Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles

Shows that virtue ethics offers a promising new approach to the ethics of professional roles.

Justin Oakley (Author), Dean Cocking (Author)

9780521793056, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 October 2001

204 pages
23.7 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.455 kg

'This excellent volume has something for everyone … It is a thought-provoking read [and] …offers a significant contribution to the ethics literature' Derek Sellman, Nursing Philosophy

Professionals, it is said, have no use for simple lists of virtues and vices. The complexities and constraints of professional roles create peculiar moral demands on the people who occupy them, and traits that are vices in ordinary life are praised as virtues in the context of professional roles. Should this disturb us, or is it naive to presume that things should be otherwise? Taking medical and legal practice as key examples, Justin Oakley and Dean Cocking develop a rigorous articulation and defence of virtue ethics, contrasting it with other types of character-based ethical theories and showing that it offers a promising new approach to the ethics of professional roles. They provide insights into the central notions of professional detachment, professional integrity, and moral character in professional life, and demonstrate how a virtue-based approach can help us better understand what ethical professional-client relationships would be like.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The nature of virtue ethics
2. The regulative ideals of morality and the problem of friendship
3. A virtue ethics approach to professional roles
4. Ethical models of the good general practitioner
5. Professional virtues, ordinary vices
6. Professional detachment in health care and legal practice
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & political philosophy [HPS]