Argument for Action

Ethics and Professional Conduct

John Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429872310
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1999. This book will help professions and professionals to identify their contribution to society and to understand the argument in which they must engage if they are to justify their conduct. Because of their specialized expertise and power, the task is both difficult and pressing. The work is divided into two parts. Part 1 discusses the concepts 'ethics' and 'professional conduct', indicating their dimensions and contested nature. In each case, following examination and analysis of relevant literature, a conceptual framework or model is proposed for locating instances of, in turn, ethics and professional conduct. In part 2, the model of ethical choice is used to discuss the ethical justification of professional conduct in the various forms, locations, and stages provided by its social setting. In this way, it provides grounding arguments for relevant action by professionals and others dealing with professionals. The book concludes with a proposal for a national standing commission on the professions.

PART 1: THE BASIC CONCEPTS

Our task in Part 1 is to gain understanding of the two basic concepts ‘ethics’ and ‘professional conduct’. We will then be in a position to tackle the ethical justification of professional conduct in Part 2.

1 What is Ethics?

Ethics or morality¹ is concerned with the evaluation of human conduct and human character. It is an activity in which every human being is inescapably involved - as an actor and on the receiving end of others’ actions, and as a judge of one’s own and others’ conduct and character. Past, present and future conduct and character come within its ambit. It is a characteristically human activity dependent upon our rationality, our ability to seek and give reasons for our actions, to understand and seek alternatives, to weigh their merits, to make decisions and act accordingly. It is concerned with both description and prescription.

Descriptive Ethics

Nature and Convention²

Descriptive ethics tells us what criteria or standards have been, are, and will be used by people in deciding what to do and what kind of people they will be. Humans are essentially social and normative beings. We cannot exist, let alone flourish, in isolation from each other. Our capacity to think, to speak, and to reason - to learn, to be aware of ourselves and others, to understand, to calculate, to follow an argument, to plan, to reflect, to imagine, to have foresight, to remember, to aspire, to identify feelings - has made us essentially normative beings living in social orders of various kinds, families, friendships, community groups, religious groups, societies, economies, polities, institutions of many kinds. In and through these we value certain things and avoid others, making and following rules to achieve our ends.

All of the norms in our social orders have obviously not been consciously thought out and instituted, but the norms or social conventions are expressive of human desires and aversions and are the sort of things which can be altered by human decision. This contrasts with the laws of nature or scientific laws which humans can discover and utilize but not change. Nature is what is the case, and what is the case is established by careful scientific procedures to establish the truth. Human beings as part of nature have certain natural ways of behaving. These set limits to every system of social order and are the subject of the various human and social sciences.

Predictability in Human Affairs

There are a number of quite fundamental reasons why generalizations in social science cannot have the same law-like character as generalizations in the natural sciences, no matter how much rigorous scientific work is done to develop them. Alasdair MacIntyre points out ‘it is necessary, if life is to be meaningful, for us to be in possession of ourselves and not merely to be the creations of other people’s projects, intentions and desires, and this requires unpredictability’ (MacIntyre, 1981: 99).

MacIntyre identifies four sources of ‘systematic unpredictability’ in human affairs. First, is radical conceptual innovation. Second, unpredictability in the social world arises because each person cannot predict his or her future while contemplating a decision about alternative courses of action. As yet unmade decisions make our future unpredictable. A third source of unpredictability arises from the game-theoretic character of social life. This has a number of aspects. Trying to predict each other’s predictions of each other can render an unpredictable outcome. A condition of success may be the successful misinformation of other actors in a situation and also of external observers. Players in the real world are often involved in many different transactions or games at one and the same time. Even when there is some certainty what game is being played, there may not be a determinate set of players and pieces or a determinate area in which the game is to take place. A retrospective standpoint may make these determinate, but a prospective view cannot. MacIntyre’s final source of unpredictability is pure contingency. Trivial contingencies occur which cannot be foreseen, and yet they can powerfully influence the outcome of great events. (MacIntyre, 1981: 89-96.)

In contrast to the unpredictable elements in social life, MacIntyre identifies four kinds of predictable elements - the shared expectations in a culture which schedule and coordinate many of our social actions; statistical regularities in human behaviour, relatively independent of causal knowledge; the causal regularities of nature; and finally, knowledge of causal regularities in social life (MacIntyre, 1981: 97-8).

Convention or the Normative Structure of Social Order

It is impossible to describe a society or a social order of any kind without referring to the values and rules, or normative conventions, which sustain and shape it.

Values

Concepts and characteristics³ Values or ‘goods’ are primary in human existence. They are conceptions of the desirable (positive values) or of the undesirable (negative values) in life, in terms of which we make our choices and behave in characteristic ways. They help to keep our social environment orderly and predictable, and they also provide a person with an ordered and desired self from which he or she can operate. It is values which give point and purpose to the various rules which humans make, follow and resist.

Some values are highly abstract - the worth and dignity of every person; others at much lesser levels of abstraction - a good job, a particular friendship. Each value has a cognitive, feeling, and tendency-to-act component. Values tend to occur in systems and people build their lives around a whole constellation of values. They are not all held with equal intensity but can be arranged in a hierarchy of importance. A dominant value is determined by the extensiveness of the value in the total activity of the system (personal, group or societal), its duration, and the intensity with which it is sought and maintained. Values are inevitably related to the conditions people experience, and change through time as conditions change. The level and strength of people’s value aspirations are to a great extent social products. The same value may be both an end in itself and also a means, or of instrumental value, to other valued ends. For example, education, health, or employment can be valued in their own right but also as instrumental values. People may support a common objective having different values in mind, just as many different objectives can be pursued in the name of a single value.

Conflicts Often only careful empirical analysis will reveal whether a conflict is actually about ends, usually seen as a genuine value conflict, or about means to attain particular ends, a conflict about technical and factual matters. Since people in practical situations must address both ends and means in relation to each other, many apparent value conflicts are not only or even primarily about ends, and similarly many apparent technical conflicts are not only or even primarily about means. To think of something as an ‘end’ implies at least some means that could be used to attain it, and the idea of a ‘means’ implies ‘an end’ of some sort. Value conflicts occur within individuals and between individuals, within groups and between groups, and between individuals and groups.

Operational values Declared values may or may not be the same as operational values. What values are actually operating in the behaviour of an individual, or group, or a society, can be verified by a number of complementary methods: by taking note of what people say their values are; by inferring values from the things which have a capacity to arouse emotions; by observing what people pay attention to; by studying what is left unsaid (what is taken for granted is often of fundamental importance); by systematically studying peoples’ choices when they are confronted with alternatives; and finally, by observing the things that are rewarded and the things that are punished (Williams, 1960: 403-9).

Rules⁴

Values provide the rationale and motivation for human action. Rules of various kinds enable values, or goods, to be achieved or harm or evils to be avoided, in efficient and socially appropriate ways. Again empirical inquiry will reveal what norms or rules actually operate in any particular social order, how these have come into existence, what form they have taken, how they are authorized and changed, what has been their content, and what and whose values they have reflected.

Principles, policies, and regulations Rules operate at different levels of generality. Principles are rules usually at a high level of generality and are intended to give rise to more specific rules and actions. Policies are often fairly specific rules although ‘policy’ may be used in a very broad way to cover a whole field of rule-making, as in ‘social policy’ or ‘economic policy’. Regulations are usually specific rules, often derived from broader ones. What they all share, as rules, is that they are all intended to regulate human conduct, by prohibiting, requiring, or permitting some type of action in certain circumstances. They are standing guides in that they are intended to apply whenever the relevant circumstances occur. If this does not happen, then the ‘existence’ of the rule may be brought into question.

Character⁵ Rules tend to be stated relatively simply so they can be understood and learned by those to whom they apply. Qualifications or exceptions may be built into rules, but if they become too complex they lose their general guidance function, and then people must constantly decide afresh what to do. The assumption behind having a rule is that the conduct in question is desirable and that having a rule will increase the likelihood of the conduct. There is no point in making a rule if the behaviour is going to occur anyway, and, indeed, sometimes making it a rule can undesirably change people’s motivations for acting in this way.

A rule can coordinate actions for common purposes. It can provide predictability and reduce uncertainty where these are desired. It sometimes, in games, can deliberately make a task more difficult so that the game is more challenging and interesting. Many rules can be seen as an attempt to summarize existing perceptions of when certain actions are permitted, required, or prohibited. Other rules, however, create the possibility of new forms of action.

Existence The ‘existence’ of a rule is not always a simple matter. When there are people or institutions with clear and accepted authority to make rules, the rules within their area of authority are those derived from this source. This does not mean, however, the rules of even accepted authorities are always complied with. Any rule is, of course, expected to be complied with by those to whom it applies, but in practice it may not be complied with on particular occasions. If it is never complied with, an Official’ rule can scarcely be described as still in ‘existence’. It is still ‘on the books’, but that is all it is.

Where rules emanate from people and institutions whose authority is unaccepted or questioned, there may still be some level of compliance, because some rules may be preferred to none, or because of the sanctions attached to non-compliance. There are rules which no particular authoritative rule-making body or person has made. Unlike ‘made’ rules which can exist to a large extent independent of what people in general either think or do, unmade rules only exist when people think and believe in ways that indicate the presence of the rule. People cannot be unaware of such rules often described as conventions.

All rules can be deliberately changed. This is obviously the case when there are rule-making authorities, but ‘unmade’ rules can also be changed by general agreement to abandon them.

Rules often define what constitutes a particular activity, and similarly rules define what constitutes the performance of a social role. Depending on the activities and the roles, individuals can exercise various degrees of freedom within the defining rules. If, however, they go too far beyond the prevailing norms, they are no longer seen as engaged in that activity at all, or not engaged in it ‘properly’.

Sanctions The breaking of some rules, for example, health rules, will result in certain ‘natural’, not man-made consequences. The breaking of others, as has been mentioned, will result in non-recognition of particular activities or role performances. These are consequences not punishments or penalties as such. Many rules have deliberate sanctions attached to them to encourage their observance. Sanctions take a wide variety of forms of punishment and reward. The punishments can include eternal damnation, death, restriction of liberty, fines, withdrawal of cooperation, censure, or social ostracism; the rewards, eternal salvation, praise, social esteem, continuing membership of a group. Sanctions attached to rules may be formally designated and strictly applied by specified authorities, as in the legal system, or be much less formal and certain. Sanctions are attached to the type of action contained in a rule, but may be varied according to the existence of mitigating or exonerating circumstances in specific cases. People may conform to a rule primarily because of the sanctions attached to it, not because they necessarily agree with the purpose or content of the rule itself.

Scope The scope of rules depends upon the people to whom they have application, the aspects of their conduct being regulated, and where and when the rules apply. Legal, religious, and customary authorities all claim their rules have general applications within their respective systems, but their rules apply only to those who come under the relevant categories of conduct and the circumstances being regulated by their particular rules.

Systems Rules often operate as parts of systems, deriving their significance not only from the content of the rule, but from the location of the rule in a system of rules. This is obviously true of legal rules, and a deliberate effort is made to ensure that laws do not conflict. Similar efforts are made within religious traditions to provide consistent and coherent guidance to believers.

Rules can, however, be put in relation to each...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Basic Concepts
• 1 What is Ethics?
• 2 Dimensions of Ethical Conduct
• 3 What is Professional Conduct?
• 4 Dimensions of Individual and Collective Professional Conduct
• Part 2: The Ethical Justification of Professional Conduct
• 5 Individual Ethical Agendas and Professionals
• 6 An Ethical Agenda for Government: the Role of Professionals
• 7 Collective Non-Government Ethical Agendas and Professionals
• 8 When are Professionals the Relevant Moral Agents?
• 9 Criteria for Justifiable Policy Decisions by Professionals
• 10 Professionals in Justifiable Policy Implementation
• 11 Professionals Assessing Ethical Results and Their Attainment
• 12 Concluding Comments and a Proposal
• Bibliography
• Index