Professions in Ethical Focus

“Corporate accounting fraud, collapsing bridges and cranes, journalistic scandals about plagiarism and confidentiality and dramas at the nexus of law and medicine all raise important issues about the nature of the professions and their ethical foundations. To help inform our understanding of these matters, Fritz Allhoff and Anand Vaidya have assembled an important anthology, Professions in Ethical Focus, which collects seminal articles and new essays by leading authors into a single volume. This presentation allows readers to appreciate both the similarities across professions and the distinctiveness of each. Challenging questions and instructive points emerge from this treatment. Do the morality and the character of each profession derive from a general sense of civic virtue or the distinctive social role of the profession? Are central professional commitments endemic to individual professions or invariant across them? In sum, this is a fascinating volume and a useful text for teaching about such issues.” — Rosamond Rhodes, Mount Sinai School Of Medicine

“An extremely useful collection of classic pieces and recent works. While organized around five common professions, it also provides the opportunity to investigate themes—such as confidentiality or public responsibility—that arise in virtually every profession. It thus allows an integrated approach to professional ethics which is both pedagogically helpful and long overdue.” — John Corvino, Wayne State University