Archival Ethics and the Professionalization of Archival Enterprise

Abstract

IntroductionArchivists ride the horns of dilemmas, constantly juggling priorities to minimize conflict. Such dilemmas include* the need to conserve versus the need to handle delicate items,* the need to acquire versus lack of storage space,* privacy rights versus the public's right to know,* the need for financial patronage versus the need for autonomy,* an item's enduring value versus the cost of its conservation requirements, and* the lure of new preservation technologies versus their unproven lon - gevity.To choose the lemma, that horn upon which to ride, archivists use intuition, judgment based on training, institutional guidelines, and documents such as the Core Values of Archivists and the Code of Ethics for Archivists (Society of American Archivists, 2011, 2012, 2012). These two documents purport to guide the behavior of archivists who master their 2,300 words. Their histories, found, for example, in Horn (1989, pp. 65 -66) and Cox (2008, pp. 1128-1129), show that committees repeatedly refined these documents, rather than defining fundamental concepts such as trust, and profession.I suggest that such codes prevent archivists from acting ethically in any sense other than a circular according to the code of Karl Popper (1966, p. 552) presented a similar position, excerpted in van Meijl (2000, p. 74) and Wallace (2010, p. 178):What does it [scientific ethics] aim at? At telling us what we ought to do, i.e., at constructing a code of norms upon a scientific basis, so that we need only look up the index of the code if we are faced with a difficult moral decision? This clearly would be absurd; quite apart from the fact that if it could be achieved, it would destroy all personal responsibility and therefore all ethics.Hauptman and Hill (1991, p. 43) also discussed ethical codes with respect to responsibility:[C]ommentators have come to the individual's defense in this context by insisting that since individual members of an organization only do part of a job or only follow instructions (orders) or, by extension, only adhere to an ethical code [emphasis added], they really cannot be held responsible for general negative results.I suggest a somewhat different standard based in part on new or re-worded principal precepts. The bulk of this paper explains the need and derivation of these precepts followed by suggestions for implementation, and the conclusion restates the precepts. Please note that this paper discusses archival enterprise as practiced in the U.S., although the concepts also should apply to archives worldwide. Broader and deeper discussions of archival codes of ethics, per se, occur in Neazor (2007) and Dingwall (2004). Any discussion of ethics, however, requires us archivists to ride our lemmas boldly through several quandaries.First Quandary[W]e [philosophers] have first rais'd a Dust, and then complain, we cannot see (Berkeley, 1734). Many wits denigrate philosophy through this quotation, and frankly, I agree. Philosophy has, however, given form to some aspects of information science, and we overcome our first quandary, the morass of philosophy, by limiting our exploration of philosophy to one set of forms, those discussing moral philosophy, or ethics. Further, we will limit inquiry to normative ethics, and to only three branches of normative ethics:1. Virtue ethics (Are your intentions moral?)2. Deontology (Do you follow the rules?)3. Teleological ethics, or, Consequentialism (Do the ends justify the means?)4. Pragmatic ethics (not used as such in this paper because of its imprecision).Second QuandaryIn this paper, ethics refers to conceptualizations of right and wrong behavior and frequently finds expression in dictums about what we should and should not do: Lying is wrong! Such dictums are doomed, however, without prior definition of right and wrong, and each person has a unique definition of right and wrong. …