Introduction to Special Issue on 21st-Century Ethics in Technical Communication: Ethics and the Social Justice Movement in Technical and Professional Communication

In the 21st century, the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) is clearly feeling the impact of the turn toward social justice. As a result, the language of intersectionality, power, privilege, queerness, antiracism, decolonialism, and conocimiento (knowing or skill) is increasingly becoming part of how many of us teach our TPC students and try to apply these concepts in our research for academic or nonacademic workplace audiences. But in-depth engagements with ethics in TPC have not increased correspondingly. As scholars who publish in both ethics and social justice, we have found this lack of engagement surprising because social justice undeniably stems from moral values. Across the various articulations of social justice lies a shared belief that a given state of affairs in TPC academic and workplace institutions is unethical, such as the prevailing structural inequalities in relation to race, gender, and ability. It is for the good, then, to argue that we should include and support historically and multiply marginalized peoples, practices, and epistemic traditions in TPC.

The language of ethics, however, might not always directly coincide with social justice work. For some, well-founded problems might lie in past Westerncentric and universalist approaches to ethics (Porter, 1993) and in postmodern ethics moving scholars away from those approaches and toward critique, pluralism, and localization. As Porter described, “[Postmodern] Ethics is not a set of answers but a mode of questioning and a manner of positioning” (p. 218). If much of the foundational work in ethics was written by male European and American philosophers and, in turn, if social justice is defined as “critical reflection and action that promotes agency for the marginalized and disempowered in TPC pedagogy and scholarship” (Jones, 2016, p. 343), then the word “ethics” could seem irredeemably tarnished by historical institutions and epistemic forms of ongoing cultural oppression.

Others have even questioned the role of ethics in its entirety in the social justice movement. Savage (2018) rightly criticized the fact that although many TPC scholars and teachers before the social justice movement discussed ethics, they were less likely to discuss politics because doing so is more risky. Savage conceded that many original ethicists in the Western tradition, such as Aristotle, discussed ethics in terms of the social good. But rather than try to improve discussions of ethics and better articulate its relationship to social justice in TPC, Savage preferred “to leave ethics in the category to which it is consigned in contemporary mainstream culture” (pp. ix-x), where, he perceived, ethics has been reduced to only personal concerns. Savage's critique follows a similar take by Jones et al. (2016), who argued for us to “mov[e] from mere ethics, which often exist in an individual's character or behavior, to a social justice stance, which tends to be more collective and action oriented” (p. 211).

We agree with Savage (2018) that social justice and ethics are not interchangeable and that we must challenge any impoverished conceptions of ethics inside and outside of TPC. Yet we do not agree that the field should be content to accept a reduction of ethics to “personal concerns.” To do so would be to miss the vital ways in which ethics can connect to other more highly relevant areas of inquiry. One starting place for a 21st-century ethics in TPC research and practice would be to acknowledge the far broader and still highly relevant ways in which philosophers, scholars, religions, and communities from different cultures and positionalities have defined and debated morality for centuries. The vast majority of these definitions and debates cannot be accurately reduced to matters of “personal salvation rather than social good” (Porter, 1993, qtd. in Savage, 2018, pp. ix–x).

So what is a “social good?” Clearly, the “good” is based in moral value (e.g., harmony, equity, safety) even if we, individually and collectively from different cultures, will have nuanced understandings of what this good entails. Even if we were all to agree on a particular moral end, such as “justice” as a social good, we must recourse to the language of ethics. Ethical frameworks help us understand how to enact justice and identify the behaviors, actions, and policies that should be considered just or unjust. For example, liberal activism is not universally considered a practice of justice. Libertarianism considers that any unnecessary government intervention is unjust and that justice is centered around individual freedoms rather than a liberal sense of equity or fairness. In contrast, classical liberalism considers it the duty of the government or state to actively redistribute and enforce justice. But currently in many popular conversations, social justice (and more recently, critical race theory) has become a concept (unrecognizable to those of us who study it) of a specific “leftist” ideology (one that we support) rather than a universal sense of justice that people from all walks of life might share. In other words, justice deprived of a specific, operationalized ethical framework and moral values (whether individualist or communal) is difficult if not impossible to imagine.

Particular individuals or groups presuppose different meanings of the term “justice,” depending entirely on their own moral values in relation to their respective ideologies and concepts of “the state” and politics. Take another example from recent social justice work in TPC. Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson (2021) identified the emergent need for community protection in TPC regarding the use of the term “decolonial” alongside the social justice turn. In their reading, an ethically motivated (mostly White) community has sought to acknowledge and embrace indigenous and decolonial themes in TPC scholarship. But, they argued, this same well-meaning community that has sought to include an excluded epistemic area risks having a superficial engagement that fails to reach the type of necessary activism and institution building that decolonialism requires.

In other words, one of Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson's (2021) goals was to protect an ethical form of decolonial scholarship in TPC from problematic (and potentially unethical) uses of the term in which researchers cannot answer yes to questions like this: “Did you design your research/project to be primarily concerned with supporting, respecting, and restoring the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, lands, and knowledges?” (p. 25). Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson were making a normative moral claim that not all social justice work in TPC should be identified as decolonial work even if that work is situated in a more expansive ethics that claims to value decolonial ideas. Any articulation of decolonial work is laden with particular ethical values; some articulations help to compose a more ethical world, and some do not. In brief, this concept of decoloniality operates from a set of value-laden principles.

The ethical values that marginalized communities bring to the term “decolonial” might differ depending on positionality and audience. As a case in point, while claiming to be a civilizing force, colonialism in Africa imposed asymmetrical relations between the colonizers and colonized, which continued long after those countries had attained political independence (Mbembe, 2021). Thus, for many Africans, decolonialism needs to be understood from the first instances of resistance movements symbolized by the likes of the Mau Mau, Kwame Nkuruma, and Steve Biko to the later mutually inclusive and complementary ways of seeing the world (as in postapartheid South Africa). To that end, decolonialism, in an African context, as Mbembe (2021) observed, is both a political and a normative ethic designed to undo and dismantle unjust practices and systems, and it may have slightly different ethical values and geographical locales than those articulated by Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson (2021). Indeed, such non-U.S. ethical contexts and values might come into even more conflict with a definition of decolonial in the mission statement of a U.S. English department.

Even if we wanted to define ethics more narrowly, it is difficult to isolate a purely personal concern for an ethical analysis or discussion. For example, bullying, microaggressions, and inclusive language might be ethical concerns for communities or organizations wanting their members to behave better and treat each other with dignity. But these ethical concerns are not solely personal or automatically connected to social justice practices. Research has demonstrated that institutions that adopt language of diversity and inclusion can project the ethos of diversity when the reality of the institution does not match the discourse (Kaiser et al., 2013). Such institutional rhetorics might do some good in terms of social justice awareness and are preferable to neglect or ignorance; however, if individuals and stakeholders in an institution are not changing their ethical habits, they could be creating a potentially hostile environment for historically marginalized people who are initially attracted to the ways in which the institution advertises diversity.

Matters of personal ethics are diverse, which is a viewpoint that we can recognize in the rich terrain of ancient ethical frameworks of virtue to contemporary ethical frameworks grounded in Black feminist concerns. For activists, ethical dispositions of patience, care, and integrity are vital elements in sustaining the fight to change institutions. Those of us who try to incorporate antiracism into our pedagogy might at times need to balance kairotic patience and impatience because our students or university administrators might take some time to understand antiracism. But too much patience could be seen as unethical in that it slows the move to action. Activism can be stressful, and the ethics of self-care and preserving a work–life balance matter (Davison, 2021). Honesty and integrity matter too. Would we still call an effort to improve diversity in the workplace ethical if the survey data that an activist practitioner used misrepresented the true state of affairs by overstating a problem in order to secure more sympathy and support? That is, are we okay with sacrificing honesty for communal justice goals? Do the ends justify the means in such cases?

While seeing that misinformation and falsehoods appear to help some politicians succeed at present (a true utilitarian calculus), we might empathize with antiracist activists for pondering whether it would be expedient for them to engage in similar deceptive practices. Yet other ethical frameworks of honesty and care help us to realize the limits of these kinds of means–end calculi. As Kant put it in his prohibition on lying, no society built on distrust could accomplish anything because we would never know if anything anyone said were true (Markel, 2001). In a non-Western context, a Confucian virtue ethics perspective helps us to see that by endorsing a lie (even for socially just goals), we could be cultivating habits of dishonesty in our families and communities.

Our aim is not to refute well-founded critiques of the problems with past and present ways in which some ethical frameworks have reflected individualism, Eurocentrism, patriarchy, or racism. These criticisms are justified and should be continually acknowledged in future ethical work in TPC as we grapple with our field's history and epistemic relationship to structural forms of oppression and power. But when addressing these inequalities, we argue that we need more engagement with ethical frameworks that reflect a true diversity of epistemic positions—not fewer or none. We believe that 21st-century ethics in TPC involves understanding how social justice and ethics are not the same thing but are nevertheless interconnected—both in the specific set of advocacy concerns for social justice work and in the broader everyday set of ethical concerns of any TPC teacher, researcher, student, or practitioner.

Rather than pit ethics and social justice in opposition, we believe it is more productive to describe all social justice actions as ethically motivated, the enactment of a kind of ethics—such as a belief in the moral value of equity, fairness, a just world—that motivates scholarship and workplace practices aimed at remedying a situation that seems unethical, immoral, or unjust. In this way, social justice always involves ethics, but not all ethical ideas and moral values are invested in social justice in a particular time or place. If colleagues claim that they “do ethics,” they are not necessarily or automatically invested in causes of social justice; however, if they produce social justice research or teach social justice in TPC, they are at least working from assumed ethical frameworks and moral values, if not specifically employing those frameworks and values to define their social justice work.

In this regard, we contend that ethics in general has a great deal to offer social justice work. Ethics can clarify some of the possibilities and problems of the recommendations that we make to remedy the problems we identify—in part, because most TPC scholars, teachers, and practitioners invested in social justice already tend to agree with diagnosing a central set of unethical structural inequalities. But ethics will remain broader in its scope of inquiry. We still need to explore as a field how to answer questions such as these: How do I cultivate well-being in the workplace? How does this social justice movement's communication practices consider the labor of its volunteers? How do activists exercise self-care? When and how should I intervene to challenge current unethical policies and practices in my institution?

Thus, part of our challenge in thinking about 21st-century ethics for this special issue lies in the need to explore the complex and multifaceted relationship between ethics and social justice. We asked contributors to this issue to elaborate to a greater degree than is typical in many TPC articles about the types of ethical frameworks they used to study their subject matter. Three of our four articles make connections between ethics and social justice and all four clearly have a goal to help us build an ethical and more socially just world in TPC. Indeed, we appreciate social justice's focus on action as a pressing need for 21st-century ethics, but we also highlight the need to see that all ethics lead toward action or result from actions and that social justice rhetorics can benefit from better articulating and understanding the ethical frameworks that they use in order to identify how to build a better world.

Theorizing ethics and social justice is also not a one-way street. One thing all ethics work in TPC can take from social justice is the emphasis on connecting ethical values to specific forms of action. Past work on ethics both in and outside of TPC has tended to use “after the fact reflection” to diagnose what should have happened and to call for others to think about “ethics.” Others acknowledge the complexity of ethical thought but do not always feel comfortable naming a positive or normative ethical value. For example, in a foundational article on ethics in TPC, Katz (1992) critiqued expediency (a narrow ethic of capitalist utilitarianism). To oppose expediency, Katz suggested that we need to locate technical communication goals in “humanitarian concerns” but added that “this presumes that we can define and agree upon what these ‘humanitarian concerns’ are—a presumption which is not at all certain, given the ‘true’ relativity of values, the multiplicity of needs, and the current climate of personal and corporate greed” (p. 272). While Katz is quite right that any such understanding would need to be plural, he does not endeavor to define what a “humanitarian concern” would look like.

Yet as the authors in this special issue will affirm, ethical definitions are essential to enable us to declare any normative (and not normalizing) or positive ethical values. Not all ethical frameworks strive for the universality that postmodern ethics rightly critiques. Certain ethical frameworks—such as those we consider here—will enable us to take risks and name principles to revise asymmetrical hierarchies in order to create more ethical dwelling spaces. We asked our contributors to take such risks, and we are pleased that they took us up on our challenge. For us, another method of studying 21st-century ethics lies precisely in defining, however provisionally and partially, what concepts such as “humanitarian concerns” mean and, in turn, providing TPC researchers and practitioners with ethical frameworks for action and reflection as overlapping spheres.

An Overview of This Issue

Johanna Phelps's “Concomitant Ethics: Institutional Review Boards and Technical and Professional Communication's Social Justice Turn” places normative ethics in specific dialogue with social justice and research with participants in TPC. Much history, lore, and critique of the infrastructure of institutional review boards (IRBs) are premised—as is a great deal of technical communication—on the false perception of objective neutrality. After careful analysis of the Belmont Report and the revised Common Rule, Phelps revisits the original question: What is justice? She explores four axes (ideal vs. pragmatic; corrective vs. distributive; procedural vs. substantive; comparative vs. noncomparative) that technical communicators can apply to their understanding of justice while they prepare for and undergo IRB review. She notes that it is possible for technical communicators to embody multiple forms of justice at different levels as part of conceiving and proposing research.

Beau Pihlaja's “Everyday Ethics at the Border: Normative Ethics for the 21st Century” offers another illustration of how multiple ethical frameworks can and must coexist while enabling the formation of provisional and flexible but also normative goals to inform social justice action. Pihlaja's site is “the imaginary line that cuts through the northern Chihuahua desert,” or the Mexico–U.S. border. The border is a complex ethical assemblage. Those who seek to cross it and those who seek to protect it must make normative ethical decisions under circumstances in which the “right thing to do,” in interpersonal communication especially, is not always clear. Pihlaja self-consciously explores how activity theory and actor-network theory can help researchers and practitioners ethically interpret the silences created and constrained by asynchronous communication between two sister companies on the border.

Kristin Bennett and Mark A. Hannah's “Transforming the Rights-Based Encounter: Disability Rights, Disability Justice, and the Ethics of Access” also explores social justice but from the perspective of disability ethics. They observe how a rights-based ethical approach in the workplace perpetuates unethical conditions for disabled bodies due to its grounding in ableist and privileged frameworks of corporeal autonomy and freedom. They ground their discussion in a case study of the Employer Assistance and Resource Network on Disability Inclusion as an example of how a rights-based approach circulating through certain professional institutions has informed institutional frameworks for theorizing and enacting the ethics of disability. To remedy this problem, Bennett and Hannah articulate an ethical framework grounded in disability justice conversations supporting articulations of complex intersectional embodiments while accounting for individual rights based on autonomy.

And in “Ethical Dimensions of App Designs: A Case Study of Photo- and Video-Editing Apps,” Xiaobo Wang and Baotong Gu demonstrate the enduring relevance of Chinese Confucian virtue ethics in dialogue with studying user experience (UX) design in popular photo- and video-sharing platforms, such as Instagram and Tik Tok. Wang and Gu apply their ethical framework to an ethnographic pilot study of millennial and Generation Z mobile app users from different cultural backgrounds. The authors note several instances of how UX across such platforms can negatively influence younger users’ well-being due to the ways that these platforms can change users’ ethical behaviors. Their article takes a step beyond analyzing an unethical situation to explore how to use the ethical values of modesty, middle way, and honesty in combination with playful and hyperbolic UX designs in order to design more ethical UX systems.

Future Directions

While we hope that this special issue extends work in social justice (Agboka, 2013a, 2013b; Jones, 2016; Walton et al., 2019), we also hope that it builds on past work on ethics in TPC. To date, Katz's (1992) “Ethic of Expediency,” Markel's (2001) Ethics in Technical Communication, Dombrowski's (2000) Ethics in Technical Communication, and Dragga's (2001) special issue on ethics in technical communication remain the most widely taught and cited sources that explicitly discuss ethics. But these treatments are nearly or more than 20-years old. There is some work in ethics scholarship that we should highlight and that we hope future scholars will draw on, including work on ethics and place (Ross & Willerton, 2015) and plain language (Willerton, 2015). Perhaps the most significant recent contribution to ethics in TPC has been work around the ethics of care, such as seen in multiple articles including Black feminist ethics of self-care in the business writing classroom (Shelton, 2020), ethical decision making around vulnerable IRB participants (De Hertogh, 2018), and ethics of care applied to tactical technical communication (Colton et al., 2017). Ross's (2021) helpful update and overview of ethics in the TPC classroom is also a great starting place for TPC teachers interested in ethical frameworks.

To remedy some of the limited and unproductive ways in which ethics has been understood, as rightly highlighted by Savage (2018), Jones et al. (2016), and others, this special issue demonstrates that we need more work on ethics—from diverse perspectives and epistemologies. With TPC now global in its reach and expansive in its impact, a more expansive and inclusive outlook to ethics is warranted. For example, virtue ethics are not specific to the west even if Western thinkers and philosophers in the U.S. academy have been historically privileged and recognized. What the virtue of honesty means now might differ from what Aristotle or Confucius described, the latter for whom honesty meant “wise discernment” rather than unfiltered truth telling. Indigenous virtue ethics are not consistent across all tribes by any means, but Itchuaqiyaq (2021) has observed how the Iñupiaq culture embodies nuances specific to the Iñupiat Iḷitqusiat ethical framework, including guarding the virtues of responsibility to tribe, knowledge of family tree, and knowledge of language. The Jarilla-Apache philosopher Cordova (2007) even identified an empathetic solidarity with Aristotle but also sought to shift the ethical framework from the ethics of the individual toward more social forms of moral relationality.

We close with an engagement of one particular ethical framework: the Ubuntu moral philosophy. As Gyekye (2011) summarized, “When a speaker of the [Ghana] Akan language wants to say, ‘He has no morals,’ or, ‘He is immoral,’ or ‘He is unethical,’ ‘His conduct is unethical,’ he would almost invariably say, ‘He has no character’ (Onni suban)” (n.p.).

Among many indigenous African cultures, the ethics of Ubuntu reflects a similar sentiment. Tutu (1999) once said, to give the highest praise to an individual is to say that person has ubuntu, that is, their humanity is bound up in the humanity of others. Ubuntu recognizes affect and interdependence as distinctly human characteristics. Thus, disability, for example, is part of being human, not an anomaly or a lack of having what counts as being human. This interdependence equally applies to nature and the environment to which humanity is connected. Ubuntu enshrines respect for diversity because diversity showcases the otherness of what humans who are different from ourselves possess—be it in terms of queerness, gender, race, or some other trait. In Ubuntu, inhumanity is when attributes such as disability or queerness are degraded or otherwise seen as defective (see Berghs, 2017; Chataika, et al., 2015).

As Ubuntu is humanist, it holds tenets for restorative justice through community dialogue because an individual's life has meaning only within the context of the meaning of the lives of others in the community. Examples of this practice are seen in South Africa's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose work of enacting restorative justice required wrongdoers to take ownership of their inhumane actions and seek forgiveness from the wronged in order to be reintegrated back into the community of abantu (people). In this kind of restorative justice, both the wrongdoer and the wronged are impacted by the act of inhumanity, and so both require restoration. Rather than emphasize difference, Ubuntu unites parties with its “I am because we are” philosophy, thus ensuring another's well-being is ensuring our own—a “shared collective humanness and responsibility” (Berghs, 2017, p. 2). In sum, caring for others, even oppressors, was an ethic applied to South Africa's decolonializing tools, which functioned by putting into context the horrors of apartheid and required the perpetrators to own up to their complicity with inhumanity and, in so doing, reconstitute their humanity (see Mbembe, 2021, pp. 54–55). Ubuntu assumed the agency to shape the country's future, and adherence to this ethics enabled Nelson Mandela to break bread with his oppressors and jailers. In this way, Ubuntu could begin to offer a provisional but normative framework toward defining Katz's (1992) “humanitarian concerns.”

Ubuntu is just one of countless neglected and marginalized ethical traditions that should be engaged by TPC researchers who will keep care, intersectionality, and authorial positionality concerns firmly in mind. Thus, to enact TPC research and practice in the 21st century, we hope that this special issue will help scholars explore how we can translate complex and perhaps even irreducible ethical differences and intersectional concerns in order to build more of these ethical “bridges,” to use Anzaldúa's (1987) term, from neglected or ignored ethical traditions to ethical forms of normative advocacy.