I know Dean well. I'm not certain what the citation above means. But here's the skinny on the question. Ethics are acts. Morals are attitudes. Why do PR professionals subscribe to a code of ETHICS (ACTS)? To benefit themselves? They already do that with their MORALS, which they must first form and which cause their ethics. Their ethics are meant to guarantee their correspondents that their acts can be trusted. All transactional actions are directed outward – toward others. Actions are not self-congratulatory events. They are corrsespondent events. A person doesn't shout to be loud. He shouts to be heard. A lecturer doesn't cite degrees and credentials before a speech to get over his nervousness. He does it to make the audience cconfident in his presentation. A husband doesn't promise to come straight home after work to remind himself he is a faithful partner. He does it so his wife is reminded he's a faithful partner. Remember, PR is about audience, audience, audience. Morals are inside a person. Ethics are the outward expression of morals directed to outside persons for outside benefit.
Answer: C. Public Relations Professionals. We as a professional community are the primary beneficiaries of our ethics, which permit us to self-identify our role in society by publicly defining our voluntary relationship with society. Our ethics clarify what our professional community has agreed to be the parameters of our professional conduct, even though a societys legal code and moral norms may allow behavior that extends beyond our professional communitys self-declared ethical boundaries.
Because of this, society and our clients do also benefit from the ethical practice of public relations. But the primary beneficiaries are the members of the professional public relations community.
Acknowledgement: This question was provided by Dean A. Kruckeberg, Ph.D., APR, Fellow PRSA, taken from his article Testing Your Public Relations E.Q., published in the spring 1997 issue of The Strategist (pages 31, 33-35).