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Professional Codes as Social Contracts

26 July, 2019 - 12:01
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  • What some have said about defining ethics could also be applied to defining a profession: it's a bit like "nailing jello to a tree." Nevertheless, we can make to reasonable claims about professions: tye can be treated as social contracts, and they have someting to do with specialized knowledge. If these two claims hold, then a third claim can be made, namely, that professions have an ineliminable ethical dimension.
  • A legitimate contract between two parties requires a quid pro quo (a mutually beneficial exchange) and free consent (consent that includes full information and excludes force or deception). The social contract between engineering and society can be pictured int he following way:
Table 4.4 Profession as Social Contract

Society grants to Profession

Profession grants to Society

Autonomy

Self-Regulation

Prestige

Primacy of public health, safety, and welfare

Monopoly

Developing and enforcing ethical and professional standards

Society grants autonomy, prestige, and monopoly control to the profession of engineering.

  1. Autonomy includes freedom from regulation and control from the outside through cumbersome laws, regulations, and statutes.
  2. Prestige includes high social status and generous pay.
  3. Monopoly status implies that the profession of engineering itself determines who can practice engineering and how it should be practiced.
  4. The profession promises to use its autonomy responsibly by regulating itself. it does this by developing and enforcing professional and ethical standards. By granting prestige to the profession, society has removed the need for the profession to collectively bargain for its self-interest.
  5. Not having to worry about its collective self-interest, the profession is now free to hold paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public.
  6. This contract explains why professions develop codes of ethics. Codes document to the public the profession's commitment to carry out its side of the social contract, namely, to hold paramount public welfare. They can do this because society will honor its side of the contract, namely, to remove from the profession the need to fight for its self-interest

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 knowl edge 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 common good. Society also trusts the profession to regulate its own activities by developing and enforcing ethical and professional standards.