Getting Started
This summer, I signed up for a course (Moral Philosophy & Professional Ethics) through the education program I am in. At first I thought it would be a simple question of knowing a few different philosophies, and perhaps more importantly, knowing to follow professional ethics while at work. What I was not expecting was to really dive into the intersection of my own personal ethics and how these intersect with professional ethics -- or how important that would be to me.
My Experience and Thoughts
What I’ve learned in this last semester is that my own personal ethics do not always line up directly with professional codes of ethics from various companies and fields we examined in discussion posts. For example, I chose to focus my inquiry project on collection development in libraries because I realized that I had a personal, ethical conflict with the ALA Code of Ethics insofar as shelving certain materials went -- in particular the seventh statement requiring fair representation (ALA, 2021) which in itself could create an environment of hate. Prior to this, I had been uncomfortable with this conflict but had not been able to really put a finger on why. Further analyzing this issue led me to find that there are many librarians with similar conflicts and there are many great discussions on this topic published in the field.
This realization came from an examination of the Code of Ethics from the perspective of several different ethical and moral philosophies, including deontological ethics, utilitarian ethics, virtue ethics, care ethics, and critical ethics. Learning about the history and cultural aspects of each of these allowed me to see some issues with the ALA code and also led me to examine how I acted in regards to certain aspects of it. It helped reading philosophical case studies to understand the framework for examining ethics, such as Christie, Groarke, and Sweet (2007) and their critique and examination of the different philosophical views of supervised injection sites and needle exchange programs. Understanding how to apply multiple philosophies to a single issue opened my eyes to how something might both be "good" and not good at the same time.
Critical ethics, in particular, really helped me see how system-based problems were causing moral conundrums in my own personal life. Beyond my example above regarding the ALA Code of Ethics, I was brought back to when I worked at law firms and how I found sometimes that doing what was legal and playing everything by the book sometimes meant that people were not held accountable (or fully accountable) to their actions and choices. Further more, the system could be exploited by those who knew how to use it which gave some individuals an unfair advantage. Perhaps a little harder for me to examine, because I love my work team and have seen an unfortunate divide, was the idea of work systems not always being designed for interprofessional or interdepartmental work as described by Irvine, Kerridge, McPhee, and Freemen (2002).
The most profound learning experience I had in this course was through the reading of The Path and the completion of the Personal Ethics Story. As I was reading The Path, I found myself flagging every page it seemed for something else that I thought needed more examining or expressed ideas and practices so well that I needed to come back to them. This book described a philosophy of small choices we can make each day in order to lead the “good life.” It’s a book that helps break down becoming virtuous into manageable practices and describes how philosophers intended their philosophies to be acted upon with examples parallel to everyday experiences (Puett & Gross-Loh, 2016). I expect I will be experiencing changes from this book for a long time. In the short term, I’ve already been able to reexamine interactions and occurrences at work with more patience, and I’ve been carrying less negative weight from moments during the day.
In Conclusion: An Ethical Leader
All of this has led to me beginning to illustrate, to myself, what an ethical leader is so I can begin to plan for my own professional growth. To me, an ethical leader is someone who wants to do what’s best for the majority of people (employees and library users, to use a more exact example), but also understands how to value the virtues of individuals and communities in order to provide the best service. While I think libraries in general are in a constant state of evolution towards democratic and social good, it is important to me that an ethical leader also consider more immediate actions of “good.”
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