Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2022-04-01 01:06 am
silveradept) wrote2022-04-01 01:06 am
Entry tags:
TISHLILS(HTBPA): An Actually Useful Set of Ethics
This one is a bit of a hybrid, in that it is entirely about the use of skills that I learned in library school, but how to apply them in this particular manner has been something that I've had to learn over time.
The setup is that someone is here at the help desk and is looking for books on "people's rights to their body about vaccines" and the laws around such things.
This is an ethical quandary for an information professional, even though it might not look like it at first blush. After all, the Internet is absolutely chock-full of people who have opinions about whether vaccination mandates are legal or whether the freedom to control someone's own body must be subordinated to public health needs or the needs of other people not to get sick from you. And most of the things you will find with a cursory Internet search that are available for free are from people who make claims that they are experts in their field, or that the solution is clear and easy, but they are neither properly expert nor is the solution as simple as they are going to portray it. Furthermore, around vaccination and SARS-CoV-2, there's more than enough misinformation, disinformation, lies and conspiracy theories around that there's a lot of chaff to sift out looking for the grains of wheat. As easy as it would be to print something out, especially if it were something that agreed with the person asking's already formed opinion on the matter (I have my suspicions, with the way the person is asking the question about what resources we have, and they also talk as an example, about the papers that hypothesized that vaccination causes autism as possible sources to use), I'm supposed to give people accurate information on the matter from reputable sources, so this is going to take a while.
Furthermore, when I start searching for what I think will be the best phrase to use, "bodily autonomy," the search engine helpfully reminds me that this phrase has long since been in use in all of the debates over whether or not a pregnant person has the right to terminate their pregnancy or whether they are to be reduced to nothing more than a host for the fetus until birth. That complicates the results, but it makes sense that both abortion and vaccination would have questions around when it is appropriate for the state to step in and mandate measures in the name of protecting health.
I do manage to find an opinion written in the New York Times from ACLU members who endorse vaccination mandates, but the Grey Lady is paywalled, and our database access conveniently leaves out the opinion column for the day where the opinion was published. Thankfully, the ACLU had their own copy on their website that I could print off.
Eventually, it turned out that we also had a book in the collection, on the shelves at my location, that's about the intersections of law and public policy with regard to previous and current pandemics and public health crises, written by someone who at least got the right kind of degree to be a potential expert on the subject. So, article and book in hand (even better, the book is short and in a small size, so it should be fairly easy to read), we send the person asking on their way. I have no idea whether they thought the resources provided would be good ones, or whether they intend to reject them out of hand for not having ideological compliance with the reader's predetermined beliefs and not offering them solutions in how to avoid mandates for themselves and their children.
It took some significant time, though, to get resources that I was willing to say were likely to pass being reputable and that were on the topic presented. The reasons why I took so much time are at the heart of the ethical question with this reference request. At least some faction of the library world believes that a library worker's right and proper duty to their requesters is to provide the requester with the information or data they have requested, according to whatever parameters have been set forth in the request, without any editorializing or suggestion that the material being sought or the question being asked is of low quality or fundamentally flawed in ways that are clear to the library worker. The need for "neutrality" and not taking any sort of political stance is the most important part to this faction, because they fear that allowing any library worker to express an opinion on something opens up the entirety of the library to express their opinions or to be challenged that their opinion on the matter is wrong. Or, for example, that letting a librarian steer someone to the place where scientific information on sex ed is also means that the organization can't stop a different librarian from always steering their people to the section that asserts sex ed is sinful and wrong and that abstinence and ignorance are the only things for an unmarried person to have when it comes to sex.
The ethics of neutrality are still being debated in library circles, even with more evidence piling up that neutrality is a harmful stance to take, one that ultimately sides with those who suppress and do violence instead of those who try to fight it. The competing ethical arguments say that libraries should be in the business of providing accurate information where possible, and that harmful materials in our collections, where discovered, should be removed so more of our communities will feel welcome at the library. In my professional judgment, this inquiry wasn't someone trying to look for all sides of the question to produce an academic work or similar, it was someone looking for justification for their own beliefs on the matter, and any side that agreed with them would do, so I felt the ethical thing to do was provide them with the best information I could find that would give them an accurate picture and let them do their reasoning from there. In the wider context of what's happening in schools and libraries, and especially in the wake of increased challenges and assertions by parents and administrators alike that the professional judgment and training of the librarian or educator about the appropriateness of a work in class or the library collection should be subordinated to the personal whims of parents, legislators, or administrators who are not trained or are choosing not to use their training, using and standing by your professional judgment seems more fraught and less generally accepted as the correct thing to do. (It's not lost on me that this sudden crisis of confidence in professionals coincides with the acceptance and integration of materials into schools and libraries (and society) that are more accurately portraying the history, culture, and reality of minoritized groups in relation to the hegemony of the straight white cis man.)
It's fascinating, sometimes, to see how what would have been an uncontroversial thing to say under previous cultural assumptions has exploded into being a highly contested issue once those cultural assumptions are unearthed or disputed. I feel like this is the true implementation of "defeat bad speech with more speech," as opposed to the way that the people most loudly claiming they're being cancelled tend to think of it, which is much more "my speech is important, yours is not, so my good speech should stay intact and your bad speech should go away."
So, yeah, this was the kind of request that needed care and assistance to make sure someone got correct (or more correct) information instead of what would have confirmed any biases they had but provided nothing useful for them. Which somehow seems like a more radical activity than it really should have, because the ethics we got installed from library school often recommend counterproductive courses of action for situations that require nuance or that could conflict with other possible ethics, like the ethics of whether it's okay to provide the address and phone number in a people database you subscribe to because someone claims to be looking for them to reconnect or to send them a friendly card or other such.
The library world is well overdue for an overhaul of our moral and ethical frames, and while we're at it, can we apply a new classification system that doesn't really on the racist and other -ist mindset of either Thomas Jefferson or Melvil Dewey? And possibly find a way to get the national organization to not only elect a board and officers all of color, but to also then take active stances on issues that decry one side of another of them as wrong, in our professional opinion. That kind of encouragement could potentially do a lot of work towards making a better set of ethics for library people.
The setup is that someone is here at the help desk and is looking for books on "people's rights to their body about vaccines" and the laws around such things.
This is an ethical quandary for an information professional, even though it might not look like it at first blush. After all, the Internet is absolutely chock-full of people who have opinions about whether vaccination mandates are legal or whether the freedom to control someone's own body must be subordinated to public health needs or the needs of other people not to get sick from you. And most of the things you will find with a cursory Internet search that are available for free are from people who make claims that they are experts in their field, or that the solution is clear and easy, but they are neither properly expert nor is the solution as simple as they are going to portray it. Furthermore, around vaccination and SARS-CoV-2, there's more than enough misinformation, disinformation, lies and conspiracy theories around that there's a lot of chaff to sift out looking for the grains of wheat. As easy as it would be to print something out, especially if it were something that agreed with the person asking's already formed opinion on the matter (I have my suspicions, with the way the person is asking the question about what resources we have, and they also talk as an example, about the papers that hypothesized that vaccination causes autism as possible sources to use), I'm supposed to give people accurate information on the matter from reputable sources, so this is going to take a while.
Furthermore, when I start searching for what I think will be the best phrase to use, "bodily autonomy," the search engine helpfully reminds me that this phrase has long since been in use in all of the debates over whether or not a pregnant person has the right to terminate their pregnancy or whether they are to be reduced to nothing more than a host for the fetus until birth. That complicates the results, but it makes sense that both abortion and vaccination would have questions around when it is appropriate for the state to step in and mandate measures in the name of protecting health.
I do manage to find an opinion written in the New York Times from ACLU members who endorse vaccination mandates, but the Grey Lady is paywalled, and our database access conveniently leaves out the opinion column for the day where the opinion was published. Thankfully, the ACLU had their own copy on their website that I could print off.
Eventually, it turned out that we also had a book in the collection, on the shelves at my location, that's about the intersections of law and public policy with regard to previous and current pandemics and public health crises, written by someone who at least got the right kind of degree to be a potential expert on the subject. So, article and book in hand (even better, the book is short and in a small size, so it should be fairly easy to read), we send the person asking on their way. I have no idea whether they thought the resources provided would be good ones, or whether they intend to reject them out of hand for not having ideological compliance with the reader's predetermined beliefs and not offering them solutions in how to avoid mandates for themselves and their children.
It took some significant time, though, to get resources that I was willing to say were likely to pass being reputable and that were on the topic presented. The reasons why I took so much time are at the heart of the ethical question with this reference request. At least some faction of the library world believes that a library worker's right and proper duty to their requesters is to provide the requester with the information or data they have requested, according to whatever parameters have been set forth in the request, without any editorializing or suggestion that the material being sought or the question being asked is of low quality or fundamentally flawed in ways that are clear to the library worker. The need for "neutrality" and not taking any sort of political stance is the most important part to this faction, because they fear that allowing any library worker to express an opinion on something opens up the entirety of the library to express their opinions or to be challenged that their opinion on the matter is wrong. Or, for example, that letting a librarian steer someone to the place where scientific information on sex ed is also means that the organization can't stop a different librarian from always steering their people to the section that asserts sex ed is sinful and wrong and that abstinence and ignorance are the only things for an unmarried person to have when it comes to sex.
The ethics of neutrality are still being debated in library circles, even with more evidence piling up that neutrality is a harmful stance to take, one that ultimately sides with those who suppress and do violence instead of those who try to fight it. The competing ethical arguments say that libraries should be in the business of providing accurate information where possible, and that harmful materials in our collections, where discovered, should be removed so more of our communities will feel welcome at the library. In my professional judgment, this inquiry wasn't someone trying to look for all sides of the question to produce an academic work or similar, it was someone looking for justification for their own beliefs on the matter, and any side that agreed with them would do, so I felt the ethical thing to do was provide them with the best information I could find that would give them an accurate picture and let them do their reasoning from there. In the wider context of what's happening in schools and libraries, and especially in the wake of increased challenges and assertions by parents and administrators alike that the professional judgment and training of the librarian or educator about the appropriateness of a work in class or the library collection should be subordinated to the personal whims of parents, legislators, or administrators who are not trained or are choosing not to use their training, using and standing by your professional judgment seems more fraught and less generally accepted as the correct thing to do. (It's not lost on me that this sudden crisis of confidence in professionals coincides with the acceptance and integration of materials into schools and libraries (and society) that are more accurately portraying the history, culture, and reality of minoritized groups in relation to the hegemony of the straight white cis man.)
It's fascinating, sometimes, to see how what would have been an uncontroversial thing to say under previous cultural assumptions has exploded into being a highly contested issue once those cultural assumptions are unearthed or disputed. I feel like this is the true implementation of "defeat bad speech with more speech," as opposed to the way that the people most loudly claiming they're being cancelled tend to think of it, which is much more "my speech is important, yours is not, so my good speech should stay intact and your bad speech should go away."
So, yeah, this was the kind of request that needed care and assistance to make sure someone got correct (or more correct) information instead of what would have confirmed any biases they had but provided nothing useful for them. Which somehow seems like a more radical activity than it really should have, because the ethics we got installed from library school often recommend counterproductive courses of action for situations that require nuance or that could conflict with other possible ethics, like the ethics of whether it's okay to provide the address and phone number in a people database you subscribe to because someone claims to be looking for them to reconnect or to send them a friendly card or other such.
The library world is well overdue for an overhaul of our moral and ethical frames, and while we're at it, can we apply a new classification system that doesn't really on the racist and other -ist mindset of either Thomas Jefferson or Melvil Dewey? And possibly find a way to get the national organization to not only elect a board and officers all of color, but to also then take active stances on issues that decry one side of another of them as wrong, in our professional opinion. That kind of encouragement could potentially do a lot of work towards making a better set of ethics for library people.