Ethics for Records and Information Management

Norman A. Mooradian

• Publisher: ALA Neal-Schuman
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780838916391
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838917633
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The scope and reach of information, driven by the explosive growth of information technologies and content types, has expanded dramatically over the past 30 years. The consequences of these changes to records and information management (RIM) professionals are profound, necessitating not only specialized knowledge but added responsibilities. RIM professionals require a professional ethics to guide them in their daily practice and to form a basis for developing and implementing organizational policies, and Mooradian's new book provides a rigorous outline of such an ethics. Taking an authoritative principles/rules based approach to the subject, this book comprehensively addresses

• the structure of ethics, outlining principles, moral rules, judgements, and exceptions;
• ethical reasoning, from meaning and logic to dilemmas and decision methods;
• the ethical core of RIM, discussing key topics such as organizational context, the positive value of accountability, conflicts of interest, and confidentiality;
• important ethical concerns like copyright and intellectual property, whistleblowing, information leaks, disclosure, and privacy; and
• the relationship between RIM ethics and information governance.

CHAPTER 1

The Structure of Ethics

INTRODUCTION: SOURCES OF ETHICAL OBLIGATION

The moral obligations of the records and information professional come from one of three sources. First, as a person, an information professional is subject to the general or fundamental rules of morality. These rules apply to him or her as a normal human agent who is capable of rational decision-making and voluntary action, and is able to help or harm others. Second, as a professional, a person has obligations that come from membership in the profession. The profession is a source of ethical obligations. This has to do with the status and nature of professions. Professions are given trust and authority in their specific domain. With this trust and authority come special obligations. Members of a profession inherit these obligations in their role as professionals and not simply because they are persons. Professions have codes of conduct that attempt to specify these obligations.

Third, information professionals work for organizations. Different organizations, by virtue of their purpose and social sanction, create a different moral context for their members, which in turn generates organization-specific ethical rules. A records professional working for a government agency inherits certain obligations by virtue of the norms that legitimate public-sector entities have. Another professional, working for a private sector entity, will be subject to a different set of norms, as will someone working for a nonprofit or NGO. And within these general categories, there will be many differences among organizations and their purposes. Many organizations will have mission statements and codes of conduct that attempt to specify their organization-specific values and obligations. As a member of an organization, a records professional will therefore inherit certain organization-specific obligations.

In summary, a records professional gains his or her ethical responsibility from three areas: (a) ethics in general, (b) professional ethics, and (c) organizational ethics. These obligations come from the fact that the records professional is a person, and hence a moral agent, a member of a profession, and a member of an organization. When attempting to understand the ethical issues that he or she will encounter, the records professional will need to look at all three sources of ethical obligation in order to understand what the proper course of action or policy might be. Failure to consider all three aspects of one’s moral situation can lead to mistakes and misunderstandings. Also, as the profession evolves or as the person changes organizations, it will be important to understand the implications of these changes for one’s responsibilities, especially as one moves between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, where different problems and different expectations arise.

This chapter will focus on the general ethical requirements one has as a person, since these requirements form a general framework for understanding one’s moral obligations. The next sections of this chapter will look at professional and organizational ethics.

THE ETHICAL FRAMEWORK

The goal of this chapter and the next is to develop a framework for ethical inquiry and decision-making. There are different ways of representing our common moral knowledge, but the elements below capture its central features and accord with the language and methods of ethicists. It is therefore of value to know and become familiar with the concepts below, but more than that, it is important to see how they work together to form a system. Each concept is explained in figure 1.1, with the exception of the last element, the rules and methods of ethical reasoning. This will be explained in the next chapter.

Principles	High-level moral statements that express fundamental values and provide general guidance. Examples include the principle of non-harm (non-maleficence), the principle of beneficence, and the principle of fairness.
General Ethical Rules	General rules that govern action. These describe particular types of action such as theft and deception. Examples include “do not steal” and “do not lie.” These rules are part of our common morality and apply to persons generally.
Specific Ethical Rules	Ethical rules that apply to more specific issues and contexts. These are the sorts of rules that make up professional ethics. They address the responsibilities of persons playing specific roles and dealing with certain kinds of issues that are relevant to those roles. An example would be “do not falsify records.”
Rights	Rights are ways to express certain standing obligations owed to persons, as well as certain permissions and liberties owed to them. Rights are often thought of as protective barriers against encroachment or as entitlements to something.
Ethical Judgments	Ethical judgments are determinations of what is permissible, prohibited, or obligatory for a particular situation or type of situation.
Exceptions	Judgments that particular actions or types of actions are permissible under certain circumstances, even though they seem to violate an ethical rule.
Rules and Methods of Ethical Reasoning	Rules governing the logic of ethical statements and ethical reasoning that can be used to justify moral rules and judgments.

FIGURE 1.1 Elements of common moral knowledge

Principles and General Rules

There are different ways of representing and organizing our ethical knowledge. Some have proposed thinking of moral knowledge as reducible to a single high-level principle, rule, or value such as the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”). Sophisticated philosophical theories have been proposed along these lines. One theory (or family of theories) begins with the main idea expressed in the Golden Rule and attempts to work it out more systematically. In a related view, morality boils down to a principle of doing only those things that you can propose as universal rules; that is, rules that everyone in like circumstances would be bound to follow.1 Another theory stresses the consequences of actions (where consequences are broadly understood). It proposes as the unifying idea behind morality that a morally correct action is one that brings about the best possible consequences for all those affected by the action.2

Over the years, these theories have been developed systematically and with great subtlety. They have also become more complicated as their applications have been worked out and their objections have been addressed. Because of these complications, and because there is no consensus on which theory is right or even whether a single theory can adequately represent our moral knowledge, many ethicists have opted for a principles-based approach. Such an approach identifies high-level principles that form a framework for our ethical thinking. These principles represent important aspects or dimensions of ethical thought and form a base structure into which we can place the many moral rules we follow and the innumerable moral judgments we make. In a similar vein, other ethicists have identified general moral rules that are essential to the well-being and functioning of any society. Such rules prohibit certain kinds of actions such as killing, stealing, and lying. These rules make up a common morality that is widely shared across different cultures.3

The approach I follow is a combination of these two approaches. It can be appropriately called a principles/rules-based approach. In this view, our basic moral knowledge can be represented by a combination of (1) basic principles that represent important aspects of our moral thinking, and (2) a larger set of general rules that are shared across different societies and learned by the vast majority of people.

We can think of the basic principles as “framework” principles. They represent foundational values such as autonomy, responsibility, and concern for others and are similarly named. Examples include the principle of autonomy, the principle of responsibility, and the principle of beneficence. In addition to representing fundamental values, these principles help us summarize and organize the general moral rules as well as more context-specific moral rules and particular ethical judgments. They also help us communicate our ethical ideas and provide an understandable way to justify our positions and judgments. Hence, when deliberating over questions about the disclosure of personal information, the principle of autonomy may be invoked. After deliberation by many stakeholders, this principle may become the basis for a particular regulation or policy (e.g., a requirement for consent before the disclosure of personally identifiable medical information).

General rules identify fundamental and basic actions that are prohibited or required. An example is the moral rule prohibiting the unjustified killing of persons. These rules are fundamental in that they identify actions that cannot be ignored within a functioning society. The reason for this is that the actions are harmful or helpful to a degree that they need to be strongly prohibited or encouraged, respectively. Societies that did not include these rules would be dysfunctional because of the disvalue caused by harmful actions or the value lost by the infrequency of helpful actions. The rules are basic in that they affect persons in relation to their common human nature. Killing and injury affect us because of our basic physiology, and persons can cause injury and death to each other without technologically advanced weapons. Verbal deception is effected through speech and does not require telecommunications and computing technologies. The general rules reflect this simplicity of the human condition and apply across societies and time periods. More specific rules, by contrast, reflect institutional contexts and technological developments. For example, specific ethical norms and legal rules prohibiting financial fraud arise in relation to financial institutions and the technologies that support them.

Specific Rules and Particular Judgments

The framework principles and general moral rules can be thought of as a common store of moral knowledge that is shared by members of our society and shared across societies. They contain the most general moral knowledge we have.4 However, as knowledge goes, we know that there is common knowledge and specialized knowledge. There are things most of us know, and things we know by virtue of having a profession or specialization of some kind. The various fields of applied and professional ethics are a kind of specialized ethical knowledge. This knowledge is developed by persons with extensive study in a particular field, and who have become familiar with the ethical problems which arise in that field. In drawing on our common store of ethical knowledge and applying it to the problems of specific fields, these persons expand our ethical system to provide answers to these new and complicated issues. The answers can be formulated as ethical rules, though they are more specific than the general rules described above. They are more specific because they are limited to certain social contexts where particular activities are carried out, based on specialized knowledge, and sometimes using new technologies. The body of rules that emerges in response to the field-specific issues constitutes an applied or professional ethics. Some of this knowledge is shared across applied and professional fields as well. The subject matter of this book is a professional ethics of this sort, and all of its chapters except this one and the next will be dedicated to professional and applied ethics.

PRINCIPLES

This section will discuss the framework principles. I introduce a list of five such principles. These principles are found in a wide range of discussions of ethics, though one can find different lists as well. They are the product of reflection and analysis carried out by numerous ethicists over many years, and they have been used effectively in ethical analysis in a number of fields such as medicine and bioethics.5 I have chosen five principles in order to balance comprehensiveness with simplicity.

Framework Principles

Principle of Non-Maleficence (Non-Harm)

Principle of Autonomy

Principle of Fairness

Principle of Responsibility

Principle of Beneficence

Each of these principles captures an important dimension of morality. Taken together, they present a high-level map of its general territory. This map will provide a context into which we can place general rules as well as more specific rules and ethical judgments. A familiarity with each of the principles will be useful. Each of these principles is explained below.

Principle of Non-Maleficence or Non-Harm

The principle of non-maleficence enjoins that we refrain from acting in a way that harms others. It includes harms that we directly cause, harms we indirectly cause, and harms that we risk causing (make more likely through our actions). It is also called the principle of non-harm. Many moral rules fall under this general principle. These include rules against killing, injuring, causing mental distress, financial loss, and so on. The principle is expressed as a prohibition, which means that it asks us not to engage in certain types of actions. Principles and rules that prohibit or restrict are categorized as “negative” because they seek to negate or prevent our acting in certain ways. (Negative and positive duties are explained in more detail below.) Their objective is to minimize evil and harm.

The principle of non-harm is among the most fundamental principle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1. The Structure of Ethics
• 2. Ethical Reasoning
• 3. Professional Ethics
• 4. Management Ethics
• 5. Whistle-Blowing and Information Leaks
• 6. Information Privacy
• 7. Concluding Thoughts: Information Governance and Ethics
• Appendix A. Disagreement, Relativism, and the Ethical Framework
• Appendix B. Applying Principles and Rules to Privacy Values
• Appendix C. Synopsis of Chapters
• Bibliography
• Index