[...]... specifying the source of the standards governing professional actions undertaken or authored on behalf of the client The grounding must show why the norms bind professionals and only professionals For if the norms bind all agents, citizens, or rational beings, then we will not have located the ground of Introduction 9 professional authority per se We will have offered instead a general theory of authority In... aided by professionals.”18 Consequently, any grounding of professional authority must legitimate the exercise of professional power in the eyes not only of professionals but also of clients, be they actual or potential Since the majority of clients served are thinking persons who do not repose trust indiscriminately, this grounding of professional authority is primarily concerned with specifying the conditions... champion their rights, on the other hand, mistrust the power of experts In order for the professional client relation to be moral, the professional, in their view, must be empowered by the client to act on the client’s behalf The empowering occurs when both parties agree to the terms and conditions of a fee-forservice contract specifying what the professional is to do for the client Each of these views... the fabled emperor, the professions appear to be bereft of any legitimate trappings of power While the nude emperor’s state was merely comic, that of the professions borders on the tragic We should not forget that professions represent the only mechanism we have for collectively providing 6 The Ground of Professional Ethics ourselves with the goods of health, legal justice, and spiritual peace If professionals... normative and 10 The Ground of Professional Ethics a descriptive enterprise The grounding is normative because we shall be trying to discover which standards or norms, if any, should regulate professional conduct It is descriptive because we cannot know whether professional authority is illegitimate until we examine the character of the professions The structure or character of the professions cannot... since authority must exist in the eyes of the clients as well as the professionals, the grounding must reveal why clients voluntarily entrust these norm-governed professionals with the power to affect their lives Although professionals and clients will turn out to be considerably more than correlatives of one another, the dictionary definitions are right as far as they go: professionals are persons who... to serve – i.e if they are to be professionals THE APPEAL OF THE EXPERT MODEL Many professionals will argue that they desire to use their skills to help people In order to assist clients, they must have the freedom to exercise their skills as they, not their clients, see fit If clients were able to help themselves, they would do so But the fact that clients voluntarily come to the professional reveals... upon whether an activity is professional and more upon whether people are effective at whatever they Introduction 5 do These critics remind us that the process of professionalization is not one of simply acquiring traits, whatever they may be, but rather one of developing skills and strategies for improving performance The process of professionalization is what matters most.11 To understand professionalization... question dominate the literature Professionals are thought to be trustworthy agents of clients either (1) because they are experts; or (2) because they are service providers who, for a fee, obey clients’ wills The first view is supported by many professionals who believe that their 16 The Ground of Professional Ethics superior knowledge and skill or expertise enables them to identify and then do the morally... 2 The Ground of Professional Ethics inherently good about professional practice Although professionals have traditionally been seen as acting in the spirit of public service, these antagonists deny that professionals are benefactors.3 On their view, the ancient Greek physicians erred in seeing themselves as “lovers of mankind.”4 Cicero was wrong to portray the attorney as a servant of the public whose . terminated? Should professionals resist political pressure? The Ground of Professional Ethics will help professionals and the public to re-think what professionals owe clients. It also explores the responsibilities. Introduction 1 2 The untrustworthiness of professional expertise 15 3 Delegitimating client contracts 34 4 The public pledge as the ground of professional authority 54 5 The legitimacy of the professions’. ideas of practice. One visible sign of these developments has been the proliferation of codes of ethics, or of professional conduct. The drafting of such a code provides an opportunity for professionals