Ethics History

Aristotle
- Virtue and personal character
- Defines and explains goodness, truth, justice, and rightness as principles for guiding conduct
History
- Time honored, traditional approach
- Ethics of Christianity in medieval period was strongly influenced by Plato and Aristotle
o Saint Augustine—Plato, other-wordly, spiritual
o Saint Thomas Aquinas—Aristotle, achieving our best conduct here and now
- Ethics is the study of what is involved in good actions—no hard and fast answers, don’t try to make it more definite than it can be
- Ethics is about what is sought for its own sake and not for the sake of something else such as money or success—do something because it is the right thing to do
- Ethics derives from reason, and so ethical behavior must be reasoned behavior—it’s not automatic, we have to think about it
- Explanation of love and friendship

Kant
- Duty or obligation based on a fundamental universal principle
- Can be figured out rationally, no metaphysical theories
- Do something because it is the right thing to do, regardless of the personal consequences
- Strives for fairness and equality—if everyone understands ethics, then everyone can apply ethics
History
- Radically autonomous free will bound by duty, coupled by reason with a radically individuality that is nevertheless one with the universal
- Nature of the individual in relation to society
- Categorical imperative—One’s ethical decisions (even though you can make the decisions yourself), are never egocentric or arbitrary or even self-serving
- Implies that we are all capable of reflecting on our consciousness, reasoning toward binding universal conclusions, weighing judgments about practical actions, etc.

Utilitarianism
- Weighs the consequences of costs of an actions against benefits in order to calculate the most socially desirable course of action
- Strives for fairness by being impersonal
- Government organizations treat ethics this way, as people are like interchangeable parts of the social machinery

Ethic of Care
- New, nontraditional—gender-sensitive
- Not impartial justice, but weigh other standards like caring concern and quality of relationships
- Flexibility and sensitivity—no universal rules

Relevance to technical communication:
It is interesting that every theory that aims to approach ethical decisions can be applied to different types of technical communication. As mentioned in the utilitarianism segment, the government needs to make decisions that way because they must think about society as a whole rather than individuals. On the other hand, the ethic of care falls under the category of “feminist ethics” and seems to shrug tradition all together and centers much more on the individual. Of course, Aristotelian ethics are always applicable because they act as a frame of reference for many other theories and approaches. We should do what it right and strive for “the good” in our writing simply because it is the right thing to do rather than a means to an end.