Monday 11 July 2016

Professional Ethics and Pride

Zak S wrote a post about professionalism. I was going to use it as a springboard to launch into some horrendously pretentious rant about Alistair MacIntyre and Aristotle, but I'll spare you that. Instead, I'll just say this:

Professional ethics are important - or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that professional ethics were once actually thought of as being very important but are now often only nominally important in my professions. Professional ethics are the kind of thing that would once, in a (likely non-existent golden age) have prevented your local bank manager from granting you a loan because he was worried it might not be good for your long-term financial health; or which still prevent doctors from acting against the best interests of their patients or teachers against the best interests of their students. They tend still to be alive in the kind of professions which actually think of themselves as professions - doctors, accountants, lawyers (don't laugh), teachers, actuaries, whatever - but even there they probably have been somewhat eroded. There is some suggestion that this may be because we have become very tick-boxy and superficial about what "ethics" means, and this has resulted in a sense of what is called "ethical fading" in the literature: a tendency among people to see ethics as something that is mostly about process and fulfilling requirements and consequently not to consider whether their actual behaviour is ethical. Form over content, in other words - as long as you are doing the correct procedure that must QED mean you are behaving ethically (even if you actually aren't).

Professional ethics also seem to me to be tied to something we often call "professional pride" - the idea that you have a job to do and that it is important to do it well, for the sake of one's own self respect and for the sake of the image of the profession as a whole. The ideal marriage of professional ethics and professional pride is, let's say, a civil servant who refuses to cut corners not just because it is "the wrong thing to do" but also because it may have negative consequences for the public and for him- or herself; and because he or she actually cares about how the public perceives civil servants.

Anybody who has a profession (and a conscience) probably recognises that there are such things as professional ethics and professional pride and that they matter. Professionalism isn't the same thing as commercialism, for this reason. Commercialism is about making money. Professionalism is about doing a job properly. Everybody also probably recognises that the world works at its best when people who have jobs to do perform them in a professional manner (i.e. with professional pride and a sense of professional ethics).

So while I take the point that the spirit of amateurism (of doing something out of love) is very important in being a DIY RPG designer, I also think that a heavy dose of professional ethics and professional pride are by no means bad things. God knows there are enough failed Kickstarters, unpaid freelancers, doomed projects and pieces of shoddy rubbish out there to suggest that being a good DIY RPG designer means having the right mix of amateurism and professional ethics and professional pride. I by no means having anything like the right mix: I am as lazy, feckless and unethical as they come. But that doesn't mean I can't at least try.


24 comments:

  1. Yes, it is shame that professional/ism has come to be used the way Zak S uses it. I hate the way that the injunction to 'be professional!' almost always means 'do what your boss says', rather than behave according to the standards of your 'profession'.

    But professions have been undermined, particularly since the late 1970s. Talcott Parsons imagined that it was the moral system of 'the professions' that would protect capitalist societies from being driven only by the cash nexus. Pity was, he imagined that the newly emerging class of 'professional' managers and executives would have some ethical code, whether explict or implicit, in the way that doctors, teachers, lawyers etc. [ought to] have. Hah!

    But as we strip away the right and responsibility for professions to act professionally - look at teachers; look how the scope of using professional judgement, or being respected as a professional capable of autonomous action, has been eroded - then there is little purpose to having a ethical code, as behaviour becomes increasingly determined by 'what the boss says'.

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    1. I never expected to see Talcott Parsons referenced in a comment on this blog!

      We are living in post-trust societies, if I can use so pretentious a term. For whatever reason, leaving anything to professional judgement is anathema in the modern day. I tend to think this has crowded out autonomous ethical thinking, with potentially disastrous results.

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    2. The scourge of neoliberalism teaches us that the only value of economic activity is maximized profits for the shareholders and bonus payments for the managers. You don't have to like it, but as it is famously known, "there is no alternative".

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    3. Neoliberalism is one of those terms that can mean anything. We don't live in a 'neoliberal' society if that's how you choose to define it. The reality is thankfully a lot messier, I think.

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  2. I assume Zak S would basically agree with you. It's a semantic issue. Your "professional pride" seems similar to what we might call Zak's "amateur pride." You do something well for the sake of it, not just to make money or impress your boss, etc.

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    1. Professionalism is more complicated than that, though. Sometimes it is about making money or impressing your boss, because you have duties in those areas. Nobody is an accountant because they love accountancy. But you can be an accountant who takes professional pride in providing an excellent and important service to his clients - and who also takes ethics seriously by not taking advantage of tax loopholes, say.

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    2. ==Nobody is an accountant because they love accountancy.

      That's a dumb thing to say.

      ==But you can be an accountant who takes professional pride in providing an excellent and important service to his clients - and who also takes ethics seriously by not taking advantage of tax loopholes, say.

      That is cretinous. Professionals work as effectively as they can for their clients in whatever system they find themselves, and *that* is ethical. 'Ethical' as you use it is repulsive virtue signaling. Grow up, you are not an undergrad anymore.

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    3. Nonsense. What about when accountant are acting as auditors, or when a company enters administration? There have been numerous cases in which the accountants are caught between multiple competing interests - in which an ethical code beyond 'profit' would have be helpful. But I guess a pursuit of anything as repulsive as the common good is anathema.

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    4. Kent, virtue signalling is only virtue signalling if it is done in the open. It's perfectly possible for people to think about the effects of their actions beyond the immediate horizon without it being virtue signalling. In fact, the knee jerk response of "You're just virtue signalling" is the mindset of a real undergraduate - a nice way of never having to actually think about the common good and a brilliant excuse for being a self-centred prick.

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    5. No. Virtue Signaling is a brilliant concept which eviscerates feminists and SJW by drawing attention to their lack of interest in truth, and their lack of sophistication in investigating truth (lacking a hard-science education), since their entire concentration is on projecting an aura of NICENESS no matter how incoherent or illogical.

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    6. By definition virtue signalling means signalling. It is perfectly possible to act virtuously without signalling the fact that you are doing so.

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    7. We are not talking about secretly purported self-deluding acts of virtue. We are talking about you broadcasting your virtue by declaiming the proper way for accountants to behave ethically, even though it would exactly oppose their professional ethics.

      It is people like you, liberal winky wanky lefty wishy washy academics who have invited a complete dunce like Trump onto the stage because almost everyone in the western world is sick of politically correct virtue signalling, which is a sort of shitty religious mania. Can you imagine for a second that there is zero actual virtue in your thoughts, and all you can do is try to think as correctly as you can according to whatever intelligence you have.

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    8. Look you are no - isms, right? Or did I get that wrong? You are a lawyer, is there such a one as an Ethical lawyer as you describe it? A lawyer who will tell the cops his client is a guilty cunt?

      I think you have, understandably, wobbled under the financial agitation of being an osr luminary.

      I couldn't care less if you make a fortune, but everyone so far who has tried to make money from this hobby has swiftly become a silly cunt, addressing a mob of fools.

      Turn back! Be a man!

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    9. Professional ethics of a barrister preclude him from asking his client if he's guilty or not.

      I would have thought anybody with half a brain who reads the blog regularly would know have figure out I'm a Tory. But keep tilting at your phantom virtue-signalling liberal left windmills by all means. You'll be telling me you're a Men's Rights Activist next.

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    10. That's weak. You are not operating on my plane.

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    11. "You are not operating on my plane." screeched the hysterical rhombus at the geomatic surgeon.

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  3. this part was meant to address this use of "professional" (as it is used OUTside primarily creative fields):
    "
    A lot of time when folks talk about "professional" they are using it as as a synonym for quality (production quality or content quality or customer service quality). I'd like to think that on this score we've been beyond professional at least as it's defined in this business, I haven't heard anyone disagree.

    However "professional" can also refer to the creators' priorities and style of behavior...
    "
    ....and that's when I talk about how "professional" can mean bad things in creative projects

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    1. I think there is more to it than quality, though. There really are things like professional ethics and the image of the profession, and they do matter to a lot of individual professionals.

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    2. Are the practical results of that anything _other_ than what we would call "quality service" ?

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    3. Engineering is arguably creative.

      One could quibble about quality and cost being tradeoffs, and say that chasing quality past diminishing returns into sheer in-economy is unprofessional. :)

      Professionalism as minimizing controversy: There are certain popular policy fads that overlap with engineering decision space. The people responsible for these fads largely do not have an engineering background. A lot of people also support the idea that consensus matters, and that polling scientists is a legitimate source for analytical data that engineers must base their decisions on.

      Under Zak's model, the professional thing to do would seem to be avoid controversy, make decisions that satisfy consensus, or even defer decisions.

      Under noisms' model, we'd look at engineer teachings on general solutions to that type of problem. Engineering practice is not a debate society, a trolling club, or fighting for fight's sake. What matters is results. If engineers wanted consensus making engineering decisions, engineers would give consensus permission to sign and stamp documents as a professional engineer. Specific entities sign, seal, or stamp documents as a professional engineer, and are answerable. Furthermore, it is strongly suggested that an engineer only speak in public with care and on topics they are competent to discuss.

      We actually do see both.

      Publications of some of the engineering professional societies show signs of being written to the taste of bureaucrats and the like in love with fashion.

      Conversely, there are PEs who only stamp and seal their own work, or work which they supervised, which is in their professional judgement correct to the best of their knowledge. Which may have no relation to what the fad suggests. Where it differs, they may refrain from going out it public and calling out "all y'all innumerate sons of Boche". The areas a fad may be wrong on often are much broader than an engineer's area of practice makes them competent to discuss.

      (I suspect that some of the aversion to controversy that Zak attributes to professionalism is a broader social thing. If there is a growing sentiment that some different ideas are evil, must be punished, and can be punished by economic means, there is an incentive for those that fear economic risk to hide their positions, or not hold positions. Yes, refusing to defend attracts predators, and hence is a really bad strategy. However, it is difficult to form a group willing to defend a specific thing, unless that is a purpose of the group. An organization that focuses on defending an idea is likely less effective at doing entirely other things, which may be what pays the bills.)

      Zak also neglected to mention loss leaders as a marketing strategy, perhaps for lack of space.

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    4. @Zak: It depends how you define "quality service". I don't think that teachers, doctors, accountants, lawyers, etc. conceive of their work as just being about providing a "quality service", and the practical results are much broader than that. Most lawyers at least have some understanding that law has a role in keeping society together and restraining power, even if they don't participate in that directly. The same is true of most if not all professions - doing a good job is important, but what "doing a good job" means is much broader than just providing a quality service.

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  4. @ Noisms:

    Um...I agree with you (your original post). A lot of this other discussion is a little over my head, I'm afraid.

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  5. I didn't see the word 'engineer' anywhere, which is usually the first that comes to my mind on this topic.

    1. Incompetent engineers kill people. 2. Engineering might be defined as those problems of human life and death that can be solved with common sense and math. 3. Recently in history, people from several societies took practiced engineering in very serious manner. Doing this, and delivering, earned a lot of public trust. 4. This doesn't mean that there weren't many engineers being disciplined for all sorts of horrible things.

    It will be interesting to see what effects societal changes have on upcoming cohorts of engineers.

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