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Journal of Mass Media Ethics:Exploring Questions of MediaMoralityPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hmme20

Taking the Future SeriouslyLee WilkinsPublished online: 17 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Lee Wilkins (1990) Taking the Future Seriously, Journal of MassMedia Ethics: Exploring Questions of Media Morality, 5:2, 88-101, DOI: 10.1207/s15327728jmme0502_2

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Journal of Mass Media Elhics Vol. 5. No. 2, pp. 88-101

Takimg the Future Serious ly By Lee Wlkfns

University of Minouri-Cohtmbia

O ~ h e modern environmental crisis has confronted the news media with a story they are ill equipped to report-events and changes that may happen as opposed to those that have already occurred. This article explores a political and philosophical ra- tionale for a journalism that examines democracy's options for the future. The author then evaluates current media perfor- mance in this area, providing suggestions for how that per- formance might change to make coverage of potential futures a part of journalistic activity.l

A Future-Oriented Ethic

In the 20th century, the consequences of human actions have changed. Before the industrial era, individual choices and discoveries affected contemporaries or perhaps a sin le, unborn generation. Nowadays, modem science and technology a ow humanity to alter the lives of generations far into the future.

li However, philosophy and the future have an uneasy relationship.

Although the future is implicit in ethical reasoning, it is seldom discussed for its own sake or on its own terms. Garrett Hardin (19801, who coined the term Promethean ethics to deal with the role of ethics in future-oriented decision making, noted "one might suppose that ethical discussions have always devoted much attention to time, but this is not so. Our possible obligations to posterity cannot be discussed without considering the effect of the passage of time on values" (p. 9).

In the ensuing 10 years, the future has become one focus of envi- ronmental ethics. One view of the future adheres to deep ecology or the notion that no single species, including homo sapiens, has the right to dominate or eradicate another. Jonas (1984) asserted an ontological view of humanity: "[That] there be human beings, with the accent equally on the that and the what of obligatory existence" (p. 43). In both

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Wilkins 89

cases, ethical values underlying the arguments can be summarized as the good of continued existence and minimization of suffering.

Although philosophers may disagree about who the stakeholders of the future are or what their exact stake may be, there is little debate that the implementation of future oriented actions will involve political policy and government. Assigning government such a role means that ultimately citizens need to decide what they want for themselves and what they want their governments to provide. In order to think about such complex issues and then to make choices about them, democratic theory asserts citizens should have the opportunity to become informed. Much of that informational role has been assigned to the mass media.

How the mass media choose to perform that informational role raises two important issues. The first is philosophical: What might be the foundation of future oriented institutional roles in democratic soci- eties? The second is pragmatic: Is current media practice likely to pro- duce the informed public(s) decision(s) such questions require? If not, how might that practice be changed to enhance the debate? This arti- cle addresses both issues.

The Political and Philosophical Foundation

Thomas Hobbes's (1958) Leviathan remains the embodiment of the original social contract, and his reasoning, in some of his own words, is worth revisiting. As Hobbes viewed it, the social contract was that imaginary mechanism that saved people from a life that was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (p. 1071, allowing them to enter into and to maintain a civilized society. Hobbes's state of nature is not so very different from the state of nature modem climatologists anticipate may be the result of nuclear war and the ensuing nuclear fall, winter, and spring or the more gradual changes brought about by the greenhouse effect. Hobbes offered government as a remedy for humanity's per- petual residence in this abyss.

Hobbes's social contract could be dissolved only with great diffi- culty. He allowed the monarch enormous latitude to maintain the so- cial order, a rationale that became the justification for the divine right of kings, but refused the monarch absolute sway. Unlike Aquinas (1961) and Augustine (1962), who were willing to allow citizens of the civil state to exchange earthly misery for a divine afterlife, Hobbes (1958) asserted there was one act that gave citizens of the civil state the right to dissolve the social contract: The monarch's demand that the citizen sacrifice his own life (p. 117). In the Hobbesian view, it was not merely any life that would do; it was a life that was qualitatively superior to the natural state of things. How the average participant in the social

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contract was to apprehend the dieference was left to the realm of experience but explicitly involved communicPtion among citizens (pp. 38-45].

Hobbes's work was followed by that of Locke and Rousseau (Barker, 1962). The govemment Lake developed assumed that slow change is more conducive to the continuation of the social contract than either stagnation or revolution. Locke's view of the soda1 contract was a series of restrictions on gwe!rnrxtent, what modern political philosophers call the doctrine of tights. In Loclre's view, the fu- ture is hinted at in the su itions a b u t h g e built into the theory, but without real voice in t r contemporary polity.

Although Locke's theory may have encouraged a view of the envi- ronment as controMable private property, Rousseau tied government much more closely with an untamed nature and a human community. Rousseau believed the only reason for breaking and then reforming the social contract was the threatened d i d u t i o n of a particular com- munity through thwarting the general will, a term he never defined consistently. Rouseeau assumed a future populated by humanity, and from his descriptions of the state of nature it is not difficult to anticipate that Rousseau would have found a future that jeopardized humanity's connection to the natural world seriously flawed.

Finally, contemporary social contract theorist John Rawls (1971) abandoned any discussion of what the 20th century considers a mythi- cal state of nature in favor of a view of a post-state of natural political society arising from an original position. Under Rawls's terms, the so- cial contract is designed to do two things: maximize liberty for all in- volved in the polity and protect the rights of the weaker party. To insure those ends, Rawls's articulation of distributive justice supports a - priate, and sometimes emphatic, government intervention. ~ e o p K e - prived of food or adequate protection from the elements due to mas- sive climatic change, either through war or gbb?l pollution, ought to be subjjt to government protection. In fact, Rawls's (1971, p. 128) original position involves some acknowledgment of the future at least two gen- erations beyond the present. The despoiling of the earth would make all of humanity the weaker party which would not only allow for but would demand politbl response.

This brief review indicates social contract theory implicitly consid- ers the future. Thomas Jefferson, writing more than 200 years ago to James Madison, phrased it this way:

. . . the question of whether one generation of men has the right to bind another . . . [is] a question of such consequences as not only to merit de- cision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every gov- ernment. I set out this ground which I suppose to be self evident. That

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Wilkins 92

the earth belongs usufruct to the living: That the dead have no rights and powers over it . . . . (Brodie, 1974, p. 244)

Moral theory, too, adds weight to the argument that people do in- deed have a responsibility to the future. Its clearest expression is found in Kant's (1959) categorical imperative:

Ad only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of an- other, always as an end and never as a means only. (p. 1028)

If it can be intuitively assumed that at least some people are likely to want and have children, then based on Kant's (1959) theory it would be morally obligatory to bring them into a world where they did not suffer unduly. Mere procreation or political decision making that failed to take this duty into account would result in treating people, in this case subsequent generations, as a means rather than as an end. This duty to insure a livable future would combine some elements of both the strict Kantian duties-not to murder or to break promises (in this case, assurances about the possibility and the quality of future human existenceband at least one of the meritorious duties--aiding others. This view is not a consequentialist argument. Rather the duty evolves from the intuitive notion that people will continue to want children, and it demands that people consider the future well being of those children rather than constructing an exclusively present tense view.

In political and ethical theory, then, the future does indeed have a voice. Political theorizing about the future emphasizes the relationship of the individual to current and future communities. Ethical theory emphasizes individual duties in preservation of a livable future. Gov- ernment action, and consequently citizen involvement, is essential to both points of view.

The foregoing has established, at least in a provisional sense, the concept that consideration of the future is the purview of citizens in a democracy. A combination of social contract theory and more tradi- tional moral theory may help to promote this result. However, the fu- ture-at least that part of it that is subject to science and technology- is problematic. The nature of that problem, how the average person and the expert understand technological risks, has important implica- tions for democratic decision making.

Just as science and technology have enlarged humanity's view of its potential impact on the future, science also has provided humanity with a new way of thinking about that impact. That new way of thinking

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centers on r isk-a concept that has been analyzed both rnathemati- cally and psychologically.

The Risky Buinhss of Foreknowledge

Mathematical risk analysis is based on probobjlity theory. Risk ana- lysts calculate the probabilities of various components of technically engineered risky spterns breaking down (Perrow, 1984). Mathematical risk analysis has provided the dewieped world with phmes such as the likelihood of a nuclear reactor meltdown occurring once in every 10,000 nuclear reactor years. The technique has been applied to everything from nuclear submarines to genetic engineering.

Mathematical risk analysis may correctly be considered the province of expert, scientific knowledge. Some philosophers have ar- gued that only scientists and engineers are equipped to understand it, an argument with important ramifications for governmental policy choices. Jonas (1984) asserted modern governments should be run by a scientific and technocratic elite schooled in mathematical risk analysis because only an elite well educated in the predictions of sciene is ca- pable of making ethical policy choices (p. 12). Furthermore, this ethic of responsibility can be implemented only throu h a utopian Marxist

missed because of f government. Democratic fostering of an ethic o responsibility is dis-

. . . the doubt it casts on the capacity of representative government, op- erating by its normal principles and procedures, to meet the new de- mands. For according to those principles and procedures, only those present make themselves heard and felt and enforce their considera- tion . . . . But, thefuture is not represented. (Jonas, 1984, p. 22)

But mathematical risk analysis has its critics. Chernobyl and Bhopal are just two real-world examples of systemic flaws in what is essentially a mathematical construct (Pidgeon, 1988). Risk analysis is a poor predictor of specific events; public policy decisions, some assert, would suffer from overreliance on it.

Nonexperts also know something about risk. That familiarity, a less precise form of knowledge, comes through ex riences as common-

or not to offer a child an apple sprayed with alar. r place as weather forecasting and as controversia as a decision whether

When risk analysis makes its way to the public mind it becomes risk perception, and psychologists have found that the average person calculates the likelihood of risky events in a much different way than the risk analyst. When peo k think about risk, they entwine with pmb ability estimates some ru f irnentary values. For example, the average

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person views the risk of a nuclear power plant being built near his or her home not in terms of breakdowns per reactor year-the mathematical concept-but in terms of the magnitude of the potential harm (if it breaks, it is going to kill me), whether the risk was voluntarily assumed (people tend to rate the probabilities for voluntarily assumed risks, e.g. not wearing a seatbelt, much lower than involuntary risks, a nuclear meltdown, even though the safety statistics are precisely the reverse), and whether the assumption of such risk is somehow fairly distributed (if I should have to do it, so should my neighbor; Fischhoff, Lichtenstein, Slovic, Derby, & Keeney, 1981; Slovic, 1987).

The average person thinks about risk by moving rather haphaz- ardly between the facts of science and the implementation of political, social, cultural, and ethical values (Krimsky & Plough, 1988). When lay people think about risk, what they lack in rigor they make up for in complexity.

This layperson's view of risk calls into question the primacy of ex- pert knowledge. Experts may understand much that the average per- son does not about the implications of science and technology. How- ever, citizens have proved themselves unwilling to ignore the moral questions more mathematical views of risk cannot account for. This broader view may rightly be considered a form of knowledge capable of sustaining humanity.

Jonas's call for centralized and elite dominated decision making about policy issues involving science and technology ignores this alter- nate form of knowledge about risk. Furthermore, the history of most democracies, among them the United States, indicates that at times both leaders and the public have been willing to contemplate and to act on the future. The Louisiana Purchase, the safety net that became the New Deal and its subsequent imperfect additions, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of nationally protected wilderness areas all indi- cate that at certain historic times, the future has indeed found a voice in the democratic present.

If this second kind of knowledge, one that has been explored by so- cial science and is informed by human experience, is as insightful as that of the expert, then what is needed is a government in which a dia- logue between the expert, the public, and the policy maker cannot only begin but flourish. Such work is politically messy, but capable of sus- taining human life into future generations. The mass media, in turn, can be expected to help promote that dialogue.

The Media's Political Function

Under democratic theory, the mass media have an obligation to in- form the public about critical political events. This is not the media's

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only role in democratic &ties, but it is a central one, for the media provide the link amo e h s , pdticd policy makers, and citizens. Although thee is am3 scholarly debate about whether science has ever been apolitical, it is now apparent that science and technology have important pditical overtones. Media reports on science and techndagy should provide some of under- political structures a d dab.*s. D I U l t g U a a s the chemical spill in Bhopal, Mia; the Chermhyl power s t a h addent; or the worldwide AIDS epidemic, at their most basic reveal othmvise veiled political agendas, the choices between mckbl cosb and individual benefits in which a democratic d k n r y is expected to have some say.

In this view, the media as m institution in the bqpr society have a specific role: to resent a complete and understandable a view of the admittedly comp f' ex relationships among science, scientific elites, pub- lic policy makers, public policy, and the electorate. Based on the fore- going analysis, this role encompasses not only existing relationships but also notions of future relationships, whether they be among the various parties involved acting only as human agents or among the various parties involved who will, in turn, act on the physical world in ways that constrain future human choice.

Articulating possible futures is not a small responsibility, and in many ways it takes on the aura of social science as opposed to story telling (Hess, 1981). This proactive concept of pumalistic responsibility assumes there are certain issues of importance to citizens as demo- cratic decision makers. CitizeMl need to be informed about what those issues are, what constitutes propod policy in the area, the reasons for the proposed poky, and how citizens can act to baing that policy or one of its alternatives to political notice and fruition. All this must be done in a way that makes tk news relevant to fonxasting without putting the individual purnalist in the & of forecaster.

It is news that must take the future seriously as a news value. From this institutional obli ation arises a responsibility for individ-

ual journalists. To make indivi &I a1 stories relevant to forecasting, pur- nalists must be willing to ask questions about the future and to report those answers.

Those questions, however, should not be framed in the mold of worst-case scenarios as is sometimes the case in current science reporting (Friedman, Dunwoody, & Rogers, 1986). The insightful framing of questions about the futum q u i r e journalists to understand the language of the specialist even if scientific and technical jargon never reaches news columns or the air waves (Lambeth, 1986). Individ- ual journalists should (a) report what a variety of experts have to say about the ramifications of their current work on the planet's and the polity's future, (b) articulate for readers and viewers the assumptions

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and the logic that underlies these various futures, and (c) question pol- icy makers about the political values that underlie a variety of alterna- tives.

By insisting on asking and getting answers to value questions, jour- nalists can begin to help the individual democratic citizen link expert and lay knowledge about risk to informed political choice.

There is an obvious pragmatic difficulty in seeking this particular sort of information. Any response to such questions is politically tricky, subject to interpretation, and controversial even when clearly stated. For example, former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm received mountains of adverse publicity for a statement he never made: ''The old have a duty to die to get out of the way for the young." The fact that these words were put in Larnm's mouth and then repeated around the country was shabby reporting (WBrien, 1991). The value issues they raise are not. If we as a country elect to spend a large part of our total resources on catastrophic health care for in the final year of life, what opportunities are we missing? Might we be better off if we bought prenatal care instead? To whom is this duty owed, and why? These were the sort of value questions Governer Lamm was brave enough to raise, but thoughtful and determined journalistic probing can elicit them on a variety of issues from a variety of policy makers.

Just as a view of the future needs to be incorporated into the pan- theon of more traditional news values, journalists must learn to frame questions about the future in such a way as to reveal the value choices that underlie future oriented decision making.

Social science literature indicates the average citizen is capable of sorting through replies on these and other issues which constitute knowledge about risk and coming to conclusions about them. Political scientists have noted that most people tend to make political judg- ments based on the level of sophistication of the information they ac- quire (Nie, Verba, & Petrocik, 1976). Poli makers also read such news accounts, and they interpret and use suc ‘i! information in yet different ways (Shilts, 1987). Providing news accounts about the values underly- ing future options fuels political understandings on more than one level. Out of such understandings, political debate and decision mak- ing can begin.

The Media's Questionable Performance

Political events such as the Montreal Accords or Los Angeles's con- troversial plan to control air pollution suggest Promethean political de- cision making already has begun. However, scholarly analysis of cur- rent media performance indicates news that takes the future seriously

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as an institutional and individual journalistic goal is a standard to aspire to rather than one that is put of c u m t @malistic repertoire.

Taking such an abstract relationship as the link between specific scientific knowledge, the use of 6echrol , and democratic choice and making it concrete is problemstic. In "$ act, communication scholars have asserted that media cov of such risky events includes pre- dictable distortions that, instea "F of revealing political debates and choices, obscures or omits them.

For example, both the American and European media portrayed the Bhopal chemical spill as a homndous scientific and technical fail- u r e t h e worst industrial d e n t in human history--rather than a re- flection of the political choice to adopt the green revolution as a path to Indian economic self-sufficiency and political stability. Only a few media outlets and none of the thee Ammican television networks car- ried a report in which Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, speaking in Geneva to an international organization 2 months after the spill, asserted that his country would continue its present modernization course. That decision included the use of chemicals and pesticides to enhance food production, despite the risks of future Bhopals. The speech was significant: It framed the event in a specific political con- text. But because it was attached to a relatively "small" event, a speech to an international group rather than the accidental death of thou- sands, it did not receive the media play of the Bhopal disaster itself. Yet, Gandhi's assertion about his country's goals was more directly re- vealing of underlying litical choices than the Bhopal event, with all its human tragedy (Wil E' 'ns, 1987,1989).

These trends in the Bhopal coverage exemplify two general cate- gories of error in media coverage of scientific and technical events.

The first is an error of representability, or presenting stories with a specific history and context only as s ific events and only in pre- dictable ways. Tuchrnan (1978) refe mr to the process as routinization of the unexpected. Social trends or societal changes that take decades to develop seldom become news unless they are punctuated with specific events. The American mass media have been accused with some justification of missing two of the bigger political stories of this century, the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s and public disenchantment with the Vietnam War, until well into their de- velopment. The reason for such glaring omissions is a fairly simple one, journalistically. Until civil rights marches and antiwar demonstrations in the 1%0s, there was no event to report-hence, no story.

This mediated focus on the large event obscures the lengthy his- tory of underlying political debates. Persistent media preoccupation with events makes it uniikely that disasters or demonstrations will be

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Wilkins 97

holistically framed to include a political context. Media accounts of dis- aster and crisis ignore the representability of the politics of the event.

Just as news of the events that constitute normal accidents is sub- ject to questions of representability, the words and pictures of news re- ports often exemplify a second category of error: decontextualization and condensation through over reliance on predictable script and nar- rative and cultural stereotypes.

Decontextualization (Altheide, 1976) takes place in a variety of ways. The process begins when stories related to the event are viewed as more newsworthy than stories that focus on the event as an example of a particular problem. That second variety of news story, the concep tual and analytic side of the issue, generally receives less television air- time and less newspaper space.

The media also condense their coverage of events by relying on narrative stereotype (Nimmo & Combs, 1985) and dominant cultural assumptions (Gans, 1979) to tell a complex story. Such condensation is more easily visible in television news which must, by the very nature of the medium, rely on pictures to convey some of the meaning of the event. The television pictures of Bhopal, which focused on women and children as victims, became a form of visual shorthand for all the rami- fications of the event. Empty playground swings in a coastal Florida community have served in the same role in television's accounts of the greenhouse effect. In both cases, although these poignant pictures convey emotion and human costs, they omit the economics and politics of what the event itself represents. Not every viewer, upon seeing tele- vision's version of Bhopal, Chernobyl, or the greenhouse effect, would readily connect the victims to the economic and political choices those three risky systems represent.

Part of what makes the condensation of news reports so subtle is re- liance on cultural stereotypes. News accounts, regardless of story subject, focus on the underlying values of ethnocentrism, responsible capitalism, altruistic democracy, small-town pastoralism, individualism, and moderatism (Gans, 1979). The dominance of such values in news reports is insidious; by telling a story predictably, it allows journalists to leave many questions unexamined, and hence unreported. By making Chernobyl the accident of an inept, callous, and secretive political system (Patterson, 1989), Americans were urged to believe that it . . . "couldn't happen here". . . without being informed that the value assumptions underlying the development of domestic atomic energy in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are very much the same regardless of the ideology of the two political systems (Wilkins & Patterson, 1987).

Reporting that is avowedly political, reporting that delves into polit- ical and social questions surrounding various kinds of knowledge about risk, may make a difference at least when decision makers are exposed

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to it. 'The extensive nature of cov of the Chronicle . . . helped sup tical an % governrrrent and health offi-

to the AIDS crioie" Wts, 1967, p. 385). However, such cal events is all too rare. The mass media, through

their own definition of news coupled with histdc, cultural, and Wtu- tional constraints, are providing iRfolsrPtion about risky systems that is narratively predictable and anaIytkally shalbw.

This review of media phmnllce coupled with t i t i d and ethi- cal theory c a b for c in the i n o t i m d &n of news and the reapdMUties of p U m . Hirroricolly, news has been the loporting of a change in the status quo. News W t t a k ~ the future serious1 as a news vokn llso wmld d what mr c h w the s t~ tus quo an the reason(s1 for that change. y uch &- is to spot, harder to quote, and even to her to videotape. The final section of this article addresses these prac '$ cal problems.

News of the Future: A Journzlistic Prudent Vision

The future is an unanswered question, certain1 not something that can be resolved now or that one i~stitution can b$;e w i h u t ajd h m a variety of others. But, if social contract theory does include within it some implicit acknowledgment of the future, if ethical analysis pro- motes a similar view, and if knowledge about risk is not strictly the purview of experts, then the mass media ought to have a role in the process of cbice about the future that policy makers and the elec- torate are going to make in the coming years.

In order to accomplish that, voters, policy makers, and scholars alike need to acknowledge that the media will not radically alter the way they gather and disseminate the news. There will still be an orien- tation to the went, news will still be told in predictable ways, and de- contextualization and condensation will continue to permeate news ac- counts. Nevertheless, although these trends will continue, there are additional news values that can offset them.

Journalists could begin to demand of themselves that reporting about particularly disastrous events or certain kinds of scientific insight include answers to questions of forethought or what philosophers might label prudent vision. Prudence would demand that journalists ask experts and citizens alike to look far ahead and begin to ask and report the answers to questions about sacrifice in the present to safeguard the future. Vision, then, would entail the presentation of a potential future so clear and so detailed that readers or viewem could contemplate it as though it were before them.

In order to accomplish that goal, pumalists ma have to resort to what many have asserted they do best: tell stories. 41 e kinds of stories

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journalists can tell about the future scientists call scenarios, what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a sketch or outline of the plot of a play, giving particulars of the scenes, situations, etc."

Philosophers have noted that scenarios have at least two important qualities to recommend them (Jamieson, 1988). First, they are narra- tives constructed to serve some purpose and told from a point of view. They bring together diverse information and engage the imagination.

Second, "scenarios about the future are stories about a natural or expected course of events. They are not prtdictions, nor are they fan- tasies; they are plausible stories" Uarnieson, 1988, p. 77). For scenarios to provide readers and viewers with usable information, they must fo- cus on past or present facts and extrapolate them into the future. Sce- narios make explicit our implicit assumptions about the future. Furthermore, as both mathematical and psychological constructs of risk indicate, there is not one right or accurate future scenario but a multiplicity of them. A multiplicity of scenarios provides a richer future picture. "When it comes to scenario construction, a multiplicity of collectively inconsistent scenarios is a resource rather than a weakness" (Jamieson, 1988, p. 85). B isolating the source of the inconsistencies-whether in the facts o r particular situations or in the values applied to them-journalists and their readers and viewers can begin to make reasoned choices about the future. Citizens as well as journalists can then begin to develop their own prudent visions.

Incorporating journalistic prudent vision would not be possible in all stories, but it would be possible in many. Making the future one of the profession's news values certainly would require that the argu- ments of various stakeholder groups with various future interests be presented, and that the logic of those arguments, and the values that underlie them, be reported as completely and as fully as possible.

Some publications have already begun experimenting. For example, the Boulder, CO, Daily Camera became a voice for

the future with its readership in 1987 when it published an entirely fictional account of what a 100-year flood would do to the contemporary community. Details included how the flood would occur, potential damage-both to property and to human life--and some of the actions the community could take to mitigate some of these potential events. The indepth news story was tied clearly to a political choice the voters would make, whether to build an addition to the city's main library at the current site, within the 100-year flood plain, or whether to move the facility. Although this story focused on a single, local issue, there is nothing to prevent similar coverage of the impact of the greenhouse effect, the role that diet may play in cancer, or the impact upon both the developing and developed world of the green revolution.

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What is required is that pumalists articulate clearly for both them- selves and their m&rs a d viewers that one of the mspon&biIities of a late 20th century press in a democrxy is to take news a b u t the fu- ture--and the policy options that will produce it-seriously. Such an obligation arises both from political and ethical analysis. Journalistic pmdent vision will provide both vokrs and @icy makem with views of what is poseible. Exercising such prudent vieion strengthens democ- racy. As Jefferson might say, it may help to insure that the earth con- tinues to belong to the living.

Note

1. A preliminary version of this article was presented at an interdisci- plinary seminar, Ethics and the Professions: Moral Theories and Contemporary Problems, University of Nebraska, June 19-30,1989. I thank Professors Robert Audi, Department of Philosophy, University of Nebraska, and Stephen Kalish, College of Law, University of Nebraska, for their comments and criticisms on the earlier draft.

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