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Ethics is a transitory state (one not always in play or even needed) rather than a state of being, though I can point to colleagues I know who were scrupulously ethical, so far as I can tell, and others (usually higher up in organizations) who seemed to be almost entirely unethical—who lied daily, who sought vengeance against staff for mere peccadillos or oversights, who lied to hurt others, and who (literally) attempted to and sometimes succeeded in destroying people’s lives for nothing but power over another. Let me note this fact so that non-archivists do not assume archivists are naturally immune to sin (to use intentionally a religious term).
I spent a tiny amount of time with archivists in the last one and two halves of a day, and at each of the two events I attended, the idea of the ethical requirements of archivists arose. That is because Terry Baxter, the current but outgoing (in both senses) president of the Society of American Archivists, was the major speaker at both events: the first a small and incomplete gathering colleagues who ran the Archives Leadership Institute for six year and the second a large event at the formal SAA conference.
The crux of these discussions (the first between Terry and me and the second from Terry to a seated assembly of archivists) was the distinction between morals and ethics—at least as I see it. Terry, as the video I present here demonstrates is about love, and I do not suggest Terry is wrong to use the word “love” in this context, even though or especially because, both of us were raised in families directed by their religions to see love as the highest form of human interaction (though the concept of love and the reality of it in practice may not appear to resemble each other at all).
Terry and I were both raised in different types of Christian homes, and both of us rejected our respective religions, and the practice of religion. The two of us are similar in our beliefs and tendencies yet quite different as well.
As a humanist, Terry sees love as the highest state of a human action, and as I sit here typing, I agree with that. However, we are also both amused by joking, and such jokes can often hurt people when they are not in a state of mind to accept the joke as gentle ribbing or when the joke is too biting, too full of actual teeth or unintentional hurt.
On the two days this week I saw Terry, he made the argument that love should trump rules forced on us, such as laws and regulations, and that, as an act of love, we would be morally right to ignore those rules when love—meaning showing deep respect for a person’s desperately needed support—was the overriding issue of our concern.
Please note I am rephrasing all of this and making assumptions based on what Terry has said. I am not suggesting I am presenting Terry’s thoughts exactly, only reasonably accurately.
Let me start with a return to the first night I spoke with Terry. I argued we, as government employees, have responsibilities we accepted when we were hired, and we would be ethically wrong to flout those rules to help even the most desperate person. I told him a story of mine, and it went something like this:
The last time I received a call from a person trying to access a birth certificate sealed by the state to protect the identity of the birth mother or both parents, I felt the greatest pain ever in such a situation. The woman who called me did so to help her father, who was quite elderly and simply wanted to know who his mother was. He wanted some connection to the person who made him within her body and made him well enough to live into his old age. I told her we did not have the records, but she could speak to the state’s vital records office and see if the parents had released the automatic hold on allowing access to such records, the chances of that being almost nil.
As I sit here, I realize there was a possible way, though I hadn’t thought of it before: I could have told his daughter to have her father take a DNA ancestry test or several from different companies, which would increase the chances she could find a match and be able to identify his own and ever mother. I am a little dazed by this thought coming far too late. I was a government archivist for most of my life, and I never had thought of this, until it was too late. Sure, I never had any responsibilities for vital records, but I had to discuss them throughout my career.
I will now give you Terry’s point of view, as I see it. We, as archivists, are not here to put papers in boxes and scan papers and store digital records. We are here to help people. I agree with all the foregoing.
Because our focus is on people, we must do what we can to help them, even if we need to bend or break rules. I countered that we are required to follow those rules. We might find a way to bend them, ethically, but we cannot break them.
After Terry’s speech today, however—because I listened to him once again—I realized there was a way to be a person of love and moral conviction and a person of ethics. That way would be to break our ethical requirements and to accept—and not even hide—what we have done. If the love we must provide is important enough, we need to break our oaths firmly and openly, with moral devotion and love.
I will write more about love, in a different context, later today.
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