Situated practice as a way to train ethics
The seemingly opposing debates between Paul Dombrowski and Jim Gough and Anne Price seem to illustrate a problem not just in ethics, but also in the teaching of technical communication—and maybe some problem with teaching in general. On the one hand, we have Dombrowski claiming that trying to “technologize” ethics—that is “procedures cannot substitute for personal ethical responsibility (334). Therefore, we need a way to help students understand a personal ethical responsibility. On the other hand, the suggestions from Gough and Price take the form a list of suggestions and processes they believe will lead to ethical decisions. In this way, Gough and Price seem to be attempting to “technologize” ethics.
In other words, the question about ethics seems to hinge on whether ethics come from within (“personal ethical responsibility”) or from without (“conditions” and “circumstances” that make for ethical decisions). Perhaps unknowingly, I think Gough and Price touch on an issue with creating the sort of “schematic” for ethical decision making when they are discussing circumstances for ethical decision making. Here they state that “ethical considerations require a human interest” (323). Maybe we could rephrase this to say that ethical considerations require an audience.
And, technical communicators no doubt agree that audience is important. And, perhaps we can point to heuristics that will help us understand a given audience. But at the end of the day, a true ethical decision must take place within a situation involving real people. And any sort of schematic for making these decisions will necessarily be lacking. Still, one can see the temptation to look for these schematics. They can provide an easy “check list” to making an ethical decision. But will that decision truly be ethical in a given situation? I worry the answer is no.
So then, how might we teach ethics. To me, Dale Sullivan made an interesting attempt at describing how to teach ethics by appropriating Carolyn Miller. In Sullivan’s essay, he does not try to lay out a one-size-fits-all ethical decision-making device. Instead, he looks at the definition of technical communication as social practice and attempts to situate ethics within that schema, with that schema representing a particular situation.
The main move Sullivan seems to make for teaching ethics is to make teaching technical communication political. To do this, Sullivan pulls on classical traditions of rhetoric as political discourse in opposition to classical traditions of “business writing” as the discourse of “slaves” (216). In doing so, he attempts to show that situating technical communication as a purely business-oriented type of communication strips technical communicators of the ability to make ethical decisions. Sullivan concludes, “[t]herefore, our present way of defining technical communication as the discourse appropriate for industry is equivalent to defining it as the rhetoric appropriate for slaves—those barred from making decisions about the ends, those whose decision-making authority is restricted to determining the most efficient means of obtaining predetermined ends” (216).
To remedy this, Sullivan suggests broadening the definition of audience to include the public—“even an imaginary one” (217). Now, the idea of assuming an “imaginary” public seems counterproductive to me. In doing so one could fall prey to one’s own prejudices or the prejudices of society. However, when Sullivan describes his own class, we can see how these ethics can become more situated. In class, Sullivan assigns his students to different interest groups who debate a real social situation, in this case, copper mining strikes in 1913 (218). By situating students in a real (albeit historical) situation, I think that Sullivan creates a space where students can explore ethics without the necessity of the sort of “check lists” that Dombrowski decries and Gough and Price strive for. He figured out the third path.