes by offering concrete suggestions in harmony with the framework of Clifford Christians, that can serve as directions for future research that would help to settle the theory more securely within an enhanced human-centeredness while rendering it less susceptible to relativism.