ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Current concern
I refered to the recent upsurge in interest in professional ethics and consider its impact on the profession of applied linguistics.
Ethics, the study of how we are to live, of right and wrong, also known as moral philosophy, has been called ‘the emperor of the social sciences’ (Scriven 1991: 134). But it is only in the 1990s that the emperor has been reclothed. Coady and Bloch refer to the current ‘obsession with ethics … not the ethics of private individuals so much as the ethical behavior of groups, whether these groups are professions, businesses, government or non-government organizations’ (1996: 1).
There is another reason for this current ‘obsession’ with ethics, which is its neglect in the first part of the twentieth century. That period, writes Singer (1986), ‘was aberrant … due to the influence of logical positivism, with its implication that ethical statements were nothing more than the evincing of emotions’ (Singer 1995: 42–3).
Linguistic philosophy, concerned as it was with meaning rather than knowledge, queried the whole basis of ethics, maintaining that ethical statements were essentially circular. ‘Ethics, as I conceive it, is the logical study of the language of morals’ (Hare 1952: v).
The critical turn in the last decades has made the quest for meaning equally problematic and in a paradoxical way has prompted the search for fragments of knowledge as bulwarks against the emptiness that postmodernism threatens. Docherty discusses the ‘basis of an ethical demand in the postmodern’, admitting that ‘there is no escape from the necessity of judging in any specific case. Yet’ he agonizes ‘we have no grounds upon which to base our judging’ (1993: 26).
Hence, no doubt, the current search for ethical guidance as to what may be expected in group behavior. This search is reflexive in that it seeks to provide some small certainty for the group and at the same time it helps to define an identity for the group.
Rawls refers to two (equal) principles of justice:
[F]irst each person engaged in an institution or affected by it has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; and second, inequalities as defined by the institutional structure or fostered by it are arbitrary unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work out to everyone’s advantage and provided that the positions and offices to which they attach or from which they may be gained are open to all.
(1967: 221)
And so one of the chief roles for ethics is to balance these two principles, the individual and the social. This requires thought and imagination as much as law-making, offering: ‘a way of conceptualizing difference which renders it compatible with equality, but also, and crucially, does not simply increase social differentiation’ (Mendus 1992: 414).
The danger, of course, is that in our attempts to be fair we end up by destroying completely the social, making all morality individual and therefore never ever achieving fairness anyway. Indeed, Osborne, lamenting the influence on philosophy of post-structuralism and feminism, suggests that we are left only with ‘personal ethics or the search for small forms of valid knowledge’ (1992: 181).
This is a counsel of despair, but Jackson (1996) shows a way of avoiding such a solipsist trap. Discussing codes of practice she points out that morality is never absolute. For example, codes of health and safety require appropriate protection of employees. At the same time, in all such cases there is a clause (either implicit or explicit) which limits employers’ responsibility to ‘within reason’. Otherwise, their duty would be impossible to fulfil.
Without the recognition of the ‘within reason’ limitation, we are likely to exaggerate the demands of morality and to assume wrongly that you cannot get on in business or carry out your profession unless you are prepared to cast aside or compromise principles. This is not so. Morality as typically encoded in codes of practice constrains action within reason.
