7/23/2019 prof eth

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/prof-eth 1/7

 Article

‘What is professional ethics?’

Bob Brecher University of Brighton, UK

Abstract

The very term ‘professional ethics’ is puzzling with respect to what both ‘professional’ and ‘ethics’ might mean.I argue (1) that professionalism is ambiguous as to whether or not it is implicitly committed to ethical practice;(2) that to be ‘professionally’ ethical is at best ambiguous, if not in fact bizarre; and (3) that, taken together,these considerations suggest that professional ethics is something to be avoided rather than lauded.

KeywordsCodes, ethics, morality, professional, professional ethics

Introduction

The very idea of professional ethics seems – or ought to seem – decidedly odd. Its referent is already ambig-

uous. Is it to do with the ethics of a particular profession, such as nursing, teaching or prostitution? If so, then

why ‘professional ethics’ rather than ‘nursing ethics’, ‘teaching ethics’ or ‘prostitution ethics’? Presumably,

the thought is that there is something common to the professions in light of which their ethical pursuit is in

some way generic. But then, why have different codes for different professions? And what is it that theyhave – relevantly – in common? Perhaps it is simply the assumption that their pursuit has to be ethical

in order to count as a professional one. But then, might one not make a similar claim about just any of our 

 paid pursuits? If not – if shelf-stacking in a supermarket, plumbing, toilet-cleaning or janitoring can count as

such even if pursued unethically or not pursued ethically – then perhaps the term ‘profession’ is to be under-

stood as serving to differentiate work that cannot count as such unless pursued ethically. But how plausible

is that? Do unethical professionals really thereby cease to count as professional? I shall pursue these issues

in the following section on professionalism. In the section, ‘Professional Ethics’, I shall pursue the other arm

of the ambiguity of ‘professional ethics’, the sense it carries of being professional about ethics, of acting

responsibly in respect of the ethical obligations and responsibilities characteristic of one’s profession. Even

to make the point, of course, is already to point to the oddity of such a notion. Do ‘ordinary’ people, or 

 professional people in the course of their ‘ordinary’ rather than their ‘professional’ lives, not fulfil this tau-

tologous requirement simply insofar as they act ethically? Perhaps you do not think that being professional

about ethics is odd. But if that is so, then substitute ‘morality’ for ‘ethics’: professional morality – really?

The monstrosity of ‘professional morality’ is revealing. Even if you do not agree with the Kantian thought

that to be a person is already to be an inescapably – and universally – moral being (a big issue, of course), the

thought of a particular morality as the purview of a specialist group of people – professionals – is at least too

close for comfort to the incongruity of a ‘ professional person’, as contrasted with ‘professional person’.

Corresponding author: Bob Brecher, University of Brighton, 10-11 Pavilion Parade, Brighton, BN2 1RA, UK.

Email: r.brecher@brighton.ac.uk 

Nursing Ethics2014, Vol. 21(2) 239–244

ª The Author(s) 2013Reprints and permission:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

10.1177/0969733013484485nej.sagepub.com

7/23/2019 prof eth

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/prof-eth 2/7

But before pursuing these specific issues, it will be as well to distinguish the two sorts of objection

I shall be offering to the idea of professional ethics, related as they nonetheless are.i The first is that

‘professional ethics’ is on one conception of morality a self-contradictory notion. It supposes

that there are (broadly understood) local contexts that  either  have their own, particular, ethics  or   that

universal ethics – that is to say, universally valid moral principles – need to be interpreted within such

local contexts.I shall not say much about the first of these approaches, involving as it does just about all the fundamental

 problems of moral philosophy, merely noting that it brings with it all the problems of relativism and/or 

subjectivism, and that that renders ethics at best no more than local systems of what might be termed ‘seri-

ous etiquette’. Put another way, and as against Bernard Williams’ famous argument in Ethics and the Limits

of Philosophy,1 this would be mistakenly to eviscerate morality of any content. This is, of course, no more

than an assertion, justification of which would require (at least) another, and far longer, paper. But to the

extent that it turned out to be valid, to that extent ‘professional ethics’ would be merely symptomatic of 

a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of morality.

The second approach may perhaps appear plausible. But it is nonetheless misconceived: in offering the

relevant set of interpretations as ‘ready-made’, as a set of formulae against which practitioners may check 

their practice, it eliminates the need for the practitioners concerned  themselves to do that work, to think for themselves and act accordingly. It allows one to act in a certain way on the say-so of others rather than act-

ing as a moral agent, to behave as a young child might when (rightly) told to do something rather than to act 

as a person, that is to say as an agent. Again, I cannot defend here the broadly Kantian view of morality,

rational action and personhood which that reflects. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the idea of acting for 

the right reasons (‘She needs gentle handling’) as opposed to ‘acting’ because one has been told that that is

the right thing to do (‘The code emphasizes respect for the patient’) has a grip that goes well beyond devo-

tees of Kant. The codification required by the need for interpretation is central: it is because following a

code and acting morally are not at all the same thing that codes of professional ethics are objectionable, and 

 professional ethics as a matter of actual fact consists in codes. Perhaps one could delineate a conception of 

 professional ethics that does not take the form of codes (an interesting task that would, I think, require also a

recasting of the idea of what a profession is). But given the realities of the neo-liberal dispensation under which we live, this theoretical question, important though it is, matters less than professional ethics as

actually instantiated. Indeed, that is the point of writing this piece at all.

On either of these two possible views of ‘professional ethics’, then, morality is denied. And that is one

 basic reason for supposing the notion contradictory: or at least, contradictory if ‘ethics’ is held to retain any

moral content at all. But if it does not, then the question arises, ‘What are professional ethics concerned with

if not with morality?’ – which takes us back to Bernard Williams.

But suppose you disagree. Suppose, for example, that you take ethics to be a matter of exercising virtue,

or, like Williams, of living a certain sort of life; or that you take morality to be in some deep way subjective

or relative to particular communities, ways of life; or whatever. One interesting concomitant of all these

views is that the notion of ‘professional ethics’ becomes no less problematic than on a Kantian view of 

morality. To put it very schematically, how can you be exercising virtue if you are following a rule (i.e.

a professional code)? Or if morality is a matter of living (a) certain kind(s) of life, then again, what kind 

of life – of moral life – would it be where your professional life consisted merely in playing a role, in acting

out what it is to be a good nurse? And if there is, in the end, no such thing as morality, but only subjective

 preferences or social conventions, ways of life or practices, then why do professional ethics matter at all,

other than in terms of a nurse not breaking their contract?

iWith thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this needed to be clarified.

240   Nursing Ethics 21(2)

240

7/23/2019 prof eth

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/prof-eth 3/7

Furthermore, and this brings me to the second sort of objection to ‘professional ethics’, in the present

 political conjuncture – neo-liberal ‘shock and awe’ – the issue of the ethicisation of public life as an ideo-

logical weapon serving the neo-liberal revolutionaries is particularly urgent. What better way is there of 

 preventing people from thinking about the rights and wrongs of what their employer is telling them to

do – of, for example, National Health Service (NHS) managers preventing nurses from thinking about their 

 patients’ needs – than by imposing on them a code of professional ethics which, so to speak, does the think-ing for them? If right and wrong are defined in terms of a set of rules, a code, which it is a nurse’s job to

follow, then there is no need – and no opportunity – for nurses to think about how to conduct themselves

vis-a-vis their patients. Even ‘their patients’ can all too easily become problematic, as all too many readers

doubtless know all too well. Again, that is why the main focus of what follows is professional ethics as actu-

ally extant, that is to say in the form of codes.

Professionalism

The historical transformation of a job into a profession conjoins redescription and new naming – a funda-

mentally political matter. How should we understand and assess such transformations? Are they a welcomemeans of safeguarding the public by assuring adherence to basic standards of practice through

self-regulation, and in particular ethical self-regulation? Or are they rather an efficient means of protecting

from the public those who can achieve professional status? Or both? All these are political issues, which is

why debate about what constitutes and/or what should constitute a profession has always been politically

freighted.

What is the difference between someone who is and someone who is not a professional; between, for 

example – as things stand today – a nurse and a shelf-stacker? One element is expertise and its certification.

So while a shelf-stacker may need some initial training, that is the limit: no particular expertise is required 

and so no certification in respect of it comes into question. But then, why are plumbers, toilet-cleaners and 

train drivers not professionals? Well, perhaps driving trains, while it requires much more training than shelf-

stacking, is something that more or less anyone could do if they chose to. It is more like driving a car than

like surgery: just about everyone can learn to drive; but surgery, like tennis, requires skills that most of us

 just do not have. Perhaps that is why the idea of driving trains as a profession sounds (at least) less far-

fetched than that of cleaning toilets as a profession, and why ‘the oldest profession’ is ambiguously

regarded. That suggests another element of professionalism, the idea that being a professional is something

that goes across a whole lifetime, or at least a significant part of it, in such a way that that life is identified, by

oneself and by others, in terms of the profession in question: academic, doctor or barrister, but not toilet-

cleaner, shelf-stacker or (maybe) plumber. Again, prostitution is particularly interesting in this regard: here,

identification by others and self-identification might – but might not – diverge.

How these elements are understood and evaluated of course changes over time and place: hence, for 

example, the comparatively recent professionalisation of engineers and nurses. What matters, and what I

suspect plays a large part in professionalisation – as in de-professionalisation, a far less common phenom-

enon until the success of the unfolding neo-liberal revolution – is of course status. (That is why the

neo-liberals regard the professions as an enemy: status is to be conferred on those and only on those whose

‘talent’ is for making money, a talent the exercise of which is carefully not  described in either professional

or non-professional terms – unprofessional in one sense though the financiers clearly are. ‘Professional

 banker’ or ‘professional financier’ rightly have connotations not very different from ‘professional

criminal’.) The status conferred by protecting the public against quacks and incompetents versus the status

conferred by membership of a club closed to the public is a familiar issue in considerations of the histories of 

the professions. In short, the very idea of professionalism is politically and morally ambiguous.

Brecher    241

241

7/23/2019 prof eth

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/prof-eth 4/7

Ethics

For some 20 years now, ethics have been blooming everywhere in our neo-liberal utopia. The United 

Kingdom announced in 1997 that it would pursue an ‘ethical’ foreign policy, an intention not rescinded 

despite Afghanistan, Iraq, rendition and all the rest of it. Every organisation worth its salt proclaims its ‘ethi-

cal’ principles: even Atos, for example, the private company awarded a contract to conduct the assessment

of the capacity of people with disabilities to undertake paid work, despite what it actually does,2 which is

reminiscent of nothing so much as the conduct of US army psychologists advising torturers at Guantanamo

Bay and elsewhere,3 proclaims a code of ethics.4 In the town where I live, there is even a fleet of white vans

claiming to provide ‘ethical parking management’. Rorty was certainly right about two things: ‘anything

can be redescribed to be made to look good or bad’5 and  no  description is morally neutral.6,ii

It is of course unsurprising that this increasing insistence on proclaiming that what one does is ethical

should come at a time and in a place where the values of the so-called free market – rampant commodifica-

tion and material egoism – have become the ‘common sense’ of the times, a ‘common sense’ that is entirely

antithetical to ethical concerns. After all, the homo economicus of the neo-liberal junta is a surprising ethical

subject. For none of its various instantiations – thrusting entrepreneur, self-reliant unencumbered citizen,

happy shopper – would find themselves at home in any of the three central traditions of Western ethical

thought.   Homo economicus   cannot be a model of a balanced, virtuous life of the sort envisaged within

an Aristotelian framework according to which ‘ . . .  happiness is activity in accordance with the highest

virtue’7 nor an agent content to follow Kant’s injunction ‘So [to] act that you use humanity, whether in your 

own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’,8 nor 

one who could allow, with John Stuart Mill, that ‘[T]o do as you would be done by, and to love your neigh-

 bour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality’.9

In part, the ubiquity of ethics may reflect a genuine concern – however misguided – to operate capitalism

‘with a human face’, as with Fairtrade; in part, it constitutes a cynical attempt to disguise the neo-liberals’

‘free’ market and its values. In practice, of course, these motivations often and easily work together.

Professional ethics

‘Integrity is one of the group’s core values – being a responsible business partner, employer, customer and sup-

 plier is an important part of our strategy and forms an essential foundation on which we carry out our business. In

our view, ethical behaviour of corporations should not be just a reaction to regulation or legal compliance, but a

means of doing business that gives customers, employees, partners and communities the confidence that they are

working with an ethical organisation that is not prepared to compromise on its integrity just to achieve its objec-

tives or to make money.’10

The corporation in question is G4S, the United Kingdom’s largest private security organisation, with ‘inter-

ests’ in prisons, immigrant detention centres, Palestine, Afghanistan and more, and a corporation notorious

even by the usual ‘ethical’ standards of such ‘professional providers’.11

Might that not give one pause? But perhaps I am being too cynical: of course, actually existing professions are to some extent self-serving, and 

their embrace of ethics is an integral part of that function; and in fairness, if the notion of a professional is to

 be defended, then it has to be distinguished from its various and all too common deformations. The fact that

much of what is pursued in the name of ethics in fact answers to legal, rather than to moral, concerns is

 perhaps a deformation that could be remedied, rather than being a deep-rooted problem about the very idea

iiStill pre-eminent, despite her own later changes of direction, is Dale Spender’s  Man Made Language.6

242   Nursing Ethics 21(2)

242

7/23/2019 prof eth

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/prof-eth 5/7

of professional ethics – a misuse of ‘professional ethics’. But still, the ease with which such misuse is under-

taken – if misuse it is – tells us something about the world as it actually is.

More fundamentally, professional ethics – and especially the codes in which such ethics are encapsulated – 

 prevent rather than encourage moral thought and moral action. A code is a set of rules: some may take the

form of advice rather than direction, but nonetheless, their form is that of rules. Rules are formulae, and to

follow the rules as a means of making the right decision is a matter of looking up the appropriate rule in therelevant handbook. But is looking up the rules a good way of making moral decisions? Or are rules rather a sort

of moral backdrop, for use as reminders when we need them? Following Kant, to the extent that making a

moral decision, and thus acting morally, is a rational matter, to that extent it is a matter of exercising one’s

rational capacity. Children learn to act morally by being told what to do, by imitating their elders – that is

to say, by learning to follow rules. But  actually acting morally comes later, when children are no longer 

(just) children and can think for themselves. Of course, they – and we – might still act in accordance with a

rule, but that is quite different from merely following it, merely looking up what to do and doing it. One

way of putting this is that moral decision-making and moral action have to be internalised in order to con-

stitute moral decision and action; another is to remind ourselves of Kant’s insistence that an action not

done for the right reason – that is to say, for a moral reason – is not a moral action at all, however morally

desirable its consequences may be. Nor is that all. Consider the moral status of ethical codes. Who questions that and on what basis? The

 Nazi doctors and nurses working in the German eugenics programme of the 1930s come to mind here,

as do the doctors pimping for Atos. For it is all too easy to suppose that if the rules do not explicitly forbid 

something, then it is permissible. Worse still, the rules themselves can anyway be redescribed so as not to

apply: not ‘patients’, but ‘subjects’, not ‘people’ but ‘degenerates’ or ‘defectives’. This is more than a prac-

tical difficulty. If a code is to function as a code, it has to be  given. But if an ethical code is to be morally

questioned, then it cannot be simply given. Either the moral critique does not apply because it countermands

the code, or, if it does, then the code is redundant: the moral critique, not the code, is doing the work.

Finally, professional codes of ethics serve to prevent certain sorts of issue from being understood as

moral matters at all: consider resource allocation and rationing, geographical inequities such as postcode

 prescribing, the responsibilities of patients or private medicine. If it is not in the code, it cannot be an issue.But the content of codes depends on what their authors think relevant, an inadequate criterion because

the world changes and with it the range of issues over which ‘morality’ ranges. Nor does regularly revising

the code help much – consider the regular recasting of the Helsinki Declaration (the World Medical Asso-

ciation’s Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects) for example. And it raises a

related problem. The authors of codes, however well-intentioned and however able to think disinterestedly,

cannot but bring to their work their own particular views and contexts, and however much differing views

are balanced against each other, nonetheless, a code remains just that – a specific document expressing the

moral views of a specific group: that of the code-makers. Morality – unlike ethics – is just what overrides all

other considerations: it cannot be measured against any others, not least because there is nothing other than

itself by which morality could be measured. To weigh economic against moral considerations is already a

moral weighing. Ethical codes suggest that their contents  can be weighed against other factors. That is why

they are described as ‘ethical’ not ‘moral’.

Conclusion

Perhaps the strongest argument for professional codes of ethics is that professionals have enough to do with-

out also having to try to solve moral problems, let alone moral dilemmas. The doctor’s, nurse’s, manager’s

or teacher’s expertise is one thing – morality another. After all, no one expects train drivers, refuse collec-

tors or shelf-stackers to wrestle with moral problems as part of their everyday work, and to the extent that

Brecher    243

243

7/23/2019 prof eth

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/prof-eth 6/7

 being a professional is in part marked by one’s work having, or being considered to have, a greater import

than ‘mere’ work, and so is more likely to raise moral issues, then a code of professional ethics is a reason-

able solution. At least keep the moral considerations within professional boundaries.

But then, what are the relations between our moral responsibilities as citizens – as people – and as, say,

managers or doctors? What happens when my moral responsibility as an academic – say, to colleagues – 

conflicts with my moral (or political) duty as citizen?12,iii Professional ethics offers a way of avoiding theseissues rather than facing them.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the anonymous referee for the helpfully perceptive comments.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit

sectors.

References

1. Williams B. Ethics and the limits of philosophy. London: Fontana, 1985.

2. Atos protest: disability rights groups target firm,  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-19437785

(accessed 22 September 2012). (For details of Atos’s doctors’ conduct see Amelia Gentleman, Atos comes under 

attack in emotional Commons debate,  Guardian, 17 January 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/

17/atos-attack-emotional-commons-debate?INTCMP¼SRCH (accessed 21 January 2013)).

3. Bloche MG and Marks JH. Doctors and interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. N Engl J Med  2005; 353: 6–8.

4.   http://atos.net/en-us/about_us/Company_Profile/Corporate_Values/code_of_ethics/default.htm (accessed 22 Septem-

 ber 2012).

5. Rorty R. Contingency, irony, solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 73.6. Spender D. Man-made language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

7. Aristotle. The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle (ed. and trans. D Ross), Book X, chap. 7. London: Oxford University

Press, 1969, p. 263.

8. Kant I.  Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, 4: 429.

9. Mill JS. Utilitarianism. In: Warnock M (ed.). Utilitarianism. London: Fontana, 1962, p. 268.

10. G4S. Our ethics,   http://www.g4s.com/en/Social%20Responsibility/Safeguarding %20our %20integrity/Our %20ethics/

(accessed 22 September 2012).

11.  www.waronwant.org/G4S

12. Brecher B. Do intellectuals have a public responsibility? In: Aiken W and Haldane J (eds) Philosophy and its public

role. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004, pp. 25–38.

iiiI address the issue of academics’ responsibilities in the chapter ‘Do intellectuals have a public responsibility?’.12

244   Nursing Ethics 21(2)

244

7/23/2019 prof eth

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/prof-eth 7/7

C o p y r i g h t o f N u r s i n g E t h i c s i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f S a g e P u b l i c a t i o n s , L t d . a n d i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t    

 b e c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s  

e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l a r t i c l e s f o r    

i n d i v i d u a l u s e .