Ethical Awareness Professional Ethics Unit 7

Professional ethics carries additional moral responsibilities. It could mean professional individuals possess distinctive qualifications which make them unique in a society. Ethics is defined as the philosophical study of moral values and rules. What does the word ‘profession’ mean? ‘Profession’ means a type of job requires special training and that brings a fairly high status. Examples of professions, work connected with medicine, law and education..etc. Professional Ethics

Professional ethics are the rules governing the conduct, transactions and relationships within a profession and among its publics. The word professional ethics may at first blush, though may signify mere moral conduct, as been rightly chosen to normatively provide empirical evidence of the essentially to conform to professional standards and conduct, benefiting the importance of the profession itself. Various criteria and practices regarding professional ethics are described below. What is Professional ethics?

How to practice Professional Ethics? We have three criteria to practice professional ethics: 1. Knowledge: The job must include complicated skills, theoretical knowledge, a clear judgment and caution. Preparation of a person to do a job requires some formal education like technical studies as well as humanistic studies. This includes professional ethics.

2. Organization: Some organizations must be formed for the profession. These must be accepted by the public to set the standards for that profession, writing code of professional ethics and also these organizations have to represent that profession to the public. For e.g. Bar Association. 3. Public Good: The job must help the public by doing a favor to them quoted in its code of ethics. So generally it can be said that an occupation is considered as a profession only when professionals have had all the above mentioned criteria.

Responsibilities mentioned related with Professional Ethics Professional responsibilities are considered to be the most basic and comprehensive professional virtue in regard with Professional ethics. Responsibility refers to being morally responsible as a professional. Responsibilities related with professional ethics include a variety of specific virtues which are important in particular situations. Some of these virtues are: 1.Self direction 2.Public Spirited Virtues 3.Teamwork Virtues

These virtues are: 1. Self direction: These virtues in professional ethics are essential in exercising the moral autonomy and the responsibility. These virtues are divided into 2 groups. i) Virtues which give focus on understanding and gaining knowledge through perception. Examples are self- understanding and humble attitude of mind in assessing a character. ii) The second group focuses its attention towards commitment and understanding the actions such as courage, self-discipline, perseverance, loyalty to commitments, self respect and integrity.

2. Public spirited virtues: These virtues are based on the benefits of clients as well as general public who are affected by the work of others. Examples are justice, a sense of community and generosity. Generosity means helping others beyond minimum requirements. With respect to professional ethics generosity include the voluntary services and spending time, talent and money to the professional associations and local communities.

Team work virtues These virtues are known as ‘intellectual virtues’. These virtues include: 1. competence : being well prepared for the tasks. 2. diligence : alertness to danger and careful attention the tasks and creativity. 3. Integrity Moral integrity refers to the unity on the basis of moral concern and honesty. Integrity is the unity between responsibility of an individual in his personal and professional life.

4. Honesty is also a basic thing needed for integrity in addition to unity. Honesty is based on the aspects of truthfulness and trustworthiness. Honesty has two forms as follows: i) Honesty in act means the individual should not steal, manipulate accounts or get bribes and kickbacks. ii) Honesty in Speech means an individual should not mislead others by his speech. He should not tell lies and also not withhold the information pertaining to others. Other professional ethics virtues: Discretion: means that an employee should not interfere in the decisions taken by the employer or the client. He should not interfere with matters confidential information.

66 Self respect: Valuing oneself in some morally suitable ways is known as the self-respect. To some extent both terms self respect and self esteem are synonymous. But there are some peculiar differences. First, Self respect is a moral concept and self esteem is a psychological concept when talking about professional ethics. Secondly, self respect means valuing oneself whereas self esteem refers to having a positive attitude may be excessive or unwarranted.

 Self respect has 2 forms namely ‘recognition’ and ‘appraisal’. Recognition: is giving respect to other people as an individual. As per this, we have responsibility to show recognition – respect towards others and we should respect the rights of others as a sense of our own rights. Appraisal: means properly valuing ourselves as how well we face moral standards and our personal aims. Because of their good character, some people deserve higher respect. This is a goal of professional ethics.

Conclusion: All above mentioned virtues are the important facts while we practice professional ethics as a professional. It is a must to implement professional ethics in a professional’s life. Professional ethics will act as a standard to keep a healthy life of a social wellbeing.

End of Unit 7