Ethics and Professionalism

John Kultgen

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780812212631
• eBook ISBN: 9780812202540
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

John Kultgen explores the ways morality and professional ideals are connected. In assessing the moral impact of professionalism in our society, he examines both the structure and organization of occupations and the ideals and ideology associated with professions.Differing from standard treatments of professional ethics, Ethics and Professionalism recognizes that it is the practices within the professions that determine whether rules and ideals are used as masks for self-interest or for genuinely moral purposes.

1

Introduction: PROFESSIONALISM AND MORALITY

Is it a moral obligation to be as professional as possible in one’s work? And is it a mark of professionalism to act morally? Or do professionalism and morality have nothing to do with one another?

On the one hand, should one always do one’s work in a professional manner or does morality sometimes demand unprofessional conduct? Must one ever violate the standards of professionalism in the name of something more important?

On the other hand, must professionals remain scrupulously moral in order to adhere to the standards of professionalism? Employers and clients sometimes demand questionable actions of professionals precisely in their capacity as professionals—should they accede to such demands? What if acquiescence is necessary in order to remain on the job or in the profession?

Or, may these questions not be misconceived? Do morality and professionalism really have anything to do with one another? Perhaps they pertain to different spheres or aspects of life. Perhaps they are absolutely independent variables.

I will address the first two sets of questions and explore the ways in which morality and professionalism are connected, thus dismissing the third possibility. I shall argue that professionalism should be conceived in such a way that it is limited to moral conduct and elicits moral conduct, and that morality should be conceived in such a way as to require professionalism.

I shall also argue that some of the practices of the professions are defective from the moral point of view, despite the impression conveyed by their codes of ethics and other ideological instruments. The manifest functions of professions disguise an orientation that is inimical in some ways to the public welfare. The official reason for organizing occupations as professions would be valid if it were the overriding reason. This reason is derived from what I shall label the principle of special or role responsibilities. The general welfare in a complex society can be achieved only by assigning the responsibility for special aspects of the welfare of particular groups to specialized experts. Professionals serve clients and employers and, ostensibly, society as a whole through this service. Sometimes service to patrons does indeed redound to the public good and is justified by the principle of special responsibilities. But sometimes it does not. Patron loyalty takes priority over public interest. This pollutes the stream of professional practice at its spring.

Major deficiencies in professional morality are due to the structure of the professions rather than defects of character in professionals. A profession is an institution that confronts individuals as a reality to which they must relate without the ability to change it significantly. Most do so by conforming to its way. Few possess the thorough understanding of institutional dynamics to do otherwise. To approach such an understanding and achieve the distance necessary to evaluate what is understood, we will devote a considerable part of this study to a sociological analysis of professional structures and processes. The analysis will show that professions are interlocked with powerful institutions in such a way as to prevent more than piecemeal reforms, unless there should be a major upheaval in society. The best I can do is to propose modest changes in the existing framework, an interim ethic for the individual professional while changes are being effected, and a utopian plan to keep on the shelf in case an upheaval comes.

“Professional Ethics”

Two semantic points are in order to indicate the direction in which we will be going. They will be substantiated as the discussion unfolds.

The first pertains to the meaning of ‘profession.’ The term can be taken narrowly to refer to the traditional “learned” professions: medicine, law, architecture, and sometimes, the ministry. These occupations have a long history as open to gentlemen and involving intimate relationships with individual clients. ‘Profession’ also can be taken broadly to embrace the literally hundreds of occupations that so label themselves and fret over their professionalism. I will use the term broadly enough to include not only members of the learned professions, but scholars and teachers, engineers and scientists, accountants and business specialists, and even varieties of psychotherapists and counselors, journalists, government officials, and military officers, but not so broadly as to extend, except by analogy, to artists, athletes, or thieves. Reasons for the breadth of the concept will be explained later (Chapter 4). I will anticipate this discussion only by remarking that ‘profession’ and cognate terms have been used as ideological weapons in the struggle for social position. The claim of late entrants in the struggle, engineers, for example, is based on the nature of their work and their organizational structure—things with which we will be concerned in considering the moral impact of professionalism on modern society. Certainly, the traditional professions have no exclusive title morally or logically to the honorific designation and a broader base for comparison will serve us when we come to extract an ideal of professionalism from the turmoil of social conflict in which it is used and abused.

Moreover, work in large corporate units with limited direct contact with clients or customers is the occupational life of a large proportion of those who are, or intend to become, professionals, rather than the personal involvement with clients of the traditional professional. If we are to understand professionalism, we must consider it in the experience of the first kind of practitioner as well as the second.

The second semantic remark pertains to the term ‘ethics.’ Like ‘profession,’ I shall use it broadly. It will refer to ideals and aspirations as well as rules of conduct. Much of the contemporary literature in ethics is preoccupied with rule-governed behavior and we will examine the codes and practices of particular professions. However, our concern will not be with rules in their own right but with the outlook, the conception of mission, and the responsibility they reflect. When I propose content for professional ethics (Chapters 11, 12 and 13), my emphasis will be on ideals rather than rules; that is, on comprehensive norms that generate specific rules or, alternatively, concrete objectives or even modes of being for the professional, as circumstances dictate.

Who Should Be Interested?

Who should be interested in the norms professionals follow? Everyone, since almost all of us work and, I shall argue, the professional ideal is relevant to all forms of work. But even if the professional ideal were relevant only to the work of the professions, everyone would have a stake in it. Most obviously, all of us are consumers of professional services and our society functions as it does because of the role of professionals. Professionals should be accountable to society for their decisions. It is up to the rest of us to evaluate their behavior by their principles, and their principles by our own conceptions of ethics. It is up to everyone to participate in any reforms of the professions that are put on the social agenda.

More fundamentally, it is a mistake to think of professionals as the sole authors of their ethical principles. Professionals compose partnerships with their clients and with their employers in which all parties must make ethical decisions. Veatch points out that the physican, other members of the health-care team, the patient, and the patient’s family all make medical decisions, some on their own and some in conjunction with the others in the partnership. Physicians cannot unilaterally determine the principles for the others to follow, nor even principles for their own decisions, since the others are affected by them. Medical ethics is not identical with physicians’ ethics, as often assumed. It comprises principles that are valid for medical decisions whoever makes them and in the formulation of which all parties should have a share.¹ The same applies to the ethical principles of law, engineering, and other professions and for their generalization, professional ethics. In each area, everyone in society makes decisions like those of professionals, everyone makes decisions jointly with professionals, and everyone is affected by the decisions of professionals. Everyone, therefore, should have a say in the content of professional ethics.

The literature on professions is split into two parts, which have little communication with one another. One part comprises writings on professional ethics, a few dealing with professions as such and many more with the ethics of particular professions. The authors take the structures of society and the professions as givens and debate the rules that should govern the relations between individual professionals and individual clients or employers. They ignore the impact on these micro-ethical issues of macro-ethical issues, such as the corporate responsibilities of professions and defects in their organization and practices. They describe the obligations of moral professionals in a moral society, but ignore their obligations in an immoral or at least imperfect society, where in fact they must act.

The other part of the literature discusses professions as institutions. For the most part, the authors affect the morally neutral stance of descriptive social science. After early attempts to come to grips with normative issues, there has been, as Johnson observes, “a nervous withdrawal from ‘value-laden’ controversy.”² The withdrawal, however, is superficial. Below the surface, normative conceptions shape the way sociologists organize and interpret data. The professions are creatures of modern social systems and integral to their functioning. Sociologists who view professions from a functionalist perspective approve of what they see. They emphasize the beneficial features of professionalism and minimize the harmful ones. In contrast and partly in reaction to this bias, sociologists who view institutions as mechanisms for the resolution of conflict that effect the domination of some groups by others emphasize the harmful features of professionalism and minimize the beneficial ones.

The implication of this example of the subterranean influence of value-commitments on descriptive sociology is that social science should be conceived as a branch of social philosophy. The social thinker should make both factual and normative judgments explicit, acknowledge their interconnection, and defend both together. What is more relevant here is that the analysis of professional ethics, as a set of principles for individual acts, must be worked out in correlation with a social philosophy, with both descriptive and normative elements, for professions as institutions.

The present study brings the two strands in the literature together. They must be brought together for a successful resolution of the issues each turns up. On a level of personal ethics, actions involving such matters as loyalty to employer versus responsibility to the public or confidentiality versus the publication of new research appear quite different when considered solely in terms of the consequences for those directly involved and as contributing to practices that sustain an imperfect social system. Moreover, the obligations of the individual are not confined to work within the social system; they include obligations to change (or preserve) the system. To decide one’s obligations, both in one’s work and for the framework in which one works, one must take a critical stance toward existing institutions. A valid personal ethic must be grounded in a sound social philosophy.

In turn, the design of institutions must take into account the lives and actions of individuals who participate in them. A social program for the organization of professions must be justified not only by the benefits professional services provide the public, but by the level of moral activiy it permits and elicits from professionals. To determine this, we must have a conception of the right rules of behavior for the individual. A valid social philosophy must be grounded in a sound personal ethic.

As Aristotle teaches, ethics and politics are two volumes of the same work. Professional ethics for the individual and a social policy for the professions are integral elements of a single investigation and will be dealt with here in relation to each other.

Professional ethics is topic of concern for all members of society, but how important a topic? Let us consider its special effect on certain aspects of modern society, its role in the life of the individual professional, and its implications for ethical theory.

The Social Importance of Professional Ethics

The social impact of professional ethics is paradoxical. Moore points out the small proportion of those employed in the world that are even approximately professional. This included only 6 to 8 percent of the work force in the most professionalized countries of Western Europe, Canada, and the United States in 1950. More significant is the pattern of growth in industrial countries and in underdeveloped countries as they industrialize. The number of professionals increased from about 4 percent in 1900 to 8 percent in 1950, 12 percent in 1960, and 13 percent in 1966. Throughout the world, professionalization of occupations accompanies the application of technological knowledge to the solution of human problems. According to Moore, this connection accounts for the extraordinary prestige of professionals despite their small number.³ Other influential students of the professions agree. Hughes observes that professionalization accompanies industrialization and affects organizational structures much the same way in different societies, regardless of their ideologies and political systems.⁴ Parsons cannot imagine how a modern society could function without the smooth operation of the professions.⁵

Professionals occupy a strategic position in modern society. They provide services not available from other quarters, and the services are vital to those who receive them. Furthermore, professionals not only purport to choose the best means for the given ends of their clients and the public; they help define the ends themselves: the lawyer and accountant shape our ideas of security; the physician, of health; the priest, of salvation. The members of newer professions, such as engineering and business management, make decisions that profoundly affect large numbers of people without their consent and or knowledge. By circumscribing what is feasible and efficient through “expert” advice, they shape society’s objectives.

The services of the professions are highly valued and, as a consequence, professionals enjoy status, prestige, and influence. Not the least of their influences is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Professionalism and Morality
• Part I Normative Considerations
• Part II Models of Professions
• Part III Structural Change
• Part IV The Professional Ideal
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects