Addressing Ethics in the Technical Writing Classroom

There is no doubt that ethics is paramount to technical writing; the doubt, it seems lies with how to teach students about ethics and what of it to teach them. If Gough and Price’s article lends itself to nothing else, it certainly points out how incredibly complicated the issue of ethics is. In many ways, their attempt to cover all the different elements of an ethical code creates its own ethical code worth examining.

They state: “Anyone making an ethical decision or giving ethical advice should be aware of the necessity to employ some acceptable standard or other in the judgement to arrive at the decision” (322). Gough and Price believe this decision must be made void of personal feeling or subjectivity: “This standard must be decided independently from the subjective interests of the individual making the decision and independent of the situation in which the decision is made” (322).

Gough and Price’s notion that ethical decisions can/should be made without subjectivity is problematic for one basic reason: it’s completely unrealistic. In fact, this is a point where their entire article starts to tear at the seams from the implicit irony in criticizing the inadequate approach towards ethics in technical writing textbooks since these books apparently “are often sufficiently wrong, vague, misleading, or confusing as to make the problem of effective ethical decision-making more difficult (321).

In the wake of this conjecture, Gough and Price leave us with a long and complicated list of things to remember when judging a situation for its ethics so circuitous and rambling, it’s difficult to say what the takeaway is. Gough and Price’s framing of ethical and non-ethical situations are another unproductive addition that do little to clear up the confusion. They point out there is a difference between legal and ethical situations and that purely individual actions that have no effect on the community are not imbued or affected by ethics. Although this is an interesting claim, it is difficult to point out any individual action that does not either influence the community or stem from the community and the ethics within that given group. Gough and Price’s example of a situation that’s so individual it doesn’t affect ethics is the classic abandoned-on-the-island scenario, but even then one’s arrival on such an island would have been affected by an ethical system.

I would propose that it is more useful for the technical writing classroom to acknowledge that other divisions and fields already heavily address ethics and ethical theory; the technical writing classroom would benefit from adopting those models. Med students are almost always required to take a medical ethics course where they are introduced to theorists, theorists who lend themselves nicely to debates over how to best address any sitatuion. Two such theorists are often John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, who, respectively, propose the ideas of the Greatest Happiness Principle within Utilitarianism and the ideas of maxims and duty in Deontology. A basic summation of their claims emphasizes that Mill says people should do what is best for the group in a quality way where Kant says people should act according to their duty to do what is right.

Technical writing in many ways already adheres to these principles; we as teachers have the opportunity to introduce our students to these ideas in order to give them a model they can apply in any situation instead of thinking that ethics is situational or the result of a long list of intertwined and difficult rules. Within this system we can also show what Gough and Price overlook: ethics is entirely subjective so our students should not expect to ever fully please all audience at once, though they should try to be as respectful as they can.