Getting Started: Helping a New Profession Developan Ethics Program
Michael Davis • Matthew W. Keefer
Received: 17 March 2011 / Accepted: 20 April 2011 / Published online: 11 August 2011
� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract Both of us have been involved with helping professions, especially new
scientific or technological professions, develop ethics programs—for undergradu-
ates, graduates, and practitioners. By ‘‘ethics program’’, we mean any strategy for
teaching ethics, including developing materials. Our purpose here is to generalize
from that experience to identify the chief elements needed to get an ethics program
started in a new profession. We are focusing on new professions for two reasons.
First, all the older professions, both in the US and in most other countries, now have
ethics programs of some sort. They do not need our advice to get started. Second,
new professions face special problems just because they are new—everything from
deciding who belongs to the profession to formalizing ethical standards so that they
can be taught. Our purpose in this paper is to generalize from our experience and to
identify some of the fundamentals for getting an ethics program started in a new
profession. We present our recommendations in the form of response to 6 questions
anyone designing an ethics program for a new profession should ask. We realize
that our brief discussion does not provide a complete treatment of the subject. Our
purpose has been to point in the right direction those considering an ethics program
for new profession.
Keywords Cases � Codes � Curriculum � Education � Ethics
M. Davis (&)
Humanities Department, Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions,
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
M. Davis
5300 S. South Shore Drive #57, Chicago, IL 60615, USA
M. W. Keefer
Chair of the Division of Educational Psychology, Research and Evaluation, University of Missouri-
St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
123
Sci Eng Ethics (2013) 19:259–264
DOI 10.1007/s11948-011-9279-x
Introduction
Both of us have helped professions, especially new scientific or technical
professions (such as software engineering and geophysical information systems),
develop ethics programs—for undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners. By
‘‘ethics program’’, we mean any strategy for teaching ethics, including drafting
materials. By ‘‘new profession’’, we mean an existing occupation, discipline, or
other group that some of the members of which have begun to think of as a
profession. The professional status of a ‘‘new profession’’ is generally contested
both inside and outside but the contest concerns something relatively specific,
whether the group in question is, or at least should be, voluntarily organized to earn
a living by openly serving a moral ideal in a morally-permissible way beyond what
law, market, morality, and public opinion would otherwise require.1
Our purpose here is to generalize from our experience with new professions to
identify the chief elements needed to get an ethics program started in such a
profession. We are focusing on new professions for two reasons. First, all the older
professions, both in the US and in most other countries, now have ethics programs
of some sort. They do not need our advice to get started (though even they may find
what we say useful for review or appraisal of existing programs). Second, new
professions face special problems just because they are new—everything from
defining who belongs to the profession to formalizing ethical standards so that they
can be taught. This article takes the form of question and answer. The six questions
are intended to be what is on the mind of a professional who consults us (whether or
not the question is ever stated). The corresponding answers are what we would now
say in response.
Question 1 How do I know when a new profession needs an ethics program?
The short answer is that a new profession always needs an ethics program
because professional ethics is always more than ‘‘just common sense’’.
The long answer requires making clear what we mean by ‘‘ethics’’. We do not
mean ordinary morality (Don’t lie, Keep your promises, Help the needy, and so
on)—which is part of common sense. We also do not mean the field of philosophy
that goes by that name (the attempt to understand morality as a rational
undertaking). By ‘‘ethics’’ we mean those special (morally permissible) standards
of conduct that apply to members of a group just because they are members of that
group. A profession’s ethics are standards that apply to members of that profession
just because they are members. Like the profession’s technical standards, of which
they are in fact the most general part, they are an achievement of the profession, part
of what makes a member of the profession something more than a mere individual
expert. They help to standardize the work of the profession.
Like the rest of us, a professional learns morality all through life—from direct
experience, discussion with others, history, fiction, and so on. Professionals need not
learn philosophical ethics at all. But the profession’s ethics must be learned if the
profession is to have ethical standards of its own (a living practice). Those standards
1 For further explanation (and defense) of this definition, see M. Davis (2002).
260 M. Davis, M. W. Keefer
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can only be learned in a professional school, from appropriate books (when they
exist—as they generally do not in a new profession), or from experience.
Experience is a poor teacher—though its lessons are seldom forgotten. It is a poor
teacher because it gives the test before the lesson, because the cost of each lesson is
high, and because its treatment is never systematic. Schools, including professional
schools, exist to make learning from experience as rare as possible. For most
students, books are a poor substitute for school. We learn skills best from those who
have them and know how to pass them on.2
Question 2 How can I convince the profession of the need for an ethics program?
This question concerns the politics of the profession in question. No two
professions are alike. Our experience is that three considerations seem to be
especially helpful in convincing a profession that it needs an ethics program. The
first is that professions close to the new profession, especially the more established
ones, already have such programs. Such programs are, in effect, standard operating
procedure for any profession. The second is a program to propose. Professions are
much more likely to consider adopting a program if they have a concrete candidate
to consider. If a program is not yet available or not easily constructed, argue that
with innovations and new knowledge come new challenges, including ethical
challenges, which require consideration of new ethical guidelines, new ethical
skills, and therefore, new subject matter in the classroom; then find a funding
agency to support development of the ethics program so defined. Outside support is
a surprisingly effective argument. Third is the existence of at least one recent
scandal concerning the profession in question. Convincing a profession to adopt an
ethics program is, in part, a matter of timing.
Question 3 How do I identify the profession’s chief ethical problems?
There are at least 4 ways to identify the profession’s ethical problems (ways
which can be combined). One is a formal open-ended survey of practitioners.
Another is holding sessions at professional meetings at which practitioners are first
presented with a problem for discussion and then, after a brief discussion, are asked
to suggest problems for further discussion. Third is to look through the professional
literature for problems. Fourth is to adapt problems already developed for an
adjacent field and then ask practitioners whether these adapted problems are
‘‘realistic’’.
Always collect more problems than you think you need. Some will fail to spark
discussion, spark the wrong sort of discussion, spark only a brief discussion, or
otherwise not serve as required. Note that we don’t start by asking professionals a
question like ‘‘What are the most significant ethical problems in your field?’’ We do
not for at least two reasons. First, our experience is that this doesn’t work. Most
professionals simply don’t have or cannot recall a class of problems they would
consider ‘‘ethical’’. What they recall are individual problems. Often they are not
sure whether they are even ‘‘ethical’’; what they are sure of is that they were, in one
way or another, troubling. Second, practitioners rarely have a sense of their
2 For more on this point, see M. Davis (2011).
Getting Started: Helping a New Profession 261
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profession as a whole. What they are sure of, and therefore, what they are willing to
talk about, are problems that they themselves see or hear about. A question that
invites them to draw on that experience is much more likely to solicit useful
problems than a question that invites them to think more abstractly.
Question 4 How do I identify the ethical principles to resolve those problems?
A good way to identify ethical principles suitable for resolving the ethical
problems of a profession is to look at the profession’s code of ethics, if there is one.
(Anything obvious to the profession is likely to be there.) If there is no code, then
the best way to identify principles is to begin with discussion of ethical problems
that seem typical of the field, especially easy problems. Keep a record of the
discussion. Examine the record for principles cited during the discussion, e.g.,
‘‘Protect the public’’, ‘‘Don’t want to disappoint the customer’’, ‘‘Loyalty’’. Show
the list to other practitioners to see whether they agree that the principles identified
are important. Put aside for further discussion (and amendment or substitution) any
principle to which more than one practitioner objects. The next time, use a
somewhat different collection of cases, one that might lead to citation of principles
not yet cited. As easy problems seem to yield fewer new principles, increase the
proportion of harder problems. Continue until the list of principles seems to have
become stable. That list is, in effect, an explication of the profession’s implicit code
of ethics. It will serve to guide classroom discussion until the profession adopts an
official code.
This is, we think, a good way to develop ethical principles to guide discussion of
problems. There are others (Kipnis 1988; Anderson 1994; Davis 2007). But there
are, we think, also some ways not to proceed. The most common mistake is to ask
practitioners abstract questions, such as ‘‘What obligations do we have to society, to
employers and funders, to colleagues, and to individuals in society?’’ Such abstract
questions tend to generate answers both equally abstract and not particularly suited
to the profession in question. Professionals are better at recognizing special
obligations when thinking about the contexts in which they appear (that is, specific
problems).
Another common mistake is to let some respected member of the field write an
ethics code. The respected member, usually senior in the field, is likely to be too far
from the difficulties of ordinary practice that the code is supposed to help resolve.
The result is typically high sentiments ordinary practitioners regard as unhelpful.
New professions generally have new problems (as well as some they share with
other professions) because they work in new ways, have new knowledge, or enter
into new relations with clients, employers, public, or environment. The new
problems are generally hard to predict; they become evident in practice. The
profession must often learn from experience even if the individual professional does
not. There is, then, a need to begin the search for ethical principles by a process that
stays close to actual practice.
Question 5 How do I create an ethics curriculum and guide instruction?
An ethics curriculum should have at least four objectives: (1) raising student
sensitivity to ethical problems they may face in professional practice; (2) providing
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them with information that may help them resolve those problems (including ethical
standards, history of the profession, and structure of organizations in which the
profession works); (3) improving ethical judgment (that is, increasing the likelihood
that students will develop a good plan of action in response to an ethical problem);
and (4) increasing ethical commitment (that is, increasing the likelihood that a
student will carry out a good plan once developed). The presentation of ethical
materials should be structured with one or more of these objectives in mind.
One common mistake in designing an ethics curriculum is to think that the
objective is to teach students ethical principles as such. The result is a direct
presentation of standards or obligations. The thinking is something like, ‘‘We know
we want them to be aware of their professional obligations, so why not start with
those?’’ There are various instructional strategies and materials that fit this
approach, most of which we would not recommend. Least effective would be simply
asking students to enumerate their professional obligations or to commit to memory
important code provisions. Somewhat more creative would be asking students to
generate the provisions that could apply to selected problems or scenarios. These
approaches are not likely to be successful. Students find such generative tasks both
difficult and boring. But more important, since the principles are not presented
within a context in which they are solving practical problems, there is little chance
that students will know what to do with them when they confront an actual problem.
Question 6 What will I have when I have everything I need?
The details in the answer to this question may vary considerably. But at least two
things are always needed. First, the ethics program should include a set of
interesting problems. These not only provide a good way to introduce students to
issues in the profession (raising sensitivity), but resolving them is the best way we
know to introduce students to important ethical principles, technical standards, and
institutional background (adding to ethical knowledge).
Second, it is useful to have some materials that will help facilitate or guide
discussion of the problems. These can include relevant readings and other
supporting materials, e.g., code provisions, case commentaries, court rulings, and
so on. But our experience suggests that clear guidance is also useful for the
discussion of problems, for example, a decision procedure having several steps.
Research also supports this idea Keefer and Ashley (2001). The purpose of the
guidance is practical, e.g., to help students be more open to alternatives, to
investigate aspects of the problem that might provide the means to a better
resolution, and so on. The form of the support can vary from explicit presentation of
reasoning steps (a decision procedure) to a structured exposure to case commen-
taries that exhibit the exemplary reasoning (though our experience is that the more
explicit one can be about the method, the better).
Conclusion
Our purpose in this article was to generalize from our experience and to identify
some of the fundamentals for getting an ethics program started in a new profession,
Getting Started: Helping a New Profession 263
123
especially a new scientific or technological profession. We presented our
recommendations in the form of response to six questions anyone designing an
ethics program for a new profession should ask. We realize that our brief discussion
does not provide a complete treatment of the subject. Our purpose has been to point
in the right direction those considering an ethics program for new profession.
Acknowledgments A version of this article was presented at the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the
Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, March 5–8, 2009, Cincinnati, Ohio. We should like to
thank those present, as well as one reviewer for this journal, for comments. This article relies on work
performed under. NSF Grant No. 0019171 NSF Division of Information and Intelligent Systems:
Collaborative Research: The Responsible Conduct of Computational Modeling and Research (Keefer,
Co-PI); and NSF Grant No. SES-9985813: Ethics Across the Curriculum: Continuing to Transfer the
Technology (Davis, PI).
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