What is Beneficence?

Often posited as a healthcare provision care ethic, beneficence generally refers to the requirements of practitioners to act in their patients’ best interests and to support their patients’ associated well-being. In the realm of human subjects research, The Belmont Report, clarifies the points of beneficence that go beyond ethics and obligation:

Two general rules have been formulated as complementary expressions of beneficent actions in this sense: (1) do not harm and (2) maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harms.

Noted here, then, beneficence moves from ethics and protocols to a personal commitment to not perpetrate direct causes of harm, and to recognize and intervene on affected individuals’ or groups’ behalf when unanticipated or indirect harm may arise during practice and provision of care.

Isn’t “Helping People” Enough?

Many people choose library work to help people or serve their communities; and there’s no denying the value of librarians in communities: we offer career, vocational, and tutoring help; ensure information access provision; and even create and manage programs that address food insecurity and personal hygiene access. However, research on vocational awe and resilience narratives in library work highlight that this broad goal to help also drives library workers to weaponize industry values and fill in gaps that their organizations or municipalities refuse to acknowledge or repair. These frameworks often result in burnout – a state of exhaustion that includes dissociation from a sense of work-related accomplishment. In turn, library workers may harbor increasing feelings of contempt towards library users as they decenter their own human needs while being expected to solve problems that they aren’t trained to do – or that their organizations are never funded to handle.

Additionally, inconsistent application of equity, diversity, inclusion initiatives – including the more recent burial and/or abject abandonment of associated values and efforts – have initiated and caused sustained harm to numerous individuals, groups, and communities. In particular, they cause cognitive dissonance in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who work in libraries. In my low-morale experience research, Diversity Rhetoric, Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Racism were all identified as additional systems that allowed abuse and neglect to be exacted on racialized library workers. Values abandonment also engenders distrust of libraries in marginalized communities that witness iniquities in services, programs, and collections.

When we consider the second principle of beneficence, we move beyond helping others and increase our willingness to become aware of harm agents and minimize maleficent points of entry wherever we can.

Beneficence Awareness in Daily LIS Work

Unless library workers are engaged in human subjects research or employed in healthcare/medical libraries, they may not be aware of the principle of beneficence. When I chat about this idea with colleagues, they recognize the term vaguely – most practitioner-based research in libraries is considered IRB exempt, and as a result, practicing library workers may elect to skip human subject research certification.

A search for articles about beneficence in libraries reveals a very short supply of information, signaling space for lots of exploration.  Some likely questions for a start:

• Do library workers know about the principle of beneficence? What do they know?
• How are library workers currently practicing beneficence, regardless of their awareness of the principle?
• How might intentional beneficence impact efforts towards library advocacy, collective care, mutual aid, and community-building – the latter of which are increasingly core functions of modern library work – and as a method for improving internal workplace relationships and employee health and well-being?
• What is the role of beneficence in preventing, interrupting, or reducing acts of workplace abuse and neglect?
• What applications of beneficence can be leveraged for human-/person-centered or trauma-informed leadership approaches?

Pathways and Practices in Librarianship

These questions are exciting to me, and I’m thinking about all the points of opportunity to explore the presence and application of beneficence in library work. What it looks like as we plan our building spaces (looking at you, library with the “cool” flashing lights that cause sensory overload) – or how we provide clarity during an information interaction (moving beyond the standard reference interview to anticipating and sharing the benefits and harms of artificial intelligence) – or how we can reframe library advocacy efforts to speak truth to funding powers on direct, indirect, and even tertiary ways to maximize funds for the Most Good or underscore harms that have real consequences when dollars aren’t equitably allocated – or how we will respond when we witness a co-worker being bullied by their supervisor or threatened by a library user.

Imagining Application and Refinement

Library workers are indeed helpers – and we have also witnessed and caused harm in our quest to provide help.  Imagining the application of beneficence requires exploration of some hard truths in our profession and industry. Where have we done the Most Good –and how can we replicate that Good while recognizing our human capacity and our fallibilities? Where have we ignored harm or watched it grow, uninterrupted – to ourselves, within our workplaces, or towards our community members and library users? How might we harness beneficence as a foundational element of our practice, even while we are bombarded with increasing contempt for empathy and compassion?

Do you find these questions and starting points of imagination intriguing? Do you recognize beneficence in your current practice(s)? Let’s continue exploring and promoting libraries/librarianship as a place and practice of beneficence for the improvement of our relationships, workplaces, and communities.