Jens Allwood
Department of Linguistics
University of Göteborg
Communication Ethics
This contribution is based on and expands a section in Allwood 1995: Activity
Based Pragmatics.
One of the levels of organization which is relevant for the study of
communication allows us to see communicators as rational agents pursuing
various motives and goals, some of which are cooperative and ethical. In fact,
communication in many ways seems to build on the human ability for rational
coordinated (cooperative) interaction.
Let us now take a look at this ability. As we have seen above, one of the first
attempts to give an analysis of this was the one presented in Grice 1975.
However, it was also argued that this attempt has some difficulties.
In Allwood 1976 and 1978, I made some suggestions in which I tried to build on
Grice´s insights while avoiding some of the difficulties mentioned above. The
analysis presents six principles of communication seen as a species of rational
motivated action and interaction.
(A)
Agency
(B)
Motivation
(C)
Rationality
(i)
(ii)
(i)
(ii)
(i)
Intentionality
Volition
General
Pleasure/ pain
Adequacy
(ii)
Competence
The two first principles postulate that action is analyzed as behavior involving
intention and volition. The next two principles postulate that motivation
underlies action and often involves the wish to seek pleasure and escape pain.
Other kinds of motivation involve, for instance, cooperation, ethics, power and
esthetics. The last two principles say that rationality is analyzed in terms of
adequate (efficient) and competent (making sure of preconditions) action. The
notions of agency, motivation and rationality are then used to give an analysis
of ethics and cooperation as relevant for communication. Ethics is analyzed as
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involving the “golden rule” or in Kantian terms “universalizability” with
regard to agency, motivation and rationality. “Doing unto others what you
would have them do unto you” is claimed to entail “making it possible for
others to be rational, motivated agents”. If you consider other persons in this
way, you take them into “ethical consideration”. Communicative interaction is
claimed to always involve some degree of cooperation which is defined as
follows: Two agents cooperate to the extent that they
(i)
(ii)
take each other into cognitive consideration
have a joint purpose
(iii)
(iv)
take each other into ethical consideration
trust each other with regard to (i) - (iii)
Communication involves at least cognitive consideration, i.e., an attempt to
perceive and understand another person's actions (where these can be both
non-communicative and communicative in nature). If communication is
intentional, it is further claimed to involve at least one joint purpose, i.e., the
purpose of sharing information, or perhaps better, sharing understanding
which incidentally also is what the etymology of communication
(communicare: to make common or shared) indicates.
Communication is always cooperative in the first sense and mostly also in the
second sense, even if it involves conflict. You cannot deal your opponent a
blow, and stay safe, unless you cognitively consider him/her and for many
kinds of conflictual action, you also want your opponent to understand what
you are doing or saying which also requires at least cognitive consideration of
his possibilities of doing so.
Communication is, however, very often cooperative in much more than the
minimal sense just described. Usually, it also involves ethical consideration. If
we communicate ethically, i.e., in accordance with the golden rule, we should
make it possible for not only ourselves but also for others to be rational,
motivated agents. Let us examine this in some more detail.
In order to make it possible for others to be agents, we should not impose on
them too much but leave them the freedom to act according to their own will
and intention. This is one of the sources of politeness. It is usually more polite
to make an indirect request such as could you pass me the salt than a direct
request as pass me the salt since the former in its formulation, even if not in real
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practice, give the interlocutor somewhat greater degrees of freedom than the
latter.
Making it possible for others to be agents is also what allows us to claim that
“brainwashing” and many kinds of propaganda are unethical. They are
unethical since they remove the recipient’s possibilities to exercise his/her own
critical judgement and in this way reduce the recipient’s possibilities of being
an agent.
Secondly, ethical communication also implies that we should make it possible
for others to pursue their own motives. A very fundamental type of motive is
related to pain and pleasure. People generally want to escape pain and seek
pleasure.
Thus, in our communicating, we should therefore not unnecessarily hurt people
but if possible rather give them joy. Here we therefore have another source of
politeness strategies. It is usually more polite to compliment people than to
insult them. We also see one of the reasons for why so much of communication
has a consensus orientation. We do not wish to hurt others, especially not if
they have more power than ourselves. The implementation of ethics is in this
case and in others, strongly aided by the reliance on the golden rule in its
positive and negative formulations, “do unto others what you would have
them do unto you”. and “do not do to others what you would not have them do
unto you”. In other words, if you hurt others they might hurt you later on,
whereas if you treat them nicely, they might treat you nicely.
Thirdly, ethical communication in the analysis proposed here, involves making
it possible for others to be rational, i.e. they should be able to act adequately
and competently, In order to act adequately and competently, i.e. we must
have correct information, otherwise we cannot judge if the appropriate
preconditions for a certain course of action are present. This directly implies
that we should not lie or mislead. If we do this,. the other person’s possibilities
of obtaining the desired outcomes through the exercise of his/her rationality is
radically diminished.
As some of the examples already discussed have indicated, the ethical norms
are not in harmony with each other if any one of them is followed to the
exclusion of the others. In everyday communication, we have to “suboptimize”
the norms by considering how following a certain norm would affect our
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adherence to other norms. Given the 3 major ethical requirements we have
discussed (i) agenthood (give freedom), (ii) motivation (do not hurt) and (iii)
rationality (give correct information) the possible clashes are the following:
1.
2.
3.
Give freedom
Give freedom
Do not hurt
- do not hurt
- give correct information
- give correct information
Let us consider them in turn. An example of the first type of clash can be seen if
we prevent a child from running out into the street. We are restricting his/her
freedom in order to prevent him/her from being hurt. In this case, and in
many others, we, thus, seem to think not hurting is more important than giving
freedom. However, this is certainly not always the case as is attested by the
many “wars of liberation” mankind has experienced.
“Giving freedom” can also clash with “giving correct information”. Too much
freedom might for example prevent someone from gaining knowledge or
information which is necessary for future successful action. In general,
however, this type of clash is often less difficult to resolve than any of the two
others. Since it often involves issues of “short term freedom” versus “long term
freedom”.
The last clash, the one between “giving correct information” and “not hurting”
is perhaps the one that is most met with in everyday life but also in, for
example, political statements. So-called “white lies” are a very clear example of
one way of solving the clash. Give incorrect information in order not to hurt
another person. Another way of solving it involves not “lying by commission”
but rather “lying by omission”, i.e., not hurting another person (or oneself) by
leaving out all unpleasant information.
The ways in which the clashes between different ethical requirements are
resolved vary with circumstances. Some of the most relevant variables to
consider are ethnic culture and religion. It seems that in some cultures the
desire not to hurt another person is valued more highly than the desire to give
correct information, while in other cultures the tendency is in the other
direction. In yet other cultures the desire to give freedom is valued relatively
higher than in other cultures. However, differences are not absolute but rather a
matter of degree with somewhat greater preferences for one type of solution in
one culture as compared with another culture.
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Another factor that clearly is relevant is the kind of activity that is being
pursued. For example, in some kinds of academic seminars the object is to
pursue truth. This means that many participants think it is more important to
give what they think is correct information than to avoid hurting other
participants. In many other kinds of activity the balance is tipped the other
way, especially this will be the case, if asymmetrical power relations are
involved, which they often are.
Understanding and Explaining
We have already noted above that an important part of being able to
understand another person is to be able to interpret the purpose or the motives
behind his communicative and non-communicative actions. If we cannot find
any such purpose or motive, we cannot “understand” him/her as a rational
motivated agent but have instead to try to comprehend his/her actions in
another way, for example, by “explaining” them causally. In fact, conceptually
speaking, both “understanding” (in the narrow sense used here) and
“explanaining” can be seen as special cases of “comprehending” or
“understanding in a wider sense” which can be defined as “establishing a
meaningful connection between input information and stored background
information”. It could also be claimed that “understanding in a narrow sense”,
i.e., understanding of intentions and motives, can be seen as a special case of
“explaining”, in view of the causal role of motives and intentions.
In everyday life and conversation, we constantly switch between an
“understanding” (in the narrow sense) and an “explanatory” mode of
comprehension. If another person coughs, this can be because he/she wants us
to notice something fishy (purpose) or because something obstructed his/her
breathing (cause). Likewise, if the normally shy A says I love you to B, after
he/she has had a few drinks, our comprehension of A's utterance would
combine understanding (he/she was motivated by love) with explanation (the
drinks had caused him/her to be less bound by social restrictions).
Thus, in the analysis suggested here, rationality, motivation and agency are
essential ingredients of both the production and understanding of human
communication, but they are not the only ingredients. Other aspects of the
physical, biological, psychological and social resources and constraints are also
necessary and are drawn upon continuously to supplement interpretation and
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comprehension when “understanding” in terms of rational motivated action is
insufficient. Perhaps, we as communicators usually want to be “understood”
rather than merely “explained” and therefore primarily try to understand
others by trying to see them as relevant (motivated rational agents). However,
we often combine this with comprehending them by “explanation”.
Philosophically speaking, this means that, in relation to the views put forth, for
example, in Dilthey 1883 and von Wright 1971, I do not believe that
“explanation” and “understanding” should be pursued separately in something
like “Geisteswissenschaffen” and “Naturwissenschaften” but rather that they
should be regarded as possibly analytically distinguishable modes of
comprehension, for which it is a challenge to find new forms of integration.
Small Postscript on Rhetoric and Ethics
Already Aristotle contrasted rhetoric, in the sense of the art of persuasion, with
dialectics, the art of seeking truth through dialog.
If we are engaged in rhetoric, our chief objective is to persuade our interlocutor
of something. Such persuasion can become unethical in several ways.
1) Preventing the interlocutor from being an agent, i.e., what one says is
construed in such a manner that the interlocutor is prevented from exercising
his/her own judgement. This is the case in brain washing and various types
of coercion.
2) Preventing the interlocutor from following his/her own motives by
threatening or perhaps falsely tempting.
3) Preventing the interlocutor from being rational by lying or leaving out
relevant information.
The traditional antidote to misuse of rhetoric is, of course, dialectics, or in more
modern terminology “analysis of argumentation”, which provides us with
methods to make sure we are approaching truth. In this tradition, we find
syllogisms and many other types of logical inference as well as criteria for
definitions of concepts and criteria for a good taxonomy or a good theory. We
also find lists of misuse of rhetoric, such as the so called "fallacies of argument".
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The traditional antidote to misuse of rhetoric, thus, concentrates on how best to
find truth or, in the terminology I have used above, on finding methods
whereby one is relatively assured of getting correct information. There is not an
equal amount of interest in how to avoid depriving interlocutors of their
freedom or on how to safe guard their right to pursue their own motives.
It seems reasonable to hope that teaching rhetoric in the future will involve
teaching students not only how to best persuade their interlocutors of various
matters but also which ways of doing so are ethical and which ways are
unethical. It also seems reasonable to hope that in this way students might have
a better defence against various types of unsound persuasion that they might be
exposed to.
Bibliography
Allwood, J.1976. Linguistic Communication as Action and Cooperation,
Gothenburg Monographs in Linguistics 2, University of Göteborg, Dept of
Linguistics.
Allwood, J. 1978. On the analysis of communicative action. Gothenburg Papers in
Theoretical Linguistics 38, Göteborg University, Department of Linguistics. Also
in M. Brenner M. (Ed.) 1978.The Structure of Action. London: Basil Blackwell.
Allwood, J. 1995. An Activity Based Approach to Pragmatics. Gothenburg Papers
in Theoretical Linguistics 76, Dept. of linguistics, University of Göteborg.
Forthcoming in Bunt & Black (eds.) Approaches to Pragmatics.
Dilthey,W.1883. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Göttingen.
Grice, H.P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J.L. Morgan (Eds.) Syntax
and Semantics Vol 3: Speech acts. New York: Seminar Press, 41-58.
Von Wright, C.H. 1971. Explanation and Understanding. London: Routledge,
Kegan and Paul.
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