Search Results

According to the consensus paradigm, burnout and family life are either irrelevant to understanding professional integrity or pose threats to it. The consensus paradigm limits professional ethics, in terms of which professional integrity is defined, to the duties accepted as a consensus within a profession and incumbent on all its members. Whatever the cause of increasing involvement with professions, integrating work with family and other commitments is now a major moral challenge. The emphasis on personal ideals in professional life may seem to make matters worse by encouraging excessive zeal at work, compounding the dangers of burnout and harm to families. But excessive zeal is just that — a lack of reasonable proportion and balance. Realistic ideals of caring bring resources for avoiding burnout and for integrating professional and other commitments by keeping moral imperatives clear. To see this, we need a pragmatic view of moral reasoning that cautions against rigid hierarchies among personal commitments, while being sensitive to the need for setting priorities in specific contexts where work and family compete.

As professionals, engineers live by codes of ethics that ascribe to them a paramount obligation to protect the safety, health, and welfare of the public, an obligation that frequently implies whistleblowing. Yet, as employees of corporations, their obligation is to respect the authority of managers who sometimes give insufficient attention to safety and who also severely punish whistleblowers for their alleged disloyalty and damage to the corporation. The upshot is a clash of professional obligations to employers and to the public, as well as conflicts between codified professional duties, personal ideals, and personal well-being. The voluminous literature on whistleblowing has neglected the relevance of personal commitments to professional responsibilities. This chapter examines personal rights and responsibilities in deciding how to meet professional obligations; increased personal burdens when others involved in collective endeavors fail to meet their responsibilities; the role of virtues, especially personal integrity and self-respect, as they bear on “living with oneself”; and personal commitments to moral ideals beyond minimum requirements.

Voluntary service beyond minimum requirements is an important aspect of professionalism, yet it has received little attention in the study of professional ethics. The dominance of the consensus paradigm partly explains the neglect: if professional ethics is nothing but the duties incumbent on all members of a profession, together with resolving the dilemmas when duties conflict, then optional voluntary service is automatically excluded from consideration. A related reason for the neglect of voluntary service (or philanthropy) is the more general preoccupation of ethicists (over the last two hundred years) with universal duties, to the neglect of personal ideals of service. This chapter discusses three overlapping dimensions of voluntary service in the professions: pro bono service, work in nonprofit organizations, and supererogatory commitments. Each highlights personal commitments in professional ethics, but the last topic especially leads into wider issues in ethical theory. The chapter tries to make sense of how some courses of action can become responsibilities and yet remain supererogatory — how they can be supererogatory responsibilities.

This essay sets out with some care the author’s concept of a joint commitment, introduced in her book On Social Facts (1989). It then addresses some comments on her work from Ulrich Balzer, Rudiger Bittner, and Michael Robins. In particular it considers a question from Robins: how can people become jointly committed if they are not already “joined at the hip”. It is argued that this is not a matter of the expression of conditional personal commitments, where a personal commitment is understood in a manner specified. Also addressed is Balzer’s concern about large-scale joint commitments, and Bittner’s contention that acting together does not involve obligations and rights.

At a time when all professions are under intense public scrutiny, mentioning religion and professional ethics together might bring to mind a series of well-publicized scandals, from tax evasion to sexual harassment, molestation, and pedophilia by priests, rabbis, and ministers. Such gross abuses of religious authority are widely condemned by the religious communities affected as well as by the general public. What is the proper role of religious commitments by individuals and groups in providing professional or profession-like services, especially within authority relationships? This chapter examines religion ethics and discusses Margaret P. Battin's Ethics in the Sanctuary. One might think that religious professions would be the one place where personal commitments would be fully appreciated. Yet, while Battin deserves much credit for establishing this new branch of applied ethics, her book manifests the same tendency to underappreciate personal commitments in professional life. Issues of faith, consent, and decency are also considered, along with science and religion, medicine and religion, and government service and religion.

This chapter provides a solution to the demand-right problem. It argues that joint commitment is a ground of demand-rights. A joint commitment in the sense in question is not a conjunction of personal commitments. It is formed when two or more people together commit them all. Given this ground, the right’s addressee is subject to a peremptory normative constraint. There is also a clear sense in which a right-holder can view the action to which he has a right as his. Further, the directed obligation of the right’s addressee can plausibly be said to be willed into being by those who jointly committed themselves. The question whether joint commitment is the only ground of demand-rights is raised. In a coda, pertinent passages in Kant’s discussion of contract right are reviewed.

This opening chapter spells out the key concepts deployed throughout the book. It also contends, against integrity skeptics of various types, that personal integrity, understood as fidelity to one’s fundamental commitments, can actually have independent moral significance. The focus is on two arguments, both revolving around unconditional commitments. The first, the unfairness argument, holds that since morality itself pushes agents to incorporate certain unconditional commitments into their self-conception, it is unfair to criticize agents who go on to treat these commitments as an independent factor in their moral deliberation. The second argument links agents’ unconditional moral commitments to their self-respect. Both arguments allow us to see why one’s integrity is not simply parasitic upon one “doing the right thing.” Rather, integrity can inform the analysis of what one morally ought to do.