Dombrowski: Chapter 3- The Ethics Tradition

Aristotle
-deals with virtue and personal character
-defines and explains basic notions such as goodness, truth, justice, and rightness as principles for guiding our conduct
-focuses on cultivating the disposition of the person rather than the behavior itself
-ethical because of actions over time not just one act
-not idealistic, we are nevertheless creatures burdened with deciding how to act in a pragmatic, imperfect world
-do not deliberate about matters of science and technology
-the highest principles find expression in the immediate, material realm

Kant
-deals with duty and obligation based on a fundamental universal principle
-this principle explains that an action should be performed just because it is the right thing to do, regardless of its costs or benefits to us individually
-strives for fairness and equality by showing that ethics can be understood by all people to apply equally to everybody
-ethics to him is a deontology, an ethical system emphasizing obligation or duty
-based on binding, absolute duty and obligation as they guide the application of a free will in executing what Kant calls the universal "categorical imperative" rule of ethics
-only reasoning can grasp the unseen but metaphysically real principles that drive our actions, our sense, on the other hand, are too directly engaged with shifting appearances, confusing contingencies, and material satisfactions to allow them to derive any knowledge about our moral obligations, which are necessarily metaphysical
-our distinguishing characteristic as humans in our reasoning ability, therefore it must serve as a basis for judging ethics
-he asserts a radically autonomous free will bound by duty, coupled by reason with a radical individuality that is nevertheless one with the universal

Relevance to Understanding the Ethics of Technical Communication
1) emphasizes a sense of duty, doing what is right regardless of competing interests or eventual outcomes
2) conceptualizes ethics as both an individual and a social matter, or, more precisely, it defines one's personal ethical responsibilities in terms of a generic universal human being
3) amounts to the Golden Rule; do unto others as you would have them do unto you
*assumes nothing except that we are all rational beings

Utilitarianism
-weighs the consequences of costs of an action against benefits in order to calculate the most socially desirable course of action
-treats people like somewhat interchangeable parts of the social machinery and insists on being unresponsive to the interests or feelings of individuals
-"calculus" of ethics

Feminist and Care Perspectives
Feminist Perspectives on Science as a Value System
-feminist science would emphasize the whole organism and the entire interrelational social complex in which organisms fully live
-men feel more comfortable thinking logically than women, hence more male science majors, etc.
-be careful when using gender words in technical communication

Ethic of Care
-urge other standards for making ethical decisions, such as caring concern and the quality of relationships
-urge flexibility and sensitivity to the particulars of a given situation rather than insisting on inflexible, universal rules
-relationships are of utmost importance
-women generally emphasize caring concern, relationship, and the flexible application of values depending on the particular person and circumstance in rendering their ethical judgements

Confucian Ethics
-grounded in immediate realities rather than immutable, timeless absolutes
-defines human responsibilities as being constituted in relationships, not in the isolation of a radical individual
-insists on the subordination of individual egos to time-honored obligations of social relations and to the needs of social harmony

Levinas
-ethics is not an abstract or metaphysical system of principles, nor a rationally understood sense of duty, nor computational weighing of costs and benefits, nor a feeling of kindness towards others it is, rather, about our human nature relation with others

Gert
-morality is a public system applying to all rational persons governing behavior which affects others and which has the minimization of evil at its end, and which includes what are commonly known as the moral rules at its core