Professional Ethics

Professional ethics is a branch of applied philosophy and can be understood as the application of ethical concepts and principles to professional practice. Questions relating to the justification of these theories and concepts are also part of professional ethics.

A key element in ethics is the identification and justification of rules or standards that can be used to distinguish right and wrong behavior and identify what ought to be done. These rules and standards can be used by people to identify what they ought to do in various circumstances and to evaluate particular behavior. Likewise, professional ethics is concerned with rules and standards that distinguish right from wrong. These rules and standards constitute the principles of professional conduct and are the foundation for professional ethics. They are used by practitioners to identify what they ought to do in particular situations, and they can be used to evaluate professional behavior.

Professional ethics is grounded in the belief that professional roles require particular norms and principles to guide behavior. The focus is on the special relationships between practitioner and client or patient [Page 1694]and what that relationship entails. Professional ethics does not encompass all the norms and principles that apply to everyone but only those that pertain to individuals in their professional roles. Professional ethics, then, is concerned with the moral principles and values relevant to the roles and conduct of professionals in society and can therefore be thought of as a system of norms that can be used to justify and inform beliefs and behaviors.

Professional ethics is a recognized field of study with an established academic literature. Since the 1970s, there has been increasing attention paid to applied ethics, and subdisciplines have developed in a wide range of areas, such as accounting ethics, banking ethics, engineering ethics, teaching ethics, real estate ethics, and so on, in addition to the more established areas of bioethics or medical ethics and legal ethics. The study of professional ethics can take various forms. The most common approaches are concerned with one or more of the following dimensions: the ideal norms that a particular professional should aspire to, the common norms that are actually accepted by most professionals, the elements contained in the codes of professional associations, or the contractual relationship between the profession and society.