This social contract is more symbolic and explanatory than real.
Codes allow the profession to document to society that it has developed proper standards and intends to enforce them. They express the profession's trust in society to keep its side of the bargain by granting autonomy, prestige, and monopoly. Of course this contract has never been explicitly enacted at a point in historical time. But the notion of a social contract with a mutually beneficial exchange (a quid pro quo) provides a useful device for modeling the relation that has actually evolved between society and its professions.
Professions and responsibility
Professions have been created to exercise stewardship over knowledge and skill domains.
Exercising stewardship over X generally means watching over, preserving, protecting, and even improving X. Stewardship is a forward-looking kind of responsibility similar to the responsibility that a parent exercises toward his or her children. The steward is a trusted servant or agent of the landowner who acts in the owner's place while the later is absent or incapacitated.
"Stewardship," thus, refers to the profession's responsibility to safeguard its specific domain of knowledge and skill. This domain is essential to society in some way (it provides society with a basic, common good) and society delegates responsibility for this domain to its members who are specially suited to exercise it.
So, generally speaking, professions can be characterized in terms of epistemological and ethical responsibilities.
The epistemological responsibility refers to stewardship over the knowledge and skills that characterizes the profession. The profession preserves, transmit, and advances this domain of knowledge and skill. (Epistemology = study of knowledge.)
The ethical dimension refers to the responsibility of the profession to safeguard knowledge and skill for the good of society. Society trusts the profession to do this for the sake of the comnmon good. Society also trusts the profession to regulate its own activities by developing and enforcing ethical and professional standards.
Objections to and mischievous side effects of codes of ethics
These objections are taken from john ladd, "the quest for a code of professional ethics: an intellectual and moral confusion." this article can be found in deborah g. johnson, editor, (1991) ethical issues in engineering, new jersey: prentice hall: 130-136. the author of this module has taken some liberties in this presentation.
Codes "confuse ethics with law-making" (Ladd, 130). Ethics is deliberative and argumentative while law-making focuses on activities such as making and enforcing rules and policies.
A code of ethics is an oxymoron. Ethics requires autonomy of the individual while a code assumes the legitimacy of an external authority imposing rule and order on that individual.
Obedience to moral law for autonomous individuals is motivated by respect for the moral law. On the other hand, obedience to civil law is motivated by fear of punishment. Thus, Ladd informs us that when one attaches "discipinary procedures, methods of adjudication and sanctions, formal and informal, to the principles that one calls 'ethical' one automatically converts them into legal rules or some other kind of authoritative rules of conduct...."(Ladd 131) Accompanying code provisions with punishments replaces obedience based on respect for the (moral) law with conformity based on fear of punishment.
Codes lead to the dangerous tendency to reduce the ethical to the legal. Ethical principles can be used to judge or evaluate a disciplinary or legal code. But the reverse is not true; existing laws cannot trump ethical principles in debates over ethical issues and ethical decisions. As Ladd puts it, "That is not to say that ethics has no relevance for projects involving the creation, certification and enforcement of rules of conduct for members of certain groups....[I]ts [ethics's]role in connection with these projects is to appraise, criticize and perhaps even defend (or condemn) the projects themselves, the rules, regulations and procedures they prescribe, and the social and political goals and institutions they represent." (Ladd 130)
Codes have been used to justify immoral actions . Professional codes have been misued by individuals to justify actions that go against common morality. For example, lawyers may use the fact that the law is an adversarial system to justify lying. Ladd responds in the following way to this dodge: "{T}here is no special ethics belonging to professionals. Professionals are not, simply because they are professionals, exempt from the common obligations, duties and responsibilities that are binding on ordinary people. They do not have a special moral status that allows them to do things that no one else can." (Ladd 131)
Mischievous side-effects of codes (from john ladd)
Codes make professionals complacent . (Ladd 135) First, they reduce the ethical to the minimally acceptable. Second, they cover up wrongful actions or policies by calling them--within the context of the code--"ethical". For example, the NSPE code of ethics used to prohibit competitive bidding. Enshrining it in their code of ethics gave it the appearance of being ethical when in fact it was motivated primarily by self interest. This provision was removed when it was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court for violating the Anti-Trust law.
Because codes focus on micro-ethical problems,
"they tend to divert attention from macro-ethical problems of a profession." (Ladd 135) For example, in Puerto Rico, the actions of the Disciplinary Tribunal of the Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico tend to focus on individual engineers who violate code provisions concerned with individual acts of corruption; these include conflicts of interest, failing to serve as faithful agents or trustees, and participating in corrupt actions such as taking or giving bribes. On the other hand, the CIAPR does not place equal attention on macro-ethical problems such as "the social responsibilities of professionals as a group" (Ladd 132), the role of the profession and its members in society (Ladd 135), and the "role professions play in determining the use of technology, its development and expansion, and the distribution of the costs." (Ladd 135)
Exercise: questions for reflection
Which of Ladd's criticisms apply to the Pirate Creed?
How does your group's code of ethics stand in relation to Ladd's criticisms?
Do Ladd's objections apply t the ABET, NSPE, or CIAPR codes?
