ABSTRACT
The related questions of what constitutes a profession and what constitutes professional practice have received a great deal of attention over recent years. A core concern within this literature has been to highlight and seek to understand the ethical dimensions of professions and, indeed, what it means to be a profession. This chapter provides an initial survey of the existing literature on the ethical work of professions. The first section considers briefly what constitutes a profession in general terms, before turning to the more specific ethical dimensions of professional activity. In doing so, it pays attention to the managerialism, accountability and efficiency that have been witnessed across professions over the last 30 years. In the second section, attention moves to the value of a virtue-based account of professional ethics. In this section, the Jubilee Centre’s neo-Aristotelian approach to virtues and character is referenced in order to argue that professional ethics involves and requires professionals to act with phronesis – or professional wisdom and judgement.
