Professional Ethics

Profession:- Taking these to be paradigm instances of profession: Medicine Dentistry Veterinary Medicine Law Architecture Accounting Five features distinguish what we now call profession from other types of occupations. “Entrance into a professing typically requires an extensive period of training and this training is of an intellectual character.” “Professionals’ knowledge and skills are vital to the well-being of the larger society.” “Professionals usually have a monopoly or near monopoly on the provision of professional services.” “Professionals often have an unusual degree of autonomy in the work place.” “Professionals claim to be regulated by ethical standards, usually embodied in a code of ethics.” The importance of ethics to profession: - The early meaning of the term profession and its cognates referred to a free act of commitment to a way of life. The earliest meaning of the adjective professed referred to the activity o...

Normative ethics, Meta-ethics and applied ethics (medical, business, engineering, legal ethics etc) are all branches of the discipline called ethics , which is in turn a branch of the discipline call philosophy . “Philosophy” derives from the Greek words for love ( philo ) and wisdom ( sophia ). For the ancient Greeks, “philosophy” was love of wisdom. But while this might give us the beginning of an idea of what philosophers do today, we need to get more specific to really understand what modern philosophy is. [Caveat: not all modern philosophers would agree with the following explanation of philosophy. Interestingly, the nature of philosophy is itself a controversial issue among philosophers.] Philosophy is an area of inquiry . Inquiry is an attempt to discover truths about the world. In this way, philosophy is like the sciences, historical research, investigative journalism and detective work. But philosophy is different than these other areas of...

What is Ethics? A few years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, “What does an ethic mean to you?” Among their replies were the following: “Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong.” “Ethics has to do with my religious belief.” “Being ethical is doing what the law requires.” “Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts.” “I don’t know what the world means.” These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of “ethics” is hard to pin down and the views many people have about ethics are shaky. Ethics and Feelings: Like Baumhart’s first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one’s feelings. A person following his or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical. Ethics and Religion: - Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most r...

Introduction: Dealing with the moral issues is often perplexing. How, exactly, should we think through an ethical issue? What questions should we ask? What factors should we consider? The first step in analyzing moral issues is obvious but not always easy: Get the facts. Some moral issues create controversies simply because we do not bother to cheek the facts. This first step, although obvious, is also among the most important and the most frequently overlooked. But having the facts is not enough. Facts by themselves only tell us what is; they do not tell us what ought to be. In addition to getting the facts, resolving an ethical issue also requires an appeal to values. Philosophers have developed five different approaches to values to deal with moral issues. The Utilitarian Approach: Utilitarianism was conceived in the 19 th century by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to help legislators determine which laws were morally best. Both Bentham and Mill sugge...