PROFESSIONS AND NORMS OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT

Professions are those occupations that both require advanced study and mastery of a specialized body of knowledge and undertake to promote, ensure, or safeguard some matter that significantly affects others' well-being. This chapter will examine the norms and standards of responsible conduct in professional practice. Ethical (and sometimes legal) requirements also exist on the practices of nonprofessionals whose work immediately affects the public good, of course. For example, food handlers are bound by sanitary rules. Furthermore, many moral rules apply equally in all work contexts. All workers have an ethical obligation not to deceive their clients or customers, for example. What is distinctive about the ethical demands professions make on their practitioners is the combination of the responsibility for some aspect of others' well-being and complexity of the knowledge and information that they must integrate in acting to promote that well-being.

Moral rules, such as the one against deception, are important, but professional responsibilities cannot be captured in such rules. Fulfilling professional responsibilities requires more than rule following. Fulfilling a responsibility requires some maturity of judgment. The expressions “the age of responsibility” or “the age of discretion” acknowledge the maturity of judgment required to take on responsibilities. Carrying out a responsibility requires making complex judgments that integrate a variety of considerations in deciding how best to achieve certain ends, such as safety.