Professional Ethics

Ethics: - Ethics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to help us understand which ways of life are worth following and which actions are right or wrong. Ethics addresses questions of right and wrong using reason rather than faith or tradition. The discipline of ethics has three branches: normative ethics, meta-ethics and applied ethics. Normative Ethics: - Normative ethics is the branch of ethics that asks general questions about the morality of behavior; it attempts to provide general moral norms of behavior. Normative: - A normative statement, or question, or theory, concerns how things should be, how they ought to be, rather than how they actually are. [The opposite of “normative” is descriptive: A descriptive statement, or question, or theory, concerns how things actually are, not how they ought to be.] So normative ethics is the branch of ethics that tries to answer general questions about how we should behave, how we ought to act. In other w

Arriving at a short list of representative normative principles is itself a challenging task. The principles selected must not be too narrowly focused, such as a version of act-egoism that might focus only on an action’s short-term benefit. The principles must also be seen as having merit by people on both sides of an applied ethical issue. For this reason, principles that appeal to duly to God are not usually cited since this would have no impact on a nonbeliever engaged in the debate. The following principles are the ones most commonly appealed to in applied ethical discussions: Personal benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action produces beneficial consequences for the individual in question. Social benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action produces beneficial consequences for society. Principle of benevolence: help those in need. Principle of paternalism: assist others in pursuing their best interests when they cannot do

Why do we need Professional Codes in the first place? Isn’t it a given that anyone with specialized training will, by definition, behave ethically on the job? Actually, it isn’t that simple. No one starts out trying to be unethical—it’s more a question of juggling several responsibilities at once. One way to look at Professional Codes is to see them as a systematized approach to mediating the conflicts that can occur when one person wears several hats. Another view is that formal Codes of Conduct are a reflection of the relationship between society and trained experts. The topic of professional responsibility is about more than right or wrong conduct however. What of the goals, ideals and desires that bring one to a profession in the first place? The ideal of scientific training as a form of public service is what drives many scientists for whom research is more a way of life than a time clock to punch. Professional ethics concerns one’s conduct of behavio

A code of (professional) ethics generally appears when an occupation organizes itself into a profession. Usually, the code is put in writing and formally adopted. Even when formalization is put off, however, the code may still be a subject of frequent reference, whether explicitly, as in “Our code of ethics,” or implicitly, as in, “That would not be proper for one of us.” Why this connection between codes of ethics and organized professions? Several explanations have been offered over the years. But, for our purposes, the most helpful is that a code of ethics is primarily a convention between professionals. According to this explanation, a profession is a group of persons who want to cooperate in serving the same ideal better than they could if they did not cooperate. Engineers, for example, might be thought to serve the ideal of efficient design, construction, and maintenance of safe and useful objects. A code of ethics would then prescribe how professionals are to pursue the