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Value Profiles for Professional Ethics

15 January, 2016 - 09:08
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/05c97be4-3ad0-47f2-b5a7-a75d0ad90ab7@3.72
  1. Definition -A valuerefers to a claim about what is worthwhile, what is good. A value is a single word or phrase that identifies something as being desirable for human beings. Brincat and Wike, Morality and the Professional Life: Values at Work
  2. Reasonableness -Defusing disagreement and resolving conflicts through integration. Characteristics include seeking relevant information, listening and responding thoughtfully to others, being open to new ideas, giving reasons for views held, and acknowledging mistakes and misunderstandings. (From Michael Pritchard, Reasonable Children)
  3. Responsibility -The ability to develop moral responses appropriate to the moral issues and problems that arise in one's day-to-day experience. Characteristics include avoiding blame shifting, designing overlapping role responsibilities to fill responsibility "gaps", expanding the scope and depth of general and situation-specific knowledge, and working to expand control and power.
  4. Respect -Recognizing and working not to circumvent the capacity of autonomy in each individual. Characteristics include honoring rights such as privacy, property, free speech, due process, and participatory rights such as informed consent. Disrespect circumvents autonomy by deception, force, or manipulation.
  5. Justice -Giving each his or her due. Justice breaks down into kinds such as distributive (dividing benefits and burdens fairly), retributive (fair and impartial administration of punishments), adminis trative (fair and impartial administration of rules), and compensatory (how to fairly recompense those who have been wrongfully harmed by others).
  6. Trust -According to Solomon, trust is the expectation of moral behavior from others.
  7. Honesty -Truthfulness as a mean between too much honesty (bluntness which harms) and dishonesty (deceptiveness, misleading acts, and mendaciousness).
  8. Integrity -A meta-value that refers to the relation between particular values. These values are integrated with one another to form a coherent, cohesive and smoothly functioning whole. This resembles Solomon's account of the virtue of integrity.