Digital innovations are not the only changes that have reshaped the ethics of communication. A generation or more before the digital revolution, ethical discussion was disrupted by challenges of quite a different sort. Until the twentieth century, discussions of norms and standards in Western cultures were embedded in ethical and cultural traditions that saw duties as fundamental. Ethical discussion addressed the agent’s question ‘What ought I (or we) do?’, and aimed to identify and to justify required and prohibited types of action. Discussions of the ethics of communication followed this pattern. They covered a wide variety of duties and prohibitions that bear on communication, ranging from requirements to speak honestly, to keep promises and to respect evidence, to prohibitions of deceit and defamation, disinformation and discourtesy, and many others.