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ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS Limits on ethics

المؤلف:  Alan Davies

المصدر:  An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P125-C6

2026-07-30

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ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Limits on ethics

Group ethics must aim at balance: not too much (the ‘within reason’ limitation) but not too little. What is at issue here is the danger of an incestuous concern with the protection of members of the profession by avoiding and covering over complaints and offences to avoid litigation. Educational linguistics does not in general have the life and death risks that medicine does, but all professional activity involving language provides for potential complaints and legal action because of the intrusive nature of the activity and its normative role.

Safeguards for professional practitioners, in applied linguistics as much as in medicine, are necessary but it is important that the safeguards are also applicable to stakeholders other than the professionals themselves. Otherwise, they become not safeguards but fortresses.

Coady and Bloch note that the current obsession with group ethics has produced a proliferation of written statements setting out what the group intends. ‘One reaction of these groups to the challenges of government and to the cynicism of clients and taxpayers is to proclaim their ethical standards through establishing or reestablishing codes of ethics’ (1996: 1). It may be that our concern with codes represents a kind of false consciousness with regard to professionalism, a kind of flag of convenience to justify the public and professional claims of an activity in relation to society at large. Hence the doubts about the value of codes. It may therefore be more important to look at less formal statements about an activity, such as the training and the socializing of apprentices. Atkinson writes of practical job training in clinical medicine as ‘doctrinal conversion’ and of ‘passing through the mirror’. And he comments that ‘most studies of professional socialization have tended to concentrate on how the novice comes to take on the appropriate perspectives and understandings, behavior and values which characterize their newly-gained occupational culture’ (Atkinson 1981: 19–20).