Professional Ethics

In the first section, we gave a brief definition of what is meant by professional ethics. In this
section, we will briefly present some concepts and suggest some readings that take a look at the
history of what is meant by a profession, some differing ways to think about professional ethics,
and a brief analysis of what is meant by professional responsibility. We will then offer some
preliminary thoughts on how to identify ethics issues in what you teach, and offer some
beginning ideas of how to begin emphasizing these issues in the classroom. Finally we will go
back to the "Catalyst B" case study that you read earlier, and look at it in conjunction with a code
of ethics to see how your (or your students) concept of the case may change when looking at it
from the point of view of a professional.

What is a Profession?
History

1. "Profess": a public declaration, vow on entering a religious order. a commitment (vows)

to serve for a good end.
2. 16th century: commitment to learned pursuits (three learned professions are divinity, law,
and medicine, then the military); being an authority on a body of knowledge, belonging
to an occupation; being skilled, being a fractioned, not an amateur.
3. 19th century (late): "New professions have come into existence, and the old professions
are more esteemed" Oxford English Dictionary) (1)

Occupation and Profession

An Occupational Group:

1. Delivers important services

2. Makes a commitment to serve the public
3. Claims a special relationship to the marketplace, not merely in the rough and tumble;
distinguished from a trade.

An Occupation Becomes a Profession when:

1. A group of individuals sharing the same occupation organize to work in a morally

permissible way, or to work to support a moral ideal. (i.e. Doctors organize to cure the
sick, librarians organize to promote access to information, etc.) (2)
2. Members set and follow special standards for carrying on their occupational work.

 At least one of these standards must go beyond what law, the marketplace, ordinary
morality (what a ordinary moral person must do) and public opinion demand. (i.e. a good
mercenary only needs to fulfill the terms of his contract, a good, professional soldier must
serve his country honorably, even when ordinary morality, law, and public opinion do not
require it.) (3)
  These special standards are morally binding to “professed” members of the profession. If
a member freely declares (or professes) herself to be part of a profession, she is
voluntarily implying that she will follow these special moral codes. If the majority of
members of a profession follow the standards, the profession will have a good reputation
and members will generally benefit; if the majority of members violate these voluntary
standards, professed members of a profession will be at a disadvantage or at the least
receive no benefit from declaring a profession. (4)

A Professional is a member of an occupational group (characterized above) who:

1. Sees other members, including those employed elsewhere, as peers/colleagues

2. Exercises judgment in the performance of occupational tasks and follows relevant
professional standards.
3. Accepts the profession's agreement to work in a morally permissible way (often
expressed as a code of ethics) as determining in part the obligations of the role.

Professional Codes of Ethics

A code of ethics... prescribes how professionals are to pursue their common ideal so that each
may do the best she can at a minimal cost to herself and those she cares about (including the
public...). The code is to protect each professional from certain pressures (for example, the
pressure to cut corners to save money) by making it reasonably likely (and more likely then
otherwise) that most other members of the profession will not take advantage of her good
conduct... A code is a solution to a coordination problem.” (Davis, Michael. “Thinking Like an
Engineer” pp.153-4).

(For the next section, it may be helpful to look at a code of ethics. Take a look at the National
Association for Professional Engineers Code of Ethics. What sections of the code mention the
following obligations?)

Individual Professional Obligations:

1. An individual’s professional obligations are derived from the profession and its code,
tradition, society's expectations, contracts, laws, and rules of ordinary morality
2. A professional has obligations to his/her
o Employer
o Clients/Customers
o Other Professionals- relations of collegiality, specific expectations of reciprocity
o Profession as a collectivity
o Society - responsibility to serve the public interest

Upshot: A professional is not a mere hired gun; responsibilities go with knowledge and position.

Individual Responsibility:

1. Sphere of tasks – daily/regular responsibilities

 2. For outcome caused by one’s actions or decisions
3. Liability - answerability for one’s actions or decisions
4. Capacity - to appreciate, to control one's behavior
5. Moral responsibility - looking ahead to and caring about what happens to oneself and
others.

Levels of failing to meet one’s individual responsibility:

 Negligence – failure to meet the appropriate standards of care (or that level or quality of
service ordinarily provided by other normally competent practitioners of good standing in
that field, contemporaneously providing similar services in the same locality and under
the same circumstances). (5)
 Gross negligence – falling way below the standard of care
 Deliberate wrongdoing.

Professional Ethics

1. Define the profession's special relation to the market place.

Members earn livelihood in professional roles, accepting certain standards.
2. In the form of:
a. Codes
b. Other measures
c. Continuing Education
d. Support mechanisms for members

Professional Competence/Autonomy

Competence
Entails knowledge and responsibility i.e. meeting an appropriate standard of care. (6)
Autonomy
Individual- governs his or her own conduct, often using moral rules as a basis, and
exercises a considerable degree of discretionary judgment within her daily work, but
accepts the limits within a cooperative practice.
Profession- Prescribes standards for itself. Is accountable to the public.

Important questions to ask when obligations conflict:

 What seems to be the primary obligation?

 Which violation will cause more harm?

Knowledge/consent of those affected?

 Is there a way to make these obligations compatible?

Tension Between Professional Standards and Moral Rules

e.g. Judge foreclosing on a widow. Look for alternative that does the least harm.

Ethics as a Context of Professional Work (and identifying ethical issues in what you teach)

Ethics and other professional standards: some similarities

A. Same purpose as other standards, namely:

1. Standardize profession's work
2. Protect public, serve client, support other standards, etc.
B. Similar development
1. Begins with common sense
2. Modified based on experience of profession
3. Never final (since experience continues)
C. Needs practical context to make sense
1. Each profession is defined by a certain sort of judgment, not merely by the
knowledge such judgment presupposes:
e.g. you are not an engineer because you know what engineers know but because
you can—and generally do—show the good judgment characteristic of engineers.
2. Judgment can only be exercised in a context.

A large part of what makes a professional's judgment useful is its ability to appreciate certain
features of certain contexts

e.g. engineer sees hoisting of a large beam as an engineering problem (what forces are at
work, etc.), while lawyer sees it as a legal problem (what liability might arise).

Teaching Professional Ethics

Identifying Ethical Issues

Once you begin thinking about the ethical issues professionals in your field encounter on a day-
to-day basis, it becomes relatively easy to identify ethical issues in what you teach. What follows
are a few suggestions of how to begin to do this, and how to focus students’ attention on these
issues without greatly changing your class syllabus.

A. Read your profession's code of ethics. What issues are present? If it's in the code, it
probably comes up.
B. Draw on your practical experience. What bothered you?
C. Ask practitioners what comes up in their work.
D. Collect newspaper stories, novels, short stories, web sites, and the like that deal with your
profession. What comes up there?
E. Look through texts on your profession's ethics. (For example, see the Codes of Ethics
Collection)
F. Ask your students to write up problems based on their work experience or on the work
experience of someone they interview.
 G. Think about writing a report on research, design work, or evaluation of the material
covered in course. What problems arise in reporting technical results?
H. Ask how the activity in which such technical judgment is relevant could harm someone
or embarrass members of your profession.

Ethics in the classroom

Strategy—make room for judgment by adding context:

A. Rewrite problems to include more information.

B. e.g. instead of “liquid” emptying into a “basin”, why not a specific highly toxic chemical
emptying into a specific river? Did students notice how much was going in? Why didn't
they flag the problem? How many people might die as result? Responsibility beyond
particular technical questions?
C. Not just safety, also utility (e.g. specs not suitable to locale), cost (e.g. unnecessarily
expensive materials), and so on.
D. Create mini-design problems.
o group similar problems, ask students to do the usual calculations, then give
enough context so that what has been calculated are various solutions to same
practical problem and ask for a recommendation. Which approach should we take
and why? One approach could be cheaper in the short run, another cheaper in long
run, another safer, and so on. What is professional responsibility here?
E. Forensics.
o Assign students to study report of some disaster (or scandal) relevant to material
of course: How do “we” avoid such a disaster “next time”?
o Disasters are effective in teaching ethics because they are both real and dramatic.
o Students develop a sense for how easy it is to mess up (that is, add to their “moral
imagination”), how important professional standards really are.
o Tip: Don't use too many disasters. If you only use cases studies in your class that
show failures to exercise ethical judgment, students may become cynical about
the very possibility of professionals behaving ethically. (7)
F. Investigate technical standard (relevant to course)
o e.g. How was this table developed? Why do we record lab observations in ink, at
time, in books that cannot leave lab? (What disasters led “us” to draw line here?)
Stories.
G. Assign responsibilities now.
o e.g. treat lab rules as professional standards, explaining rationale for these
standards (safety, preserving immediacy to catch small clues, making it possible
for others to pick up where you left off, protecting against suspicion, and so on)—
or (as in D) make students figure out their rationale.
o e.g. do work with “real world” effects (sampling river for EPA)

References

(1) "Profession" II (7) a. Oxford English Dictionary. June, 2007.

(2) Davis, Michael “Is Engineering a Profession in Japan?” pp.7-8

(3) Davis, “Is Engineering a Profession Everywhere?” pp. 8.

(4) Davis, “Is Engineering a Profession in Everywhere?” pp. 8-9.

(5) Definition from case, Paxton v. County of Alameda (1953) 119 C. A. 2d 393, 398, 259 P. 2d
934)

(6) From “Glossary – Standards of Care” Online Ethics Center for Engineering & Science.
1/31/2006 6:57:46 PM National Academy of Engineering Accessed: Tuesday, October 21, 2008
www.onlineethics.org/CMS/glossary.aspx “The standard of care is the degree of care that a
reasonably prudent person would exercise in some particular circumstances. In negligence law, if
someone’s conduct falls below such a standard, then the person may be liable in tort for injuries
or damages resulting from his or her conduct. In professional malpractice cases, a standard of
care is applied to measure the competence as well of the degree of care shown by a
professional’s actions.”

(7) Davis, Michael. “Developing and Using Cases to Teach Practical Ethics.” Teaching
Philosophy20:4 (December 1997) p.364.

Recommended Reading:

Andre, Judith. “Role Morality as a Complex Instance of Ordinary Morality.” American

Philosophical Quarterly 28:1 (January 1991) 73-80.

This article looks at how the role an individual assumes in society (such as “engineer” or
“physician,” when it is a voluntary role, or “grandmother” when it is not) oftentimes has a
corresponding moral value, or moral obligations that can go beyond or differ from what is seen
as ordinary morality. For example, lawyers have a moral obligation to help the client they are
representing go free, regardless of that client’s innocence or guilt. We can old many roles
simultaneously in society, and these roles are constantly shifting and being negotiated by society
and by ourselves.

Davis, Michael. “Thinking Like an Engineer: The Place of a Code of Ethics in the Practice of a
Profession,” Princeton University Press, 1991.

In “Thinking Like an Engineer: T author Michael Davis argues that codes of ethics are central
to advising professionals on how to conduct themselves, how to judge the conduct of others, and
how to understand their occupation as a profession. Using engineering as an example, Davis
looks at the history of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, and shows the importance of
professional codes of ethics and how it could have served as a guide for engineers involved in
that incident.
 Davis, Michael “Is Engineering a Profession Everywhere?” Philosophia Published online March
12, 2008.

In order to show how the concept of a “profession” can exist in almost any country, Davis
explains the connection between “profession” (in his sense of the term) to the hard-to-translate
term “code of ethics”.

Handout from 1994 EAC Workshop, modified 2008. Copyright Vivian Weil, Illinois
Institute of Technology.

Professional Ethics
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Professional ethics encompass the personal and corporate standards of behaviour expected of professionals.

Professional Ethics

Professional people and those working in acknowledged professions exercise specialist knowledge and skill. How the
use of this knowledge should be governed when providing a service to the public can be considered a moral issue
and is termed professional ethics.

Professionals are capable of making judgments, applying their skills and reaching informed decisions in situations
that the general public cannot, because they have not received the relevant training. One of the earliest examples of
professional ethics is probably the Hippocratic oath to which medical doctors still adhere to this day.

Professional ethics is a set of standards adopted by a professional community. Professional ethics are regulated by
standards, which are often referred to as codes of ethics.

The code of ethics is very important because it gives us boundaries that we have to stay within in our professional
careers. The one problem with the code of ethics is that we can't always have the answers black and white.
Sometimes there are grey areas where the answers aren't so simple.

Components

A number of professional organisations define their ethical approach as a number of discrete components. Typically
these include:

 Honesty
 Integrity
 Transparency
 Accountability
 Confidentiality
 Objective
 Respectful
 Within the law

Implementation

Most professions have internally enforced codes of practice that members of the profession must follow, to prevent
exploitation of the client and preserve the integrity of the profession. This is not only for the benefit of the client but
also the benefit of those belonging to the profession. Disciplinary codes allow the profession to define a standard of
conduct and ensure that individual practitioners meet this standard, by disciplining them from the professional body if
they do not practice accordingly. This allows those professionals who act with conscience to practice in the
knowledge that they will not be undermined commercially by those who have fewer ethical qualms. It also maintains
the public’s trust in the profession, encouraging the public to continue seeking their services.

Internal Regulation

In cases where professional bodies regulate their own ethics, there are opportunities for such bodies to become self-
serving and to fail to follow their own ethical code when dealing with renegade members. This is because the nature
of professions is that they have almost a complete monopoly on a particular area of knowledge. For example, until
recently, the English courts deferred to the professional consensus on matters relating to their practice that lay
outside case law and legislation.

Statutory Regulation

In many countries there is some statutory regulation of professional ethical standards such as the statutory bodies
that regulate nursing andmidwifery in England and Wales. Failure to comply with standards can thus become a
matter for the courts.

Examples

For example, a lay member of the public should not be held responsible for failing to act to save a car crash victim
because they could not give an appropriate emergency treatment. This is because they do not have the relevant
knowledge and experience. In contrast, a fully trained doctor (with the correct equipment) would be capable of
making the correct diagnosis and carrying out appropriate procedures. Failure of a doctor to help in such a situation
would generally be regarded as negligent and unethical. An untrained person would not be considered to be
negligent for failing to act in such circumstances and might indeed be considered to be negligent for acting and
potentially causing more damage and possible loss of life.

A business may approach a professional engineer to certify the safety of a project which is not safe. Whilst one
engineer may refuse to certify the project on moral grounds, the business may find a less scrupulous engineer who
will be prepared to certify the project for a bribe, thus saving the business the expense of redesigning.

Separatism

On a theoretical level, there is debate as to whether an ethical code for a profession should be consistent with the
requirements of morality governing the public. Separatists argue that professions should be allowed to go beyond
such confines when they judge it necessary. This is because they are trained to produce certain outcomes which may
take moral precedence over other functions of society. For example, it could be argued that a doctor may lie to a
patient about the severity of their condition, if there is reason to think that telling the patient could cause them so
much distress that it would be detrimental to their health. This would be a disrespect of the patient’s autonomy, as it
denies them information on something that could have a great impact on their life. This would generally be seen as
morally wrong. However, if the end of improving and maintaining health is given a moral priority in society, then it may
be justifiable to contravene other moral demands in order to meet this goal. Separatism is based on a relativist
conception of morality that there can be different, equally valid moral codes that apply to different sections of society
and differences in codes between societies. If moral universalism is ascribed to, then this would be inconsistent with
the view that professions can have a different moral code, as the universalist holds that there is only one valid moral
code for all.