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Liz Horgan COM 614 Reflection #3 - Ending a Friendship and Analyzing the
What is truth? Whose truth is true? Where did the truth come from? How was it
decided that it was true? Will it be true tomorrow? The chapter in Communication
Ethics Literacy outlines the following approaches to truth and communication ethics:
• Democratic - defined as open, public airing of diverse opinions with “truth” derived
greatest number of people, obligation, value of human life, etc. It gets “messy” when
• Contextual - ethics vary based on culture, people and settings, there are different
• Narrative - a story-centered approach that impacts how people and groups evaluate
“good”; there are many narratives, each offering different guidelines for how people
• Dialog - differing “goods” are discussed and shared meaning occurs through
discourse. The “right” answer emerges through dialog, and is dependent of time,
place, different narratives and points of view. “Good” is fluid and never fixed.
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Truth seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Just as no Truth exists in postmodern
society, rather there are many truths and these truths are always in flux, so too is truth
subject to interpretation.
I had a situation where I made a difficult choice to end a long friendship. I had a
friend, Jill, who had been a friend for almost 15 years, we had even lived together in
Boston, a new place for both of us after college, and we had both gotten married and
found ourselves in the same State of NC (she moved down to Raleigh shortly after I
moved to Charlotte). She was fun, lively, nice, and we had a long history together. Yet
she had been involved in incidents that I considered insurance fraud, and that bothered
me (she considered the events opportunities to get a little extra benefit from big-bad
insurance companies). One time her apartment was broken into and an old stereo
system was taken. She made a claim to the insurance company and lied, saying her
Rolex watch was stolen, along with a state-of-the art sound system, a tv, and a few
other things (highly inflating value and the “crime” itself). She “made” several thousand
dollars on the “deal”. When she moved to Raleigh, she “scored” another financial
victory where she used her homeowners insurance to replace an entire (old) wall to wall
carpet when she “accidentally” burned a hole in it. She was pleased at her strategic
I was morally outraged. The more she bragged about her successes with these
insurance incidents, the harder I had to look at our friendship and question whether I
wanted to overlook this side of her and continue to be friends, or if this was a deal
breaker.
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this case, was honesty and not taking advantage of another entity. My ethical approach
was to protect and promote the good of truthfulness. Jill’s “good”, as I see it, was that
the “little guy” had to do whatever he/she could in the face of the “big” powers just to get
fairness a bit back in line as the little guy was always on the short end of things. I felt
that for Jill, the means (cheating) justified the ends (parity between big and small).
From a narrative perspective, the two of us had very different stories on the
insurance incidents. As alluded to above, Jill felt that she, as a “little guy”, had
triumphed over the “big, bad” insurance companies that always charged too much
anyway. Her story was of her cleverness at beating the system. My narrative centered
around how insurance premiums are set, (risk is spread out and the cost of a robbery or
other event is financially mitigated through the repayment of the monetary loss by an
insurance company), and looked at the cost of fraudulent claims as inflating the cost of
the premiums that “regular” people pay. Jill’s narrative was all about her gain, mine was
about the added cost I and others had to bear for her “theft”. We both were coming at
our own ideas of fairness, but from very different vantage points.
I dialoged with friends about my need to take a stand on the side of what I felt
was “right”. It was not enough for me to tell Jill I felt she had cheated, for I saw what I
believed was a pattern, and a fundamental belief system on her part that was counter to
the way I saw the world. Points of view I heard through dialog with others included were:
the “good” of protecting and promoting a friendship that was deep and long made
sense; that overlooking flaws in friends was what friends do; stealing is wrong; that we
are all dishonest in some way and that by ending a friendship because of what I viewed
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as a character “flaw” was not right as no one is perfect. The emergent reality that came
from these various dialogs was that, in the end, I agreed with the codes and standards
of society that deemed this cheating as “wrong”; I could not overlook it as Jill relished
her “victories” and bragged about her triumphs. I told her I thought what she had done
was “wrong”, and that I didn’t want to continue a friendship with someone who thought