ABSTRACT
Although the terms ethics and morality are more or less interchangeable, ethics, rather than morality, has the wider circulation today. So we hear of ethical investment, ethical foreign policy, or ethics in the market place. Ethics is big business. Indeed, there is a growing market for universities to teach courses in professional ethics to aspiring or practising doctors, engineers, nurses, police officers, managers of every type and business people in every sector. At first sight, this would seem a very natural development for academic philosophers, an easy market in which to build a new niche perhaps. As well as figuring, often prominently, in many university courses and disciplines, ethics has a central and long-standing place in philosophy departments, even if it is not, as has been claimed, ‘the backbone of the curriculum’ (as was proclaimed by the Vice Chancellor of The Open University in a keynote speech on ‘Ethics and the curriculum’ in a conference on teaching ethics in higher education at Roehampton University in 2005). In the discipline of philosophy, the history of moral or ethical thinking, moral theory, theoretical and applied ethics have long been taught by trained philosophers, most of whom begin as generalists, but later specialise in ethics. What better resource could be found to meet the demand for professional ethics in universities than for academic philosophers to produce professional ethics courses with professionals as the new consumers?
