This week's class was focused on ethics in librarianship and the ALA Code of Ethics. In reflecting on class, I'm not really sure there's much specific I can say beyond what I said in last week's post, but I think the situation we drove home solidified the views about ethics I expressed there.
When we did the "case studies" of ethical issues (about Random House and the ads in Toronto), we were asked to derive guidance from the code of ethics for what we would do in the situation. My group found that pretty difficult to do in any sort of specific way. We talked about different approaches to the situation, how we should respond as librarians, and agreed that the situations raised a lot of interesting issues and things worth talking about. But it was hard to find provisions in the code of ethics that we could really use as justification for whatever decisions we'd make. Obviously, the code notes that this isn't really its purpose; it's supposed to provide a general set of viewpoints and values, not anything that tells you to do a certain thing at a certain time. And it's important as a profession, I think, to have some broad view of what your values and ethics are. So the code serves something of a purpose. In many ways, though, that set of shared values is sort of inherent and intangible-- it's something people share before they go into the profession, and it certainly serves as a reference point for their decision making, but it's hard to articulate in a list of values like the code of ethics gives.
I wish we would've talked a little more about the implications of some of the provisions in the code, and maybe about how "virtue ethics" does or doesn't fit in with the code, because I found that approach really helpful for the reasons I laid out in my previous post. Overall, I think the "case studies" drove home the value of circumstances-based decision-making and an approach to professional ethics overall in line with the virtue ethics approach, though.
I have nothing more to say, except that I'm looking forward to the opportunity to learn something in an interesting way from my peers in our workshops tomorrow.
I think I might've been able to benefit from some discussion of "virtue ethics" as well, though for the opposite of your reason. I don't think my grasp of the concept is very thorough, though I definitely found our in-class discussion interesting and many of the opinions voiced were not ones I would've come up with on my own.
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