INTRODUCTION
Ethics is a major branch of philosophy
that has morality as its subject matter. Ethics concerns itself with questions
of both personal and public morality. As a branch of philosophy, ethics have
sub branches which include applied ethics. Applied ethics is specially marked out
from ethics, because of its focus on issues of practical concern; it is
distinguished as the part of ethics that give keen attention to practical
issues and controversies that affect the human person and his society. In
matters of controversies, applied ethics is concerned with supplying private
ethical perspectives and providing guidelines for public policy making.
Applied ethics as a discipline includes
the areas of professional ethics and bioethics. Professional ethics examines
the controversies, ethical issues and challenges met by a wide range of workers
in their professions or places of work. Professional ethics treats specific ethical
issues like confidentiality, truth telling and so on. Ethics here involves codes
of conduct. Bioethics on the other hand is usually at work in medical ethics;
it is the study of moral, political and social issues that results in biology
and other life sciences which involves human wellbeing directly or indirectly.
It specifically treats the controversies that arise from new developments in
medical technology and improvements. However, in this paper I will attempt an
elaboration on professional ethics and bioethics with regards to their
concerns, and their specific areas of focus.
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
Profession as a term has different connotations,
but here we are concerned of profession as an occupational activity, a job that
requires special training, skills and a high level of education. It is any
occupation, job, or vocation that requires advanced expertise (skills and
knowledge), self-regulation, and concerted service to the public good.[1] A profession is
characterized sociologically by its members’ scientifically grounded expertise
and their service ideal. On the other hand, Ethics is the branch of philosophy
that deals with moral principles; it is a system of moral principles and rules.
On a compound sense, conjoining the two words, professional ethics is the field
of applied ethics which aims at defining, clarifying and criticizing
professional works and the values typical to it. Every profession has its
service ideals or codes associated with the typical values of its constituting members.
The concept of professional ethics is to be understood in different ways, but
in this paper we are more interested on the philosophic understanding of it.
Thus it is a code of values and norms that guide practical decisions of
professionals in their specializations.
From the academic perspective, the idea of
professional ethics is a subset of applied ethics where basic ethical
principles are employed in the evaluation of the goals, methods and practices
of diverse professions in such a way that the overall well-being of members and
of the society and public would be adequately protected and effectively
enhanced by professional practice. Professional ethics concerns the moral
issues that arise because of the specialist knowledge that professionals attain,
and how the use of this knowledge should be governed when providing a service
to the public. Professional ethics examines the role of ethics in a
professional’s life. As a discipline and a practice, there are three important
dimensions of professional ethics which includes: unethical professional
behavior, professionalism, and philosophical interest.
DIMENSIONS OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
UNETHICAL PROFESSIONAL BEHAVIOUR
In this dimension, the way professionals see professional ethics
is specially taken into consideration. This dimension concerns the way
professionals conforms to the regulations of the codes of their specific
professions. When professionals consider ethics, they put into consideration
the acts that go against professional conduct and consequential sanctions to
them. These involves the way professionals consider issues that goes against
the code of conducts of their profession, issues like sex, lies, bribe and so
on. For example issues concerning a medical doctor raping his/her patient, a
lawyer collecting bribe from a client, a lecturer demanding sex from a student and
such other issues of this kind.
PROFESSIONALISM
This dimension concerns the leadership of particular professions.
Professionalism is the combination of all the qualities connected to trained
and skilled people. This dimension concerns issues on how to keep the values
and maintain the dignity of a particular profession. Professionals are not to
indulge in actions that would tarnish the reputation of their specific
professions. Professionals should create good public image for their
profession.
PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST
This dimension involves the dilemmas that a professional
encounters in the course of doing his professional work. This concerns the
expertise of a professional in dealing with really difficult situation
regarding his profession. For instance a priest is meant to be faithful to his confessional
secrecy, no matter what the situation may be, but in a situation where a person
confesses that he killed the priest’s mother, how is the priest going to handle
the situation, under what condition can the priest violate the confessional
secrecy or confidentiality? Another example is: how is a doctor going to
disclose some laboratory test results that are not positive to his patience that
have high blood pressure?
FUNCTIONS OF PROFESSIONAL
ETHICS
Professional ethics embodies the right and
obligations that are peculiar to specific professions. It stipulates codes of
conduct. The professional codes of conduct imply that every profession has its
own autonomy; its members’ expertise is based on professionalism. The
professionals’ work exemplifies a service ideal. A profession therefore, can
influence the social decisions that regulate its members’ works and their
related rights and obligations.[2] In doing this, there are
professional codes of conduct.
The professional code of conduct moderates
the actions and activities of the professional within his profession. The
professional codes of conduct exhibit duties, right, and obligations of the
members of a particular profession. The essential roles of professional codes
includes: inspiration and guidance, creating good public image, protecting the
status quo, promotion of interest, education and mutual understanding etc. Many
professional organizations have codes of professional conduct. They provide a
general statement of ethical values and remind people in the profession that
ethical behavior is an essential part of their job. The codes provide reminders
about specific professional responsibilities. They provide valuable guidance
for new or young members of the profession who want to behave ethically but do
not know what is expected of them, people whose limited experience has not
prepared them to be alert to difficult ethical situations and to handle them
appropriately.
THE
OBJECTIVE IMPORTANCE OF ETHICS IN A PROFESSIONAL LIFE
The
idea of morality is social; it is meaningful because of human interactions with
one another in the society. The objective importance of ethics to professionals
and their professions is primarily to regulate the professional’s activities
and to guide his behavior in a way that will keep the dignity of the profession
and as well enhance social stability. It also aims at providing an adequate
context within which all members of a particular profession can effectively
pursue the interest and goal of their profession in a way that is mutually
beneficial. It is in an attempt to achieve the above objectives that standards
are set (codes of conduct) to specify actions and character trait that are good
or bad, right or wrong, justified or unjustified in a particular profession and by extension,
to the society at large. These standards provide the basis for the specific
moral judgment made about specific conducts. Professional ethics equally
justifies the fundamental ethical principles that are appealed to in the
various professions through ethical analysis.
BIOETHICS
This is the branch of applied ethics that
studies the philosophical, social, and legal issues arising in medicine and the
life sciences. The range of issues considered to fall within the purview of
bioethics varies depending on how broadly the field is defined. In one common
usage, bioethics is more or less equivalent to medical ethics, or biomedical
ethics.[3]
Etymologically, bioethics is derived from
two Greek words: bios and ethicos. Bios means life and ethicos
means right or wrong, good or bad. Bioethics deals with ethical problems
that concerns life and life process, it can be referred to as biological ethics.
Bioethics therefore is the branch of applied ethics
that studies the philosophical, social, and legal issues arising in medicine
and the life sciences. It is chiefly concerned with human life and well-being,
though sometimes, it also treats ethical questions relating to the non-human
biological environment.[4] It is the discipline that
deals with the ethical implications of biological research and its implications
especially in the field of medicine. Bioethics evolved based on the development
in medicine, molecular biology, gene technology and generally modern
biotechnology. The general motive of bioethics is to protect life. However, as
a discipline of morality, there are controversies in bioethics which involves:
the issue of euthanasia, abortion, infant stem cell research, cloning, human
experimentation etc. but before I address these issues, I will attempt a
discussion of the issues of bioethics in the health care context.
ISSUES IN BIOETHICS: THE
HEALTH CARE CONTEXT
There are many contextual issues in
bioethics as well as philosophical questions, and these issues can be grouped
into several categories. Some of the categories concern the relationship
between doctors and their patients. These categories address issues that arise
from the conflicts between a doctor's duty to promote the health of his or her
patient and the patient’s right to make choices with regards to accepting or
rejecting particular treatments, a right that in the medical context is usually
taken to be encompassing; the right to be fully informed about one's condition
and a right to be consulted about the course of one's treatment. Is a doctor
obliged to disclose to a patient that he or she is terminally ill if doing so
would hasten the patient's death? If a patient with a life-threatening illness refuses treatment should his or her wishes be respected?
Should patients always be permitted to refuse the use of extraordinary
life-support measures? However, these questions are complicated when the
patient in question is incapable of making rational decisions in his own
interest, as in the case of infants and children, patients suffering from
disabling psychiatric disorders, and comatose patients.[5]
OTHER ISSUES IN BIOETHICS
There are many other issues and questions
in bioethics, no matter how they are addressed have social and legal
dimensions. For example, advances in medical technology have the potential to
create disproportionate disadvantages for some social groups, either by being
applied in ways that harm members of the groups directly or by encouraging the
adoption of social policies that discriminate unfairly against them. [6] However, some of these
issues include euthanasia, abortion, cloning, stem cell research etc.
EUTHANASIA
Euthanasia
is a practice of mercifully ending a person’s life in order to
release the person from an incurable disease, intolerable suffering, or
undignified death. The word euthanasia derives from the Greek for “good
death” and originally referred to intentional mercy killing. When medical
advances made prolonging the lives of dying or comatose patients possible, the
term euthanasia was also applied to a lack of action to prevent death.[7]
ABORTION
Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy
before birth, it is the expulsion of the foetus or embryo from its
mother’s womb before it is viable. This implies killing the foetus. Some abortions are
natural occurrence, in cases where a foetus does not develop normally or the
cases where the mother has an injury or disorder that prevents her from
carrying the pregnancy to term. This spontaneous abortion is commonly referred
to as a miscarriage. Other abortions are induced in the sense that they are intentionally
done maybe because a pregnancy is unwanted or in cases where it presents a risk
to a woman’s health, or because the foetus is likely to have severe physical or
mental health problems.
STEM CELL RESEARCH
Stem
cells are said to be cells that are capable of self-regeneration and produces
specialized cell type. Research on stem cells has been going on for many years
but due to recent advances in establishing stem cells from foetuses this has
been an important new field of research. Studies of stem cells will help in
understanding the development and function of organs in mammals. These studies
may also offer a way of treating different diseases for which there is no cure
available. The main problem stem cell researchers have working with human stem
cells is the accessibility of enough fertilized embryos and fetuses. For some
experiments there is also a need to create new embryos by cloning, a procedure
called therapeutic cloning as cells derived from such embryos can possibly be
used for treatment of several human diseases.[8]
CLONING
Cloning is the process of generating a
genetically identical copy of a cell
or an organism. Cloning happens all the time in nature, when a cell replicates
itself asexually without any genetic
alteration or recombination.
In biomedical research, cloning is widely defined as the duplication of
biological material such as DNA of individual cells for scientific purposes
like research or study. DNA segments are replicated exponentially by a process
referred to as polymerase chain reaction. The types of cloning that generate
more ethical controversy involves the generation of cloned embryos, which are
genetically identical to the organism from which they are derived and the
subsequent use of them for research, reproductive or therapeutic purposes
especially the human embryo.
IMPACTS OF BIOETHICS
As
a biological ethics, which deal primarily with life, bioethics had initiated a
significant improvement and change in the standards for the treatment of the
sick and research interests. Because of these significant changes and
improvements, health care professionals have come to the understanding that the
patient’s right is legal and is to be respected; the patient have the right to
know, refuse or accept a therapy. And in terms of research, every researcher
now understands that the participants of their research have the same rights as
they, and review boards can evaluate proposed research. Bioethics places
restrictions on infant stem cell research and cloning.
CONCLUSION
Ethics
is a philosophical discipline that is basically concerned with morality. Ethics
as a discipline is specially marked out for a special purpose: to help maintain
order in professional life and give guide lines which would serve as codes of
conduct to guide the activities of the professionals in the areas of
specialization. Much more, ethics helps to address controversial issues that affects
the society at large, issues that pose danger to the society and its
inhabitants.
Ethics
generally addresses issues of morality and well-being. As a discipline, ethics
is divided into subparts and this paper concerned itself with professional
ethics and bioethics. Professional ethics addresses issues that come up in the
professional field while bioethics addresses issues that have to do with life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. R.
S. Naagarazan, A Textbook on Professional
Ethics and Human Values, (New Delhi: New Age International Limited, Publishers, 2002).
2. Encyclopedia of life support system,
Institutional Issues Involving Ethics and Justice VOL. I- The
Philosophy of Professional Ethics.
3. Encyclopædia
Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite.
Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014.
4. Microsoft
® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
5. Teaching
Bioethics, Report from a seminar, Organized by the Nordic Committee on
Bioethics, November 2001.
6. Global
bioethics is covered in Bioethics: Special Issue: IV World Congress of the
International Association of Bioethics (July 1999).
[1] R.
S. Naagarazan, A Textbook on Professional
Ethics and Human Values, (New Delhi: New Age
International Limited, Publishers, 2002), p. 29.
[2] Timo Airaksinen, Encyclopedia of life support system, Institutional Issues Involving
Ethics and Justice VOL. I- The
Philosophy of Professional Ethics.
[3] "Bioethics." Encyclopædia
Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite.
Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014.
[4]
ibid
[5]
Ibid.
[6] Global bioethics is covered in Bioethics: Special Issue: IV World
Congress of the International Association of Bioethics (July 1999).
[7] Beauchamp, Tom L. "Euthanasia." Microsoft®
Encarta® 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008.
[8]
Teaching Bioethics, Report from a seminar, Organized
by the Nordic Committee on Bioethics, November 2001, p. 21.
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