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The field of social and behavior change communication (SBCC) has a history reaching back to the period of decolonization following World War II. Since that period, much has been learned about theories and methods pertinent to this communication subfield. One topic that has received too little attention is the ethical dimension of SBCC. This paper considers the need for an SBCC code of ethics and justification for such a code. Amartya Sen's capabilities approach and Habermas's discourse ethics are reviewed as substantial contributions to such a justification. Habermas's U and D principles are selected as especially useful when the criteria for communicative action are considered, including criteria related to validity claims and general symmetry conditions. The paper argues that discourse ethics is the most suitable general ethical approach for SBCC, offering both a theoretical foundation for SBCC ethics and guidelines for practice in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Organizations' communication and social responsibility have been conceived and used as two completely separate areas, whose relationship is merely instrumental. This has led to a current lack of trust in the mechanisms and procedures of corporate social responsibility information. This article proposes an ethics of communication that defines how to ethically manage corporate social responsibility communication which is capable of specifying the relationships that link ethics, communication, and responsibility. The objective is to present the basic traits of new codes of ethics generation that include both compliance measures and their external verification by ethical auditing. The proposal is important because it establishes an ethical infrastructure from which to recover trust in corporate social responsibility communication. The employed methodology is reconstruction, based on Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, and also transparency and participation claims that result from discourse ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author develops the problem of tolerance in a multicultural society according to Karl-Otto Apel's position and the point of view of the ethics of discourse. The author explains that the challenge of opening a space to different forms of socio-cultural life is the current problem of tolerance. This way, he exposes the contradictions of the negative tolerance in liberalism and the communitarian critical insufficiencies. Therefore, he presents the proposal of ethical-discursive basis about what the German philosopher has called 'affirmative tolerance'. This study concludes with some value considerations which are meant to question the necessity of affirmative tolerance in a constitutional regime, in first place, and to postulate, in second place, that the ethical-discursive basis of tolerance finds a more coherent derivation in the category of respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses neo-Kantianism discourse ethics. It says that social ethics are divided into two philosophies in which one is neo-Kantianism that prioritizes justice in ethical norms and have been promoted by philosophers like John Rawls, and the other is neo-Aristotelian that prioritizes the good of the community and is promoted by philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre. It adds that the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas is Kantian, but it seeks to overcome Kantian inadequacies.