Pragmatic and philosophical cases against codes of ethics for journalists and other mass media practitioners are proposed in this paper. After an examination of the First Amendment considerations related to media ethics, a distinction is made between moral philosophy and moralizing, and it is argued that most media codes tend to be moralistic in tone rather than being based on principled morality. It is next observed that developmental psychologists maintain that individuals naturally operate on narrow, pragmatic, and moralistically selfish bases only in their early stages of moral development, but that morally mature individuals and institutions evolve into independent agents. The stages and sequences of this development are traced, and the roles played by such external regulators as ethics codes during the various phases of individual development are pointed out. It is concluded that if a First Amendment function of journalists and other media practitioners is to operate as social catalysts capable of identifying the topics and expediting the negotiations societies need in order to remain dynamic, then codes of ethics may very well be dysfunctional. (HTH)