11: Ethical Beings
What are ethics? Whenever we delve into new topics, it’s always funny to me when I catch myself wondering about the nature of something I had previously taken for granted as obvious. So, now, I wonder: what are ethics? (Or is it: what is ethics?) A very small instance in Gough and Price caught my attention, namely that one ethical situation is “in writing headings that truthfully represent the contents of a section of a document” (p. 325). That is an ethical situation?! To me, it doesn’t seem that if an author called a section of their paper “High School” but they were really writing about “College” that that would be unethical. It just seems like it’d be distracting because it’s simply not correct. As a reader, I’d tend to think it was an error before I thought: “You lying author! You told me this section was going to be about high school!” I know this is a lame example—I’m merely trying to illustrate my surprise that something seemingly so minor, like a subhead, would be considered an ethical situation.
Also, because a large part of my research paper focuses on self-reflection and -awareness, I am finding myself more attuned right now to other researchers’ declarations that communicators and professionals must “be knowledgeable, self-conscious or self-aware, self-reflective, and self-critical” (Gough & Price, p. 322). More than any other tool, technique, or skill taught, I think self-awareness and self-criticism are the hardest skills to teach or learn. And yet, I believe they are more important to effective communication than any other skill.
I’m not sure I understand Dombrowski’s question: “Can ethics be technologized?” but I do understand his position that “[w]e should not expect such technologies to substitute for personal judgment and responsibility” (p. 331). If technologizing ethics means somehow creating systems or software that can make ethical judgments, that just doesn’t seem right or even completely possible. But why must it be considered an “ethical burden…a weight from which we can never fully be relieved” (Dombrowski, p. 331, my emphasis)? Sure, ethics are often so gray it’s frustrating to try to determine what’s right or wrong. But I think humans are instinctually (mostly) ethical beings, so ethics are not so much a burden as just a part of being human. Perhaps Sartre said it best: “philosophy is what philosophers do. It is not a lifeless system of principles but a task, and one which is never complete. It is a task with which we are always saddled—a burden, yes, but also the root of our very humanity” (Dombrowski, p. 336). Ethics will always be a part of us and technical information will never be able to “determine fully either its own meaning or its own ethicality” (Dombrowski, p. 332).
I continue to be drawn to this question we keep running into about whether we are or should or should not be teaching to the industry, “[indoctrinating] our students in the forms appropriate to their employers” (Sullivan, 1990, p. 213). I can’t decide whether or not I think it’s a bad thing to teach to the industry; after all, we are educated to be employed and employers want to see that we know a thing or two about their industry, but I think I do agree with Sullivan (1990) that “modern composition instruction reflects this technological consciousness: it casts the writing process in terms of problem solving, stresses objectivity and thereby denies a writer’s social responsibilities, distances the interaction between writer and reader, deals with abstract issues, and denies politics” (p. 212). Again, if I’m reading this correctly, I think what Sullivan is getting at here has a lot to do with my final conclusions in my own research, that professional communication is not clearly defined, black and white processes but is, instead, flawed by our humanness. So, to teach composition courses in a way that denies a writer’s social responsibilities or deals with abstract issues only harms their prospects of succeeding in the workplace.
Dombrowski, P. M. “Can ethics be technologized? Lessons from Challenger, philosophy, and rhetoric.”
Gough, J., & Price, A. “Developing ethical decision-making skills: How textbooks fail students.”
Sullivan, D. L. (1990). “Political-ethical implications of defining technical communication as a practice.” In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. A. Selber (Eds.), Central works in technical communication (pp. 351–364). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.