AUTHORIAL ETHICS: HOW WRITERS ABUSE THEIR CALLING*
by Robert Hauptman

*This paper is a formal articulation derived from a short course and public lecture presented in January 2008 at the Information Ethics Fellows Program, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, where it is posted.

Who We Are, What We Do, and How We Do It

Authors create notes, records, letters, articles, essays, reviews, and monographs. Traditionally, an author is someone who writes and also disseminates his or work. Many avenues for this have been followed including the telegraph, telephone, workshop, and conference, but again, traditionally, dissemination has entailed publication--in periodicals (magazines or journals) and books. My former colleague at the University of Oklahoma, who wrote novels and stored them away in a trunk, was not an author. Today, even the most conservative commentator must admit that email, listservs, chat rooms, and blogs have enhanced and enlarged the venues for legitimate dissemination. Indeed more people may read a posting than will look at a horde of esoteric university press publications. Rebecca Moore Howard points out that during the Middle Ages, authors were mimetic: they collaborated with their predecessors’ texts (75). Often they simply reworked their sources and produced a new, variant work anonymously. Modern authors insist on originality and supplant their sources autonomously. Authors now value autonomy, proprietorship, originality, and morality (76). It is clear, I think, that an author is someone who writes and disseminates the work often through publication. As Chris Herrera observes, this should be easily comprehensible to a five year old. And it is, but it also happens to be incorrect. When a colleague insisted that her name should be appended to an article that Herrera had just completed, because she outranked him (55), one realizes that authorship is an ethically convoluted business. Indeed, in the hard sciences authors may not write and writers may not get credit for authorship.

Ethics also demands at least some brief comment. It is one of the five sub-disciplines of philosophy and considers mental or physical action in an axiological or valuing context. It asks questions such as Is this action right or wrong, correct or incorrect, acceptable or unacceptable, good or evil? And since it is an applied or practical discipline one is expected to act upon the answer. No matter how difficult the problem or dilemma may be and no matter how convoluted and complexifying the work of academic philosophers may appear, there are only two foundational sources for solving an ethical problem. If one bases one’s decision on an axiom, principle, or belief, whether religious or secular, whether personal or societal, then one is a deontologist and principle takes precedence over all other considerations. The primary secular representative of deontology is Immanuel Kant who’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, with its four sustaining axioms (including the Categorical Imperative), is an excellent resource for those interested in ethical behavior.

Some people care more about results than principles; they are called consequentialists and the Utilitarians, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, represent this modality. Indeed, Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus allows one to calculate the gross happiness derived from various possibilities. The one that produces the most happiness for the most people is the ethical choice. That this may result in some unjust or negative consequences and that frequently societally mandated principles (do not kill, do not steal, do not lie) are abjured, is of little matter to those who base their ethical decisions on pragmatic utility.

A third concept that requires consideration is research. No author creates ab ovo; even the most imaginative writer has learned something about his or her topic at some point. It matters little whether this occurs through a fourth grade report on salamanders, in a laboratory, or clinically, intellectually, or archivally. Research under girds the written and published word. This is a crucial point because unpublished results are meaningless, and ethical transgressions that occur during the research process are carried over into the disseminated or published text: Research abrogations are authorial breaches.

It is equally important to understand how we know and how we know what we know is true. Epistemologists insist that there are three ways of knowing (empiricism, rationality, and intuition), that much of what we know derives from authority, and that three tests offer some often-unreliable verification for truth. When something corresponds with reality, it is true; there are, however, instances when this fails, e.g. a mirage fulfills the requirement; it appears to the optical nerve to reflect reality, but it does not. Second, within a closed system, if something insinuated coheres, than it is true, but if the system is based on false premises, then whatever is appended may also be false. This is the case, for example, with astrology. Finally when something works, it gives the impression that it is true, but for millennia humans believed that the sun revolves around the earth. Pragmatics are problematic.

Indeed, truth seems to be highly unreliable. Authors manipulate, alter, distort, and create their own version of reality. Richard F. Hamilton, among others, has accused Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, of purposely giving a false impression or distorting the truth for some higher good. Sometimes, fantasy or fabrication becomes so overwhelming that the dissimulator comes to believe that his or her version of reality is valid. This may be the case for Binjamin Wilkomerski, whose extraordinary Holocaust memoir, Fragments, turned out to lack any contiguity with reality. A more perplexing issue is fictional truth, for even novelists, playwrights, and film and television scriptwriters must create works that adhere to the truth formulated within their constructed worlds. Given the conventions of fiction, the work must give the impression that it is true to itself and honestly reflects the human condition, and this is so even within many extreme subgenres including fantasy, science fiction, romance, or horror. It is helpful to keep in mind Aristotle’s injunction that an impossible probability is preferable to a possible improbability. Homer and Kafka both reflect this and present eternal human truth through bizarrely impossible situations. Truth is the single most important authorial benchmark: Here is how Elie Wiesel puts it:
 If someone else could have written my stories, I would not have written
them. I have written them in order to testify. My role is the role of the
witness.... Not to tell, or to tell another story, is...to commit perjury. (qtd.
in Felman 39)

Thus, truth and the search for truth are authorial necessities. And yet, there may be some knowledge that we should abjure. We should not seek out those things that are dangerous or harmful. We should protect the rights of the vulnerable--humans, ht to vet accounts that discuss their