Ethics of Communication

Ethics of Communication is a form of applied ethics that studies the ethical principles involved in the human communication. Ethics of Communication can be described in three ways: in a deontological way (related to the professional use of communication, for example in the media); as ethics of communication in strict sense (devoted to clarify the meaning of basic ethical concepts: good, right, responsibility etc. in the communication); as ethics in the communication (dedicated to find ethical elements in the communicative processes: that is the founding project of Apel and Habermas). The paper discusses these forms and highlights the necessity of the ethics of communication - as critique of communicative reason - in the contemporary society and in the virtual world.