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...

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...

Consistency—the absence of contradictions—has sometimes been called the hallmark of ethics. Ethics is supposed to provide us with a guide for moral living, and to do so it must be rational, and to be rational it must be free of contradictions. If a person said, “Open the window but don’t open the window,” we would be at loss as to what to do; the command is contradictory and thus irrational. In the same way, if our ethical principles and practices lack consistency, we, as rational people, will find ourselves at a loss as to what we ought to do and divided about how we ought to live. Ethics requires consistency in the sense that our moral standards, actions, and values should not be contradictory. Examining our lives to uncover inconsistencies and then modifying our moral standards and behaviors so that they are consistent is an important part of moral development. Where are we likely to uncover inconsistency? First, our moral standards may be inconsistent with ach other...