Toward a Practical and Normative Ethics for Librarianship

Just about everything that librarians do as professionals carries ethical implications. Matters of intellectual freedom are most commonly recognized as loci for ethics‐based decision making, but the totality of individual and collective conduct is in need of practical, normative ethical structure. What is argued for here is a framework founded on rights. In order to achieve the goal of rights as foundation, processes of deliberation within librarianship must be established. The most attractive form of deliberation is discourse ethics that recognizes the dialectic nature of this (or any) profession. The result is an ethical state that serves the good of both the profession and communities.