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This essay explores how communication and ethics are intertwined, that ethics emerges within transactional episodes of communication between mutually responsive communicators, focusing on how justice is created within the communication act of acknowledgment. Using Hyde's analysis of acknowledgment as a life-giving gift, the essay examines the social construction of justice as harmony, both as an alternative form of justice and as a starting point for social construction of traditional notions of justice as fair or deserving. This analysis is juxtaposed with moral development theory and research of infants and children regarding the moral emotions of empathy, the equality bias, and disgust, which provides insight into dynamics of the social construction of ethical practices. This juxtaposition of philosophical ethics, communication and moral psychology offers a view of the dynamic entwinement of communication and ethics in transactional acts and episodes of communication that socially construct ethical practices and, over time, ethical principles, values and theories. The social construction of ethics points to the role each generation plays in teaching the next communication practices that promote practice and understanding of ethical principles, values and theories.
Paula S. Tompkins (Fri,) studied this question.