An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4 ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
4.1 Current concern
In this last section of the chapter I refer to the recent upsurge in interest in pro -
fessional ethics and consider its impact on the profession of applied linguistics.
Ethics, the study of how we are to live, of right and wrong, also known as moral
philosophy, has been called ‘the emperor of the social sciences’ (Scriven 1991: 134).
But it is only in the 1990s that the emperor has been reclothed. Coady and Bloch
refer to the current ‘obsession with ethics … not the ethics of private individuals so
much as the ethical behaviour of groups, whether these groups are professions,
businesses, government or non-government organisations’ (1996: 1).
There is another reason for this current ‘obsession’ with ethics, which is its neglect
in the first part of the twentieth century. That period, writes Singer (1986), ‘was
aberrant … due to the influence of logical positivism, with its implication that
ethical statements were nothing more than the evincing of emotions’ (Singer 1995:
42–3).
Linguistic philosophy, concerned as it was with meaning rather than knowledge,
queried the whole basis of ethics, maintaining that ethical statements were essentially
circular. ‘Ethics, as I conceive it, is the logical study of the language of morals’ (Hare
1952: v).
The critical turn in the last decades has made the quest for meaning equally
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problematic and in a paradoxical way has prompted the search for fragments of
knowledge as bulwarks against the emptiness that postmodernism threatens.
Docherty discusses the ‘basis of an ethical demand in the postmodern’, admitting
that ‘there is no escape from the necessity of judging in any specific case. Yet’ he
agonises ‘we have no grounds upon which to base our judging’ (1993: 26).
Hence, no doubt, the currrent search for ethical guidance as to what may be
expected in group behaviour. This search is reflexive in that it seeks to provide some
small certainty for the group and at the same time it helps to define an identity for
the group.
Rawls refers to two (equal) principles of justice:
[F]irst each person engaged in an institution or affected by it has an equal right
to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; and second,
inequalities as defined by the institutional structure or fostered by it are arbitrary
unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work out to everyone’s advantage
and provided that the positions and offices to which they attach or from which
they may be gained are open to all.
(1967: 221)
And so one of the chief roles for ethics is to balance these two principles, the
individual and the social. This requires thought and imagination as much as law-
making, offering: ‘a way of conceptualising difference which renders it compatible
with equality, but also, and crucially, does not simply increase social differentiation’
(Mendus 1992: 414).
The danger, of course, is that in our attempts to be fair we end up by destroying
completely the social, making all morality individual and therefore never ever achiev -
ing fairness anyway. Indeed, Osborne, lamenting the influence on philosophy of
post-structuralism and feminism, suggests that we are left only with ‘personal ethics
or the search for small forms of valid knowledge’ (1992: 181).
This is a counsel of despair, but Jackson (1996) shows a way of avoiding such a
solipsist trap. Discussing codes of practice she points out that morality is never
absolute. For example, codes of health and safety require appropriate protection of
employees. At the same time, in all such cases there is a clause (either implicit or
explicit) which limits employers’ responsibility to ‘within reason’. Otherwise, their
duty would be impossible to fulfil.
Without the recognition of the ‘within reason’ limitation, we are likely to exag -
gerate the demands of morality and to assume wrongly that you cannot get on in
business or carry out your profession unless you are prepared to cast aside or com -
promise principles. This is not so. Morality as typically encoded in codes of practice
constrains action within reason.