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The consensus paradigm reduces professional responsibilities to the shared mandatory requirements developed as a consensus within a profession and imposed on all its members equally. Any additional ideals, commitments, or responsibilities that individuals embrace are matters of personal morality, not professional ethics, even when the ideals directly and dramatically affect their work. If anything, personal ideals are automatically suspect because of their potential to disrupt the workplace and threaten uniform standards. In addition to resolving special dilemmas such as those involved in confidentiality, personal ideals shape entire approaches to relationships with clients. For example, all professions mandate a strong requirement of informed consent and more generally of respect for clients' autonomy, but usually they leave large areas of professional discretion concerning advising clients and influencing clients' views. The most fundamental professional responsibility is also the most abstract: to promote the public good.

The expression “professional ethics” can mean three things: de facto morality, justified morality, and moral inquiry. Professional ethics consists entirely of the moral requirements attached to a profession and imposed on all its members, together with the ethical dilemmas created when the requirements conflict or are too vague to provide guidance. This dominant perspective is called the consensus paradigm, which the present book argues is implausible and constricting. The consensus paradigm neglects how personal moral commitments and ideals motivate, sustain, and guide professionals in their work. In exploring personal commitments, this book introduces narrative case studies and also includes portrayals of professionals in works of fiction. Case studies are ubiquitous in studying professional ethics, but almost invariably they consist of episodic (time-slice) dilemmas about how to act when confronted with conflicting obligations. A diachronic perspective reveals the importance of caring relationships, meaningful work, voluntary service, burnout, self-betrayal, balancing family with other commitments, and other topics examined in this book.

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.

The advocacy issue raises perennial concerns about good teaching and professional ethics in higher education. It also provides an interesting area in which to explore how the personal ideals of professionals shape their daily work. This chapter argues that professional responsibilities justify advocating personal ideals and value commitments pertinent to a professor's discipline (which includes its interdisciplinary dimensions). These responsibilities are precisely the ones emphasized in the consensus paradigm, namely, the shared duties incumbent on all professors. Accordingly, shared duties can actually imply personal commitments in professors' work rather than ruling them out. If much advocacy is both desirable and inevitable, the challenge is to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable forms, especially in the gray area of undue influence where inappropriate pressures distort the learning process without amounting to overt coercion, indoctrination, or proselytizing. This chapter also considers truth, autonomy, and authority as they relate to advocacy.