Like Ashleigh pointed out in her post, two readings from this week, “Developing Ethical Decision-Making Skills: How Textbooks Fail Students” by Jim Gough and Anne Price and “Can Ethics Be Technologized? Lessons from Challenger, Philosophy, and Rhetoric” by Paul M. Dombrowsk, focus specifically on approaches to teaching ethics in the technical writing classroom.  In his article, Dombrowski argues that because “raw technical information does not signify its own ethicality,” (332) ethics cannot be reduced to a system of procedures.

In their article, Gough and Price critically review several business communication textbooks’ differing approaches to teaching ethics.  Before reviewing the findings of their textbook analysis, the authors make several sweeping generalizations about the conditions of ethical decision-making and the circumstances in which these decisions may need to be made.  They’ve done exactly what Dombrowski warns us about: they’ve attempted to technologize ethical decision-making.

While I was reading the Gough and Price article, I was struck by one of the circumstances that they explain calls for ethical considerations.  They explain (and I apologize for the long quote) that ethical considerations are necessary when multiple humans’ interests are at stake:

Ethical considerations occur only in a community or social setting where there is possible conflict between competing interests for scarce resources or the satisfaction of more than one individual’s interests or set of interests. . . For example, it is relatively easy to construct plausible desert island scenarios where no ethical choices are made because there is no possible inter-subjective conflict of interests since only one person’s interests are at stake. (323)

I was immediately interested in this particular example because it seems to imply that human interest is the only concern in ethical decision-making.  That particular quote made me suspicious of the heavy emphasis of human interest and the absence of all non-human (animals, the environment, etc) interests in ethics.  None of this week’s readings even touched upon the notion that non-human factors could potentially influence ethical decision-making in addition to the interests of humans.  I even looked in the textbook I analyzed for this class, and, like this week’s readings, the textbook implies that human interests are the only interests that deserve ethical consideration.  The textbook I analyzed gives students a list of questions to ask themselves when considering the ethics of a technical document, including, “’Am I reasonably sure this document will harm no innocent persons or damage their reputations?’” (Lannon 90).  Again, non-human factors don’t seem to play a role at all in ethical decisions in technical communication.  Are we okay with the suggestion that human interests are the only considerations in ethical decision-making?  Human interests are, of course, of utmost important in ethics, but aren’t other non-human factors involved as well?

While reflecting upon this issue, I immediately think about the debate of dumping nuclear waste.  I don’t think there’s any question that non-human factors have been considered in this debate (the dangers of radioactive materials to the environment, etc).  I wonder, though, if even those non-human concerns are still driven deep down by the interests of humans: have environmental concerns been taken into consideration in this debate out of pure concern for the environment?  Or are we only concerned about the environment in this debate (and others) because of the environment’s effects on human beings?  Is there ever a situation in which environmental concerns are not a means to a human-centered end?