ENGL 810: Debate Paper #3: Should we examine ethics in technical communication according to expediency or exigence?

Megan McKittrick

Katz, Stephen B. “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2004. 195-210. Print.

Ward, Mark. “The Ethic of Exigence: Information Design, Postmodern Ethics, and the Holocaust.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 24.1 (2010): 60-90. Sage Journals. Web. 29 Sept. 2012.

            Ethical considerations in technical communication are often overlooked in major publications. Textbooks typically relegate ethics to remote corners of the book, and “much of the literature on technical communication ethics focuses on single moments of decision – such as ‘the’ decision to launch the Challenger space shuttle or ‘the’ decision to knowingly publish a misleading user manual” (Ward 79). Stephen Katz and Mark Ward use a research method known as extreme-case sampling, examining Nazi technical memos and propaganda posters to explore the ethical challenges underlying common technical documents; however, Ward argues that Katz’s ethic of expediency falls short, ignoring the socio-cultural pressures that govern decisions made in technical communication.

            Katz centers his discussion on a chilling memorandum. Before gas chambers were adopted as the “Final Solution,” Nazi soldiers used vans used to terminate the Jews (Katz 197). This memo was used to request technical improvements to these vans and it “is an almost perfect document” according to the rules of argumentation, word choice, and design in technical communication (Katz 197). The problem, of course, is that the memo is “too technical, too logical. The writer shows no concern that the purpose of his memo” is to kill people more effectively (Katz 197). Instead, victims and bodies are referred to as a “pieces” of a “load” and the time spent gassing them as “operating time” (Katz 198).

He argues that technical communication is largely deliberative rhetoric, “defined by Aristotle as that genre of rhetoric concerned with deliberating future courses of action,” and the focus of this rhetoric is on expediency (Katz 200). The writer of this memo uses the ethic of expediency to serve the holocaust, demonstrating how they can be more efficient in achieving their ends. He also adopts the ethos of his government, shirking personal responsibility in the process. Katz argues that this ethic of expediency is a component of all technical communication, which was pervasive in the science- and technology-centered Nazi-German culture, and he draws connections to the science- and technology-centered cultures in Western civilization today. Ultimately, he concludes that “the ethic of expediency that provides the moral base of deliberative discourse used to make decisions, weigh consequences, and argue results in every department of society, also resulted in the holocaust – a result that raises serious and fundamental questions for rhetoric” (Katz 207).

Ward argues that Katz doesn’t go far enough in his analysis: “we must avoid the easy temptation to conclude … that the SS writers’ ethical blindness was simply a result of ‘hyperpragmatism’ run amok and thereby search no further for answers” (64). Ward examines a propaganda poster that visually represents the Nuremburg Laws, and he sees “an ‘ethic of exigence,’ in which exigence is understood to be, as Miller has described ‘social knowledge – a mutual construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes’” (66). For Ward, the ethic underlying these communications is largely the result of community influences rather than technical and scientific, taking aim at Katz’s article directly. Rather than “characterize Nazi bureaucrats as ‘single-minded’ practitioners of a ‘runaway technocracy,’” Ward argues that they both shaped and adopted a rhetoric that developed in the community, where designers and viewers co-create these meanings (66).

While Katz and Ward disagree on the causes of these extreme cases, neither excuse the creators involved, and both point to larger questions about ethics in technical communication. Katz concludes that the absence of ethical discussions in the field is dangerous, and Ward draws on Foucault to outline ethical questions both scholars and practitioners can apply to any situation: questions of ethical substance, mode of subjection, ethical work, and ethical goal.