The Ground Of Professional Ethics

As each week beings more stories of doctors, lawyers and other professionals abusing their powers, while clients demand extra services as at a time of shrinking resources; it is imperative that all practising professionals have an understanding of professional ethics. In The Ground of Profesional Ethics, Daryl Koehn discusses the practical issues in depth, such as the level of service clients can justifiably expect from professionals, when service to a client may be legitimately terminated and circumstances in which client confidences can be broken. She argues that, while clients may legitimately expect professionals to promote their interests, professionals are not morally bound to do whatever a client wants. The Ground of Professional Ethics is important reading for all practising professionals, as well as those who study or have an interest in the subject of professional ethics.

Professional roles are often thought to bring role-specific permissions and obligation, which may allow or require role-occupants to do things they would not be permitted or required to do outside their roles, and which as individuals they would rather not do. This feature of professional roles appears to bring them into conflict both with ‘ordinary’ or non-role morality, and with personal integrity which is often thought to demand some form of personal endorsement of one’s conduct. How are we to reconcile the demands of roles with ordinary morality and with personal integrity? This collection draws together a set of papers which explore these questions as they bear upon a number of different professional roles, including those of the lawyer, the judge and the politician, and from a variety of perspectives, including contemporary analytic moral theory, jurisprudence, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and contextualism, and, more broadly, from philosophy and legal academia and practice.

This book trains students of the caring professions, across health and social care, in the basic philosophical skills and knowledge needed to deal with the ethical aspects of their profession. It shows why ethical education is required, and teaches the skills of reasoning that equip professionals to think critically about the theories and arguments used in ethical discussions. It demonstrates how we can be confident that we can rely on common moral ground; but it also points out how we need to recognise the influence of different world-views, and to note how, on some issues, these can lead us in starkly different directions. It explains relevant philosophical theories, and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses – particularly in relation to what is required for proper professional ethics. It shows how to employ the commonly accepted framework of four ethical principles – beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. These various matters are then illustrated in two extended case studies, which focus on the problem of euthanasia, and the question of screening for disability and the value of human life. Ethical Basics for the Caring Professions is designed for use on all health and social care and human services courses on ethics and values. It will also be of interest to academics and professionals working within these fields.

This book is addressed to all those with an interest in the ethical dimension of professional development. Contributors are drawn from a variety of occupational fields (academic practice, healthcare, occupational therapy, legal, military, business, research, teaching, higher education, and civil engineering), institutional contexts, and geographical regions. However, they are united in their concern for inter-professional ways of working and for developing an ethical response to the changing institutional contexts within which they operate. Practitioners, trainers and managers will find this book both useful and thought-provoking, while scholars with a particular interest in professional ethics will find it informative and insightful.

This second edition of Professions in Ethical Focus comprises over seventy-five readings complemented by twenty case studies with corresponding discussion questions. These resources are organized into several thematic units, including “conflicts of interest,” “honesty, deception, and trust,” “privacy and confidentiality,” and “professionalism, diversity, and pluralism.” An alternative table of contents is also provided, identifying readings that bear on particular professions such as engineering, journalism, medicine, law, and policing. The book’s introductory unit offers short selections from classic and contemporary ethical theory, including non-Western traditions. All of the readings have been introduced by the editors and carefully excerpted for relevance, always with the needs of student readers in mind.

This innovative book is written in an accessible, compact style that sets forth and explains a sound framework for professional ethics that readers can quickly put into practice in analyzing and writing about cases. Through a series of moral conflicts, it aims at improving the skills of moral reasoning and achieving moral development.

Practical ethics training is now a requirement of nearly all professional training programmes. This timely and accessible book provides sustained, critical and multi-disciplinary treatment of the important and much-discussed question of addressing emotional aspects of moral functioning in professional ethics education. It offers practical evidence-based suggestions on how to incorporate the promotion of empathic development into the everyday teaching of professional ethics.