Contemporary Issues in Applied and Professional Ethics: Volume 15

How can we explain the development – or equally the non-development – of professional ethics norms in a particular case? And how can we enhance compliance with existing professional ethical norms? In this chapter, I develop a supply/demand theory of professional ethics. That is, I consider the demand-forces and pull-factors that call for the construction, reform or continuance of a professional ethos. These demands may come from various stakeholders, including individual service-providers, the professional community, actual and prospective clients and the general public collectively as interested third parties. The supply-side, on the other hand, constitutes the ethical materiel out of which norms emerge: these are the felt-motivations of individual professionals at the coalface of action that drive them to recognize, acknowledge and act upon a professional norm. This material includes traditions and stories, the conscious application of common-sense ethics, explicit endorsement of public moral codes, internal excellences within the activity, a discrete community capable of cultivating attractive role-identities and so on. As well as considering such ethical-materiel, I canvas the institutional and cultural supports that facilitate the production of these motives.

This chapter asks whether it is helpful to consider a profession to be a practice and to what extent this meshes with the idea that ‘profession’ is a moral concept. It examines MacIntyre’s concept of a practice as an activity that pursues internal goods, finds that MacIntyre’s articulation of the concept by itself is not enough to describe what it is to be a profession and seeks to supplement this with ideas from others, primarily Miller and Davis. This supplementation, however, still leaves open the question of the origin of a profession’s authority (or licence) to use what can be called the ‘dangerous knowledge’ that differentiates the work of professions from other occupations. For this, Veatch provides useful ideas.

The virtuous character and the ethical agent represent mutually inclusive terms, neither of which independently, in the Aristotelian tradition, is considered an innate quality. Virtues, if not innate, are contingent; but what makes each instantiation recognisably general? Normative ethics in this sense is a dynamic process and similarly process philosophy is based on the principle that existence is dynamic and that it should be the primary focus of any philosophical account of reality. I argue that the transformative process is equally as important as the end result of realising the virtuous dispositional traits. An important criticism of virtue ethics is the focus on character and not rules such as industry practices and codes found in the professions. The criticism however is less worrisome than usually accepted. The reasoning herein developed to overcome this criticism rests on the presupposition that no one exists in isolation and virtues are developed in a social context and not simply given. Using process philosophy as a methodological approach to examine virtue ethical agency and the transformative process involved in its realisation elicits insights that allow the conceptual development of a more robust account of virtue ethics. I extend this nuanced rendition, in ways already commenced by others, into areas of organisational, environmental and intergenerational ethics.

Since the mid-1990s most Australian jurisdictions have adopted, either through subordinate legislation or through internal government directives, rules regarding how government agencies should behave when participating in litigation. While these rules met an immediate need associated with the outsourcing of legal work to private law firms, this chapter argues that they are unsuited for enduring use: they lack a proper rationale, they are poorly worded and uncertain in their meaning; it is unclear whether and how courts should enforce them, and they have not been reviewed to take account of the more recent developments in civil procedure.

How we should behave online is an issue that is deceptively complex. The online community, whether in a professional or a personal context, is much broader than the communities in which all but the youngest of us grew up. As such, the standards of propriety in this space can differ, in ways unexpected and dramatic, from those we are used to. In this chapter I ask whether and when we are under an obligation to conform to the expectations of the dominant groups within the online communities we participate in, and argue that there are at least some times when it is defensible to conform to one’s own local norms and expectations rather than subordinating these to the broader online community.

In this chapter I consider the need for consent in two cases of posthumous donation of parts of one’s body: organ donation and the donation of sperm to allow one’s partner to conceive a child after one’s death. What kind of consent is appropriate in these cases and why? In both cases, jurisdictions tend to prefer explicit consent, although many countries now adopt presumed consent (opt-out) in the case of organ donation, and there has been a recent plea for presumed consent in the case of sperm donation as well. In this chapter I first argue that arguments in favour of presumed consent are inadequate as they stand, and then describe another way of understanding opt-out schemes, one that focuses on different models of what is at stake and on the ethical requirements incurred on such models.

In this chapter we address the problematic nature of altruistic motivation, commonly required of surrogate mothers, live organ donors, clinical research participants and health professionals. Altruism, understood as involving a desire to help others, often to a self-sacrificing degree, gives rise to various conceptual and ethical difficulties. We argue that encouraging the virtue of generosity is preferable to requiring altruistic motivation, because generosity is consistent with reciprocation as well as legitimate concern for self. A correct understanding of generosity also alleviates concerns about exploitation and commodification. Our focus in this chapter is on surrogacy, but our arguments apply to other domains as well.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the paid care of children, and assisting with their development, is increasingly coming to resemble a professional activity in Australia. The commodification of child care has tended to create a profession of carers of children, not only by virtue of more formalized qualifications and role descriptions for carers, but also by establishing a potential framework within which a profession may be practiced. I examine how paid child caring in Australia increasingly conforms in many respects with various criteria commonly associated with a professional activity. This evolution within the child care field however is creating tension between the traditional nurturing role of child care and the more formal requirements of a “professional” carer. This process of professionalisation also has significant implications, not only for the care providers, but also for those who are receiving care – the children and their families. It also has important implications for society itself.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the consequences of closing institutions for people with disabilities and accommodating them in Supported Residential Services. Issues that had been raised by an advocacy movement included shortcomings in privacy, dignity, control and meaningful activity in institutions, which led to their closure. The study applied a quality of life measurement which was commensurate with the ethical paradigms of welfare, autonomy and communitarianism to investigate whether community living in supported residences produced fulfilling lives and better outcomes than the institutions they replaced. Twenty-seven people with a disability and/or mental health issue in Supported Residential Services in Victoria, Australia were interviewed using the ‘Lehman Quality of Life Questionnaire’. An investigation into the Quality of Life of one group of de-institutionalised residents revealed that issues remain. People in the Supported Residences appear to be no better off than when they were in institutions. The study identified that it was common for a resident to have no phone, no friends outside the residence, little or no family contact, no disposable money and no job. However, since there was no research conducted before de-institutionalisation, the impact of the policy change is difficult to determine. Applying ethical measures, such as the Capabilities approach, reveals that issues remain. Practical implications from this study are first, that positive measures need to be added to de-institutionalisation to achieve satisfactory outcomes and second, that policy makers would be better informed and likely more effective if data were collected before and after significant changes.

In this chapter, I analyse the ethics of organisations assessing applicants based on group risk statistics; for example, parole boards consider information predicting recidivism risk, and employers want to minimise the risk of selecting lower-productivity employees. The organisational rejection of applicants from risky groups is explored as a form of discrimination to help identify the distinct ethical implications for applicant autonomy from the use of group risk statistics. Contra arguments from Schoeman (1987) and Schauer (2003), I argue that there is a substantive difference between assessing applicants directly through group statistics rather than including ‘individualised’ evidence. This difference impacts on the agency of applicants in the process. As organisations have reason to statistically assess applicants, some considerations for increasing applicant agency in the process are suggested. These include focusing on the nature of the factors used to assess applicants (static or dynamic), the transparency of the process to applicants, and the use of statistics specific to individuals.