By Sam Dragga | Senior Member
In teaching ethics in technical communication, I am never at loss for negative examples (and thanks to a growing list of B Corporations, I am never at loss for positive examples either. B Corporations are “better companies—better for workers, better for communities, and better for the environment;” each has been reviewed and certified as meeting rigorous criteria for responsible operating practice [www.bcorporation.net]). Students ordinarily come to my class expecting that I’ll have all the answers, but the genuine learning is in my asking lots of annoying questions—questions about which questions to ask and how and why.
Training in ethics, ongoing conversations regarding ethics, continuous review of ethics cases, and periodic revision of ethics guidelines are all vital to the practice of ethics in technical communication. Unless ethics is vivid in the minds of both employers and employees, I advise my students, organizations and individuals will likely default to the expedient and the self-serving.
Thus, to encourage us to keep ethics in mind, I offer the following five quick lessons (and 30 questions):
Lesson 1: On the Juggling of Obligations
Each of us is always juggling multiple ethical obligations. I know, for example, that I have responsibilities to my employer, but also to myself, my family, my discipline, my profession, and my community. I know that I will be perceived as a representative of the Department of English and the field of technical communication by faculty, students, and administrators across Texas Tech University. I will be perceived by individuals in the community—parents, neighbors, friends, and relatives—as a representative of Texas Tech University, of technical communicators, of college professors, etc. Their opinion of technical communication, of the humanities, and of higher education itself will be influenced by my words, behavior, integrity, energy, successes, and failures. Willing or unwilling, I am almost always a salient embodiment of my discipline and my institution; for good or for ill, I am Texas Tech University, I am technical communication, I am the academic profession. There’s little or no separation of my private and public selves, my private and public moralities. I must always aspire to bring credit to my institution and my discipline.
Note that the practice of ignoring the entire human being and considering people only in the singularity of their occupation or profession—of public ethics versus private morality—itself has ethical consequences, dividing identity from behavior and changing the ethical question from “Who will I be?” to “What will I do?” If ethics is disassociated from identity, it is possible for the individual in his/her private life to make moral decisions that theoretically are unrelated to his/her public life and vice versa (e.g., the kind neighbor but hostile boss, the generous colleague but abusive spouse). The virtual fusion of public and private life through ubiquitous technologies and immediate and infinite distribution of information, however, is again integrating public and private moralities.
Lesson 2: On the Weighing of Consequences
Your public and private obligations are typically exercised according to your judgment regarding consequences. That is, you do a cost-benefit analysis in deciding which issues are essential to fight for (by paying the high cost of jeopardizing your job, your reputation, etc.), which could be fought for less vigorously or more quietly, and which could be readily forfeited. This is a sliding scale of moral compromises.
While you might claim that potential loss of life and serious injury merit your unqualified effort to take all necessary action, it’s the variables of minor injury, major property damage/loss, and minor property damage/loss that are more likely to occur and foil the cost-benefit analysis of ethics. Is potential loss of a hand or eye the same as major property damage? If it’s a child’s hand? If it’s a photographer’s eye? Who makes this decision? According to which criteria?
And every case includes estimating risk—assessing the chances that a given condition will cause loss of life, injury, or damage. Which is the fight you would pick? The 1 in 1,000 risk of serious injury? Or the 1 in 100 risk of minor property damage? Both? How does your weighing of perceived costs differ according to anticipated benefits? Are you willing to risk higher costs for higher benefits?
And would you typically have time on the job to do this cost-benefit analysis? Would each individual technical communicator have to do this analysis on the fly? Or could detailed guidelines be devised for the entire organization or the entire profession of technical communicators: e.g., “if there’s a 1 in 1000 risk of minor injury, do A, B, and C; if it’s a 1 in 100 risk, do A, B, C, and D?”
If we never identify the potential questions and never consider the inviting array of satisfactory but impractical or practical but unsatisfactory answers, we are ill-equipped for the dynamics of addressing ethical issues on the job. Thinking through likely and unlikely scenarios allows us develop agile habits of mind (see, for example, Steven May’s Case Studies in Organizational Communication: Ethical Perspectives and Practices, 2d ed., Sage, 2013).
Lesson 3: On the Intersection of Obligations
Employers also have ethical duties to their employees, including always bringing credit to their employees by creating and sustaining a reputation for integrity, innovation, caring, etc. The evil that unscrupulous employers do will damage the reputation of their employees as much as the evil that dishonest employees do will damage the reputation of their employers. Imagine if every corporate code of conduct included something like “We will always try to be a company that employees are proud of” or “We will never do anything to make you embarrassed about working for this company” or words to that effect. It isn’t always feasible for employees to avoid ethical failures if their employers don’t offer a supportive environment with the time and resources to do jobs effectively.
Note also that employers and employees together have ethical duties to their clients and customers, to their industry, to the public, etc.
This question of ethical responsibility is never easily answered unless it’s to acknowledge that we are all always responsible. In cases of ethical failure, is it the individual making unethical decisions who is responsible? Is it the institution that created conditions causing or contributing to the individual’s decisions? Is it individual executives of the institution or is it historic processes of the institution or the industry within which it operates? Is it the government that failed to appropriately inspect and regulate the institution or industry, thus allowing the corrupting conditions? Is it individual inspectors/regulators or historic processes of the regulating/inspecting agency? Is it the society that failed to give necessary economic and political support to government regulators and inspectors or their regulating/inspecting agencies?
Lesson 4: On the Contribution of Technical Communicators
Every institution, corporation, and organization has a history that influences its decisions as well as the way its decisions are perceived (e.g., Exxon, Pfizer, Toyota): its history and the history of the industry in which it operates together impose on it extraordinary ethical obligations. Sensitivity to your organization’s unique ethical obligations is a vital insight you offer as a technical communicator. If it’s building vehicles, making medicines, or drilling for oil, a skilled technical communicator realizes the weight of the organization’s history-related and industry-related moral baggage.
Obviously, it isn’t always that communication failures have catastrophic consequences, but tragic cases (including oil spills and refinery explosions) inspire us to exercise both vigilance and courage in the reporting of risks as well as to realize how critical it is that trained technical communicators do this job, exercising the repertoire of rhetorical abilities developed through education and experience. Asking individuals untrained in technical communication and rhetoric (e.g., engineers) to make a persuasive case for inconvenient actions or decisions might be expedient, but is it ethical? Is it ethical to risk the rhetorical errors (and resulting injuries or losses) that untrained individuals are likelier to generate? Is it ethical to put untrained individuals in this position?
Training in the ethics of technical communication allows us to consider the entire rhetorical/cultural/social environment within which employers and employees operate. While the prevailing inclination is to identify individual villains in ethical failures (e.g., the devious vice president, the deceptive advisor), as technical communicators we also consider systemic sources. For example, we know that businesses typically operate on utilitarian ethics, doing cost-benefit analyses of their choices. If we the people don’t support enough regulators/inspectors/monitors to raise the cost of misbehavior, we encourage businesses to engage in misbehavior. We the people are also doing a cost-benefit analysis regarding the level of misbehavior we’re willing to tolerate relative to the taxes and loss of liberties necessary to police misbehavior. If we the people don’t like businesses engaging in misbehavior, but also don’t like supporting regulators/inspectors/monitors, we must inspire better behavior through changing the ethical perspective on which businesses operate and on which we the people operate. Technical communicators might be especially equipped for generating and mediating this wider conversation—cultivating opportunities for dialogue about ethics and assisting all parties with reviewing their principles and practices and communicating their ideas and ideals to each other.
While we focus on the ethical failures of organizations and consider the opportunities for intervention by technical communicators, we must also recognize that sometimes this intervention includes the heroic job of questioning and changing the institutional policies and processes that generate moral minefields.
For example, consider this page from the site of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): www.eeoc.gov/employees/howtofile.cfm.
How often do survivors of discrimination give up after reading these bewildering paragraphs? Where are the numbered steps? Why can’t this process be simplified? Why can’t the instructions be simplified? Why isn’t the process illustrated with a flow chart? Why can’t victims file charges online? And why isn’t the EEOC’s URL for this page www.eeoc.gov/complaint or something equally intuitive? Or why doesn’t a URL like www.eeoc.gov/complaint or www.eeoc.gov/grievance at least automatically direct you to the right page?
Consider the page on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) site for filing a grievance about air or water pollution: http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/report-environmental-violations.
Yes, the URL ought to be www.epa.gov/complaint or something equally intuitive, but the page is fairly simple to decipher and navigate, thus it is fairly simple to file a grievance (if you manage to find this page on the EPA site). Why isn’t the EEOC grievance page equally clear and simple? Why can’t the design of all grievance pages be relatively consistent across all agencies of the same government?
Technical communicators could seize the opportunity for ethical action by designing a more effective page and giving the survivors of discriminatory practices or pollution of their environment a vigorous and unyielding voice in their organizations, industries, and communities.
Lesson 5: On the Obligation to Question
In all of this intervention, discussion, and mediation, technical communicators must acknowledge the multiplicity of virtues and vices (i.e., the multiple ways that it is possible for individuals and institutions to do good or to do evil or to do neither, both sequentially and simultaneously). We’ll have to be sensitive to hypocrisy and forgiving of frail human beings, human institutions, and human societies.
We must always intervene, discuss, and mediate in ways that 1) exemplify how to do this effectively and ethically, a nd 2) make employers and employees aware that a technical communicator’s job includes the raising of questions about ethical issues.
DR. SAM DRAGGA is professor of technical communication at Texas Tech University. He is co-author of The Essentials of Technical Communication(3d ed., Oxford University Press, 2015) as well as author or co-author of a score of articles in journals and collections on topics related to professional ethics and intercultural communication. He is a Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and a recipient of STC’s Jay R. Gould Award for Excellence in Teaching Technical Communication.
