The Professional Ethics Toolkit

Christopher Meyers

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119045182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

The Professional Ethics Toolkit is an engaging and accessible guide to the study of moral issues in professional life through the analysis of ethical dilemmas faced by people working in medicine, law, social work, business, and other industries where conflicting interests and ideas complicate professional practice and decision-making.

Written by a seasoned ethicist and professional consultant, the volume uses philosophical ideas, theories, and principles to develop and articulate a definitive methodology for ethical decision-making in professional environments. Meyers offers the benefit of his expertise with clear and practical advice at every turn, guiding readers through numerous real-world examples and case studies to illustrate key concepts including role-engendered duties, conflicts of interest, competency, and the principles that underpin and define professionalism itself.

Following the format of The Philosopher's Toolkit, The Professional Ethics Toolkit is an essential companion to the study of professional ethics for use in both the classroom and the working world, encouraging students and general readers alike to think critically and engage intelligently with ethics in their professional lives.

Part I
Theory, Concepts, and Ethics Reasoning

Unlike some case‐based approaches to practical or professional ethics, the assumption here is that one cannot effectively address ethical problems without two key foundations: conceptual clarity on core concepts and their relevance to different professional concerns; and a method for reasoning through tough ethics problems.

Part II is devoted to that conceptual analysis while here, in Part I, we will explore a reasoning model. First, we need to get a clearer picture of the general topic of professionalism. As noted in the Introduction, this book treats “professional ethics” as a distinct area within the broader categories of practical and theoretical ethics; that is, to study either of those fields is not necessarily to study professional ethics, given its narrower focus. See, for example, the extensive work in business ethics, where there is only limited overlap to concerns that are specific to professional ethics.

Thus, Chapter 1 provides a review of the historical circumstances that resulted in professions – not all societies have them, after all – along with the specific normative connotations that come with that status. From there, Chapter 2 develops a method of ethics reasoning. Emphasizing ethics reasoning is, admittedly, in contrast to the approach most common to ethics texts, wherein readers are introduced to key thinkers, that is, the “he argued, and then he argued, and then he argued” approach. Readers are shown why these great thinkers are so interesting and important, and then, in each case, given a list of reasons as to why the theory will not work. Connections between the theories are typically treated as mere contrasts, not as areas of agreement. This too often produces a kind of roller‐coaster effect: students read Aristotle and are convinced that he is right, until they read Kant and find him conclusive, and then Mill, and Ross, and Rawls, and so on. It is no surprise then that students often give up on theory: “If these really smart folks can’t get it right, who am I to try to figure out the correct theory?” Ethics reasoning is thus reduced to mere or ad hoc reactions or, worse, to naive relativism.

Here, the goal is to give readers guidance in genuine practical ethics reasoning, while also emphasizing the best insights of all the major theorists. It is hoped that these insights will give readers ample opportunity to rely upon the approach they find most valuable. But I also stress that the grand insights provided by each of the major traditions in fact complement the others far more than they conflict. The method urges that, carefully done, in particular with sufficient attention to the complex array of facts present in any ethics issue, those insights can be melded into a process for making sense of tough ethical problems, even for finding better answers to those problems – better if not always best answers. No method, to my mind, can guarantee the latter, but it can distinctly narrow the choices, excluding those that are clearly wrong, and give good reasons in defense of a few, often a very few, better ones.

1
Historical Overview and Definitional Questions

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1. 1.1 Some History
2. 1.2 Defining “Professional”
3. 1.3 A Working List
4. 1.4 Types of Professional–Client Relationships
5. Notes
6. References

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Not only are there myriad ways in which the term “professional” is used, but there has also been a marked increase – nearly 700 percent – in published instances of the term between 1800 and 2008.¹ It has clearly become a common part of our vocabulary, though with mixed meanings.

To see why our definition of professionals – as experts skilled in the provision of vital services, who have a normative commitment to their clients’ well‐being – is key to an understanding of professional ethics, it helps to get a sense of how professions formally emerged in history. This review shows that the process of formal professionalization occurred for two key reasons:

1. There were vital needs that existing service systems did not adequately address. Medical practice, as we shall see, serves as the paradigm.
2. Professionalization enabled the relevant groups to assure clients that they can trust that their practitioner had the relevant expertise and ethical commitment.

Both of these brought obvious advantages to clients. They now had skilled practitioners to whom they could turn for assistance with vital needs, and there was a greater likelihood that those needs would be effectively addressed. Practitioners similarly benefited. They acquired a monopoly over their services, with corresponding increases in wealth, social status, and power.

Those benefits also motivated any number of service‐driven activities to claim professional status; even without the state‐sanctioned monopoly of licensing, to call oneself a professional is to lay claim to an associated cachet, with its economic and status benefits. Too often, however, this was a mere declaration, without the requisite training, skills, and normative commitment that were associated with the profession. Consider the near‐ubiquitous self‐designation as “professional” by everyone from gardeners to hairdressers to, yes, car salespeople.² And it is at the heart of the familiar expression “Prostitution is the oldest profession.” The idea here is the largely sardonic one that people have been willing to pay for such services for as long as there have been people. Regardless of whether the claim is historically accurate, prostitutes, as will soon become clear, meet very few of our criteria for professionalism, nor, for that matter, do most athletes, gardeners, beauticians, or car salespeople.

Furthermore, all too often even the groups that formally professionalized allowed power and status to get in the way of fulfilling their true professional commitments. This straying from the ethical foundations on which formal professions were built has led to a recent reinforcement of those foundations, demonstrated in reinvigorated ethics curricula in undergraduate and professional programs and books like this.

I acknowledge from the outset that our definition of a professional as an expert who is skilled in the provision of vital services and who retains a normative commitment to his clients’ well‐being – is somewhat artificial, especially given that the most common meaning in ordinary language attaches professionalism with pay: to be a professional, per ordinary language, is to be paid for those services. This is exemplified in the distinction between an amateur and a professional athlete in sports. The latter are paid to compete while the former do it, presumably, for the love of the game.

Although the compensation component is the most pertinent to the meaning employed in each of the examples noted above, there is also at least an implied understanding that the “professional” designation grants distinction. Such persons are better than their amateur counterparts; they have more experience‐based expertise and are committed to an ethical norm that prioritizes clients’ needs. In short, to self‐designate in this way makes for great marketing. Such people believe, and probably rightly so, that when they promote themselves as professionals potential consumers of their services will at least unconsciously trust them to do well by them.

While such trust is often warranted regardless of whether the individual or company meets the formal criteria (section 1.2), there is no structural reason to assume that this going in, whereas with the formal professions, trust is the default. It is because the formal professions have emerged in human history in response to changing vital interests and with strict, carefully designed credentialing processes underlying their creation and continued practice.

That trust is often warranted regardless of formal status is, in fact, a key thesis of this chapter, indeed of the whole book. While our definition and associated criteria will allow us to easily identify definite professions, the concept will also admit of degrees, ranging from clear profession to marginal, emerging, or non‐professional work activity. Furthermore, that someone meets the definitional criteria does not guarantee that she will always act professionally. I have, for example, known and worked with too many university professors who were at best marginally competent and who treated their student‐clients as means to an end, whereas my long‐time gardener is as skilled and as honest as the day is long; he has always done his job professionally, while those professors failed in the key normative criteria.

1.1 Some History

Backing up, then, who were the first professionals? Consider the root of the term “to profess about matters of vital importance.” Hence the first professionals were spiritual advisers, who provided wisdom and guidance on an issue of, arguably, incalculable importance: one’s relationship with the divine. And they did so from a socially sanctioned position of competent authority and thereby of trust. Their role also gave these early clergy social status; they were typically held in great esteem, often with the corresponding benefits of enhanced material comforts, features that continue to be common to contemporary professionals. Further, archeological records reveal that human cultures from the earliest times relied on such trusted and authoritative voices.

Once clergy – or more accurately, the learned, since members of this group were among the very few who received a formal education ...