I used to teach an ethics course that all students were required to take their final year of college. One semester, on the first day of class, a student stopped by my office asking for my signature on a form so that he could skip the class and graduate at the end of the year. He explained that in additional to already having enough credits to graduate, he had grown up in a religious household, and he really didn't need someone like me to teach him right from wrong or how to live righteously.
"Oh, boy," I said. "If you think I'm going to teach you the difference between right and wrong or how to be a saint, then you really don't understand what ethics is, and you definitely need this class."
This is a common misunderstanding. Most of us have heard the word ethics, and we have a vague understanding of what it is: Something to do with right vs. wrong, moral vs. immoral, and legal vs. illegal. We've heard of "work ethic" or "personal ethic." We've heard accusations of politicians or CEOs acting unethically. And we may have even heard of the infamous presidential ethics committee that accomplished nothing because they couldn't agree on what ethics even was.
The good news is that ethics is a pretty easy concept to understand, and even if politicians and CEOs attempt to muddy the waters to excuse their poor behavior, that doesn't make the whole business of ethics complicated and esoteric.
And, to put your mind at ease, my discussion of ethics isn't preachy. I really have no interest in telling anyone how to live more righteously or virtuously.
Ethics is not about right and wrong, moral and immoral, or legal and illegal. While ethics discussions often cover these topics, ethics in itself exists beyond these distinctions. Ethics is actually about your decision-making process. When you're faced with a tough decision, especially when there seem to be no good outcomes (just a bunch of bad ones), you have to figure out what the competing priorities are and then decide who or what is the most important--and then act accordingly. And that's it. That's ethics: Deciding who or what receives top priority in your decision-making process.
When professors give you an ethical dilemma to discuss, such as whether or not you would burglarize a pharmacy to save your dying child, or if you would run over a pedestrian if it meant saving a car full of people, they really aren't looking for a specific decision (and they especially aren't gauging how moral or immoral you are). Ultimately, they don't care if you sacrifice the one person to save six, or six people to save one, or if you burglarize the pharmacy to save your child, or let your child die to honor your "thou shalt not steal" moral compass. Instead, they're interested in seeing that you can identify the competing priorities--or as I like to call them, the "stakeholders"--and how you go about making your decision.
These sorts of exercises are good in helping you hone your sense of ethics. And, perhaps just as importantly, they help you articulate your decision-making process, which can really save your bacon in your job, your church, your community, and your family when you have to make tough decisions that ultimately hurt or let down certain people. While it won't appease everyone, being able to discuss how you identified the stakeholders and how you arrived at your decision can go a long way in showing that you are a thoughtful, ethical agent (another fun buzzword professors like to use, meaning a person who makes decisions and is responsible for those decisions).
Here are a handful of ethical dilemmas (or scenarios) that I use in my classroom to get students discussing their decision-making process. When I put students into groups and hand them their prompts, I remind them that I am not looking for any particular answer. There is no right nor wrong way to proceed. I just want students to think about the following:
Who or what are the competing priorities?
Who stands to benefit and who might get hurt?
How would you go about deciding?
Scenario One: You are the CEO of a corporation, and you are considering closing down a large factory located in a small town in Ohio because it would be cheaper to lease a factory in China.
Scenario Two: You are a college basketball player on a full-ride scholarship, but you have no money to buy food. Someone offers to buy one of your signed jerseys for $250. It would be a direct violation of NCAA rules, but it would also buy a month’s-worth of food.
Scenario Three: You are interviewing your mom for your profile essay, and she tells you an embarrassing story about your brother, who is also a student at your school, and you’re excited because it will fit perfectly into your paper. Later, your mom says, “I shouldn’t have told you that. Maybe you shouldn’t put it in your paper.”
Scenario Four: You are interviewing the dean of your college for a profile you’re writing for the student newspaper. He tells you about some controversial changes that will be announced soon by the university’s president. At the end of the interview, however, he asks you not to include that in the profile since it wasn’t really his place to say anything.
Scenario Five: You are writing an essay, and you want to include a story about something horrific you witnessed when you were only five, but you don’t remember much about it, and you don't know anyone else who might remember the event. You want to make the story interesting, and you really want the reader to understand how awful the experience was, so you consider adding in some dialogue and details that may not be 100 percent accurate.
Scenario Six: You are writing an essay about domestic abuse because you watched your sister finally get out of an abusive relationship. Her story would fit perfectly into the paper, but you know she would never consent to letting you write about her experience.
From these prompts, we usually get some good discussions about such things as the impact shuttering a factory can have on a small town (known as post-industrial burnout syndrome), sacrificing immediate gain to benefit your "future" self, damaging or protecting personal relationships, respecting the wishes of people you interview or write about, burning bridges and spoiling your reputation as a writer or reporter, finding the "truth" (i.e. is the truth in the details?), and making a story actually readable and worth telling. In order to arrive at a final decision on any of these scenarios, the students need to decide what's most important to them: their grade, their hunger, their future, their relationships, the needs or wants of their readers, the demands of their boss or professor, their need to expose or report the "truth," their community, their school, and so on.
When I first asked students to discuss these prompts, I was worried they would quickly come to an agreement and not give it much thought, but I have been pleased these last few years to watch students come to so many different conclusions and completely disagree with each other.
I usually have an "ethics of representation" discussion with my students while they are writing profiles. Since ethics of representation is all about the choices you make when writing about other people, it makes sense to discuss it while students are interviewing, observing, and writing about people they know.
Here are some common ethical issues (or choices) that students face when writing a profile. These aren't exclusive, however, to profile writing, and they are applicable to all sorts of genres within academic writing, such as research papers, personal essays, and case studies.
1. Telling stories that involve other people.
It's common for the person you are interviewing to tell you a story about someone else. As an author, it is up to you to decide if you should include it, if you should get that other-person's permission first, and so on. If it's an embarrassing, private, or salacious story, you should consider checking with the person involved before including it.
2. Adding details and dialogue to make stories more interesting.
Nobody likes a boring story. If you are trying to tell a story of something that happened more than three seconds ago, chances are you have already forgotten some details. There really is no way to render a perfect story. Details will be embellished. Dialogue will be fabricated. Things will be forgotten. There is no way around this unless you have video footage and endless interviews from all involved--which, face it, is never going to happen. Instead, you'll have to rely on your janky memory and fill in the blanks as needed to create a story worth reading. How much you fill in the blanks and how close it gets you to the truth is all up to you. Tobias Wolff, the author of This Boy's Life, was notorious for rendering scenes that occurred decades ago when he was a child with vivid detail and dialogue, leaving people to wonder just how honest he was being. But Mr. Wolff has assured his readers that everything he does is in the service of finding the truth.
3. Exaggerating.
Similar to adding unreliable details and dialogue (see above), exaggerating is a common tactic to help tell a compelling story and get to the heart of an issue. A little exaggeration can be effective. A lot of exaggeration can be deceitful. As an author, you'll have to find that balance. James Frey got busted for deceitful exaggeration when he wrote A Million Little Pieces, which was promoted by Oprah Winfrey for her book-of-the-month club. After her endorsement, it was revealed that Mr. Frey took some liberties. In the book, he wrote that he had hit a police officer with his car while high on crack, which led to a violent melee with multiple officers and an 87-day jail sentence. Later, after Oprah promoted the book, one of the officers shared the actual report, which showed that Frey was held at a police station for five hours (not three months) before posting a bond of 300 dollars for minor offenses. The arresting officer also noted that Frey was polite and cooperative. After Oprah gave Mr. Frey a mouthful, he gave up on nonfiction writing and now sticks with what he knows best: fiction.
I use the "go big" rule for exaggeration: I only exaggerate if it's obvious and it serves to emphasize a point. For example, if I'm telling a story that occurred when it was 100 degrees outside, I might say, "It was a million degrees" or "we could have baked cookies on the dashboard." That's clearly an exaggeration, so I don't consider it unethical. But if I wrote "It was 115 degrees," that's too close to the truth, and the reader would have no way of knowing I was exaggerating for effect. That, for my money, is unethical.
4. Deciding whether to use real names or fake names.
If there are minors involved (people under the age of 18), this can actually become a legal rather than ethical issue. Play it safe and use fake names. You'll also need to obscure any identifying information. If you are writing about your brother, and you say he's your brother, then it really doesn't matter if you change his name. Readers can read between those lines. If I were to write about one of my colleagues, I might say something like, "Jean is an English professor in a public university in the American southwest."
5. Sharing information or stories that were told to you outside of a formal interview.
This tends to happen when you know the person well, like a family member or friend. Usually, it's not a problem: just text them and ask if you can include the story of when they accidentally farted on their first date. But if you're writing at 2 am and the paper is due in a few hours, then you have some decisions to make. And, as I always remind my students, these things have a way of "getting out." Don't ever assume that just because it's a paper for school and no one in your class knows your friend that he'll never find out.
6. Describing people (being honest without offending them).
It's true that you can never write a completely honest memoir (or profile) until everyone involved is dead. And chances are the person you're writing your profile about won't die in the next week before it's due. This can make it tricky to accurately describe them, especially if that's one of the assignment requirements--which it is for my class. Some people are tough as nails and it's nearly impossible to offend them. Others are delicate and even just mentioning their hair color is enough to send them into the deepest depression.
7. Making stuff up: quotes, stories, situations.
I said I wouldn't get preachy or tell you what's right or wrong, but I think it's wrong to fabricate quotes and stories in your papers. If you do, you no longer have a piece of nonfiction. There's a difference between embellishing and outright making stuff up. For some, it's still a matter of ethics, and some people see nothing wrong with making up a quote or a source as needed, especially if it's in service of the "truth" or forwarding some larger agenda. This is especially tricky territory now as we find ourselves in a "post-truth" society where truth is often seen as relative and just a matter of opinion (and if you disagree with something, you can just dismiss it as "fake news").
Judy Blunt, author of Breaking Clean, learned the hard way that when you make up stories, someone will eventually find out. In her memoir, she wrote, "One day John's father [her father-in-law], furious because lunch for the hay crew was late, took my warm, green typewriter to the shop and killed it with a sledgehammer.“ A few years later, when her father-in-law read the memoir and publicly defended himself, Mrs. Blunt confessed that he didn't actually smash her typewriter with a sledgehammer, but every time he belittled her, it felt as if he had smashed it with a sledgehammer. Tomato, to-mah-to, right?
Other authors have ruined their careers by making stuff up. Jonah Lehrer, the brilliant author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, for reasons I'll never understand, made up a quote in his book: “'It’s a hard thing to describe,' Bob Dylan once mused about the creative process. 'It’s just this sense that you got something to say.'” Unfortunately for Mr. Lehrer, Bob Dylan's official biographer, who knows just about every word that's stumbled from Dylan's mouth, read the book and called BS on it. It didn't take long for Mr. Lehrer to admit he made up the quote. The publishers recalled all of the books (and lost millions of dollars!), the New York Times fired him as a weekly columnist, and the rest of us just scratched our heads and wondered why such a smart, talented author would ruin his career for such a dumb, insignificant quote that really added nothing to the book. I should note, however, that this all went down before we entered this weird post-truth world. If this had happened in the last few years, he probably would have gotten a raise.
8. Creating “composite” scenes, stories, or characters.
When Thoreau wrote Walden, he hit a road block. He had spent two years living on the edge of a remote pond in Massachusetts, but in writing about his experiences chronologically, he found there was a lot of repetition and the second year was kind of a snooze-fest. So he decided to shuffle the two years together and write about all of his experiences as if they had happened in one year--so everything that happened that first autumn and the second autumn were represented as just autumn. Literary nerds like to read his notes and figure out which adventures happened during which year, but everyone else is just content to read Walden as if it happened over the course of a year. Some folks, however, can't stand it because it's a misrepresentation of what really happened. By combining everything into one year, Thoreau has given us a work of fiction, even if it is based in real-life experiences. Composite characters are similar. If you want to write an essay about working at Walmart, it can be tricky to highlight the 20 or 30 eccentric people you work with--so you might create a few manageable composite characters that represent a lot of people. It's a great tactic for making your writing manageable and engaging, but it definitely resides in that grey ethics area.
9. Misleading the subject.
When my students set up their interviews, I tell them to be completely honest and forthright with the person. Tell them that this is for a school essay, that their professor will read it, that several classmates will read it, and that it might end up on my website. Not every writer is that straightforward. It can be tempting not to tell someone exactly what we're doing with the information in fear that they won't be as open. I made this mistake about 10 years ago. I was writing an essay, and I wanted to mention my grandfather and his final days battling Alzheimer's. I called my dad and asked him about Grandpa, and he told me several stories I had never heard before--sad, violent stories. I wrote them all down and a few months later my essay was published. After my dad read the essay, he called me and said he had no idea that's why I had asked him about Grandpa. "If I had known you were going to broadcast this to everyone," he said, "I probably wouldn't have given you so many details." I wanted to say, "That's exactly why I didn't tell you!" Since then, I've revised my ethical code. I don't betray the trust of anyone for the sake of a story. It's just not worth it.
A famous example of misleading the subject can be found in the story of Truman Capote as he wrote In Cold Blood, a true-crime nonfiction novel about the two men who murdered an entire family in Kansas. To get the information he needed, he regularly visited one of the murderers, Perry Smith, in jail. He led Smith to believe that he was gathering information to write a book (which was true) so that he could show the judge that Smith wasn't such a bad guy and hopefully get his sentence reduced from execution to life (which was not true). Smith, believing Capote was trying to help him, divulged all the depraved details of his life and the murder of the Clutter family. He believed, up until the moment the noose was tightened, that Capote would save him. Capote never bothered to tell Smith what he was really doing. This one is tricky for me. On the one hand, I believe firmly that you should never mislead your subject. But on the other hand, In Cold Blood is such a good book, and it could have never been written without the information Smith provided. So you decide.
10. Disclosing where you got “supplemental” information.
This isn't a huge dilemma, but as a writer you'll have to decide how much detail you want to include about where certain information came from. Not everything you include in a profile will come from the interview. It could come from a conversation you had with someone else, from Facebook, or from an old email. Sometimes it's worth mentioning where it came from, even if just in a footnote, and other times it's not worth mentioning at all (lest you end up with a cluttered mess). Decisions, decisions.
Ethics: Deciding who or what receives top priority in your decision-making process.
Pretty simple, right?