Toward building an agent-based approach to ethics of care for public communication (2021)

COVID-19 has placed a focus on the "caring professions" of health and aged workers who work on the front lines to save lives. This presents the opportunity for reflection by other professionals – public relations practitioners included – to ask: how do I incorporate caring into my job? What can I contribute to this challenging time? How can I work with a care ethics approach in my practice? Following this, we can use COVID-19 as a springboard for reflecting on the need for professions to incorporate a caring ethic as underpinned by the motivations and habits of the agent, thus combining our three fields of theory – care ethics, virtue ethics and agency.