Chapter Five

Writing Ethically
What is Ethics?
 Ethics can be defined as the assessment of
rules of moral standards or conduct that govern
human behavior. Thus in all areas of life human
beings are confronted everyday and required to
make judgments about right and wrong actions.
 Evaluating all relevant sides including
consequences before taking actions is doing
ethics.
 On the job there is limited time to analyze all
sides.
 We need to take decisions often in split seconds
 We may need to operate within intuition or
conscience
 We need to know the nature and scope of our
obligations before we can make decisions and
take cations.
 Your Professional Obligations
 To yourself: You must consider the need to
support yourself financially and at the same time
maintain your integrity and reputation.
 You cannot quit your job or allow yourself to be
fired every time you disagree with your
superiors
 You must find a way to balance your variables
and at the same time be able to keep your job.
To your discipline and profession

 You have a responsibility to protect the reputation

and advance knowledge in your chosen
profession.
 You must share information concerning research
that could improve your discipline and training for
students.
 You must communicate in a way that will bring
credibility to your profession and encourage
people to join it.
To your academic institution

 You have a ,moral responsibility to protect the

institution that trained you.
 If you communicate well you will bring honor to
it but if you are unethical, you will bring
disrepute to its name.
 You should show that you were properly taught
by the institution.
To your employer

 You owe your employer the responsibility to

advance his business, to help him make more
money, to promote its services and interest.
 You also owe a responsibility to communicate in
a way to protect confidential information
(especially if it has a competitive edge) and
intellectual property.
 You also need to protect your company from
legal liability.
To your colleagues

 You have a duty to your co-workers to do your

own share of the work with accuracy, intergirty
and efficiency. You also should make use of
resources allocated for work fairly.
 If you work in a group to produce a report, you
need to write up in a way not to compromise the
integrity of your group.
To the public

 You owe an obligation to the public to promote

public good, make the environment safe and
improve the quality of life.
 Your decisions and actions on the job can affect
your loyalty to the public positively or negatively
 In communicating information, you need to juggle
all these loyalties and make priority decisions
most of the time.
 You cannot please only your boss all the time.
 Unethical Communication Practices
 Plagiarism and theft of intellectual property
 Deliberately imprecise or ambiguous language
 Manipulation of numerical information
 Use of misleading illustrations
 Promotion of prejudice
 A Behavior Is Ethical if . . .
 It would be a good universal behavior (Kant)
 It creates the greatest good for the greatest
number of people (Utilitarians)
 It freely sacrifices one’s own self-centeredness
on behalf of others (Ellis)
 Ethical or Not?
 Using information from but not giving credit
to a research paper because it hasn’t been
“officially” published.
 Borrowing your roommate’s old tech writing
report and using it as an exact template for
your assignment.
 Rounding up your grade point average to the
nearest tenth of a point on your resume.
 Ethical or Not?
 Attending an expensive chemistry tutoring
session because you know that the tutor
has copies of the tests.
 Warning your friend about some tricky final
exam questions after you take the exam at
an earlier time.