RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT
FOR PROFESSIONALS
Michael S Pritchard and Elaine E. Englehardt
Distinguished Professors of Philosophy
“THE INTEGRITY OF THE GAME IS
EVERYTHING.”
PETER UEBERROTH, BASEBALL COMMISSIONER,
Integrity in all Professions
• Headlines in sports with steroid
probes: Lance Armstrong, Alex
Rodrigues, Jhonny Peralta and
Roger Clemens.
• Headlines in Science: Problems in
America, South Korea, Japan,
and many other countries
INTEGRITY IS FIRM ADHERENCE TO
MORAL PRINCIPLES AND IDEALS:
INCORRUPTIBILITY
• Researchers allege Merck waged a campaign of deception to promote
Vioxx. They hid possible Hazards. They claimed in-house studies
as work of independent academic
Researchers.
• Blood pressure medication results
Demonstrate falsification of data with
Japanese pharmaceutical corp.
• Herbal products have “weeds and
other materials” in them rather than herbs.
Do the herbs actually help individuals with health concerns?
CODES OF CONDUCT FOR IH
• Codes of Conduct are important guidelines for Professionals in IH:
• The code provides a framework individuals for
guiding the entire professional group.
• If a group of professionals are not in line with the code,
what happens to the society?
• Should the code be changed or the society?
• Codes ask for a collaborative commitment to the profession. The individual’s
desires in the profession are secondary. The profession must survive and to
survive the code is in place as a guide of professional responsibilities. It also
details how to serve clients, patients and the public.
A SIMILAR PROFESSIONAL CODE: THE
PREAMBLE TO THE NSPE CODE OF
ETHICS FOR ENGINEERS:
• To loosen up the grip that ‘misconduct’ has on us,
consider how engineering societies approach
responsibility. The Preamble to the NSPE Code of
Ethics for Engineers:
PROFESSIONALS IN DAILY LIFE
• “Engineering (…Industrial Hygiene) is an important and
learned profession…. Industrial Hygiene (Engineering)
has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all
people. Accordingly, the services provided by these
professionals require honesty, impartiality, fairness, and
equity, and must be dedicated to the protection of the
public health, safety, and welfare. They must perform
under a standard of professional behavior that requires
adherence to the highest principles of ethical conduct.”
VIRTUES IN ALL FORMS- RESEARCH
Suppose we substitute ‘Industrial Hygiene’ for
‘engineering’. Nothing ethically significant changes.
What seems to be called for
is that IH exhibit
certain virtues, certain dispositions
regarding what it is to be a
responsible professional.
Honesty in the profession
would be one of those virtues.
KNOWLEDGE EXPLOSION
William May says, “The knowledge explosion is also an ignorance explosion.”
• This is partly because expertise is highly
specialized.
**But it is also because experts have to rely
on one another to do their work
responsibly because they have
neither the time nor desire to
monitor one another’s work all,
or even much, of the time.
“PROFESSIONALS MUST BE
VIRTUOUS”
“Professionals had better be virtuous.
Few may be in a position to discredit
them. The knowledge explosion is also an
ignorance explosion; if knowledge is
power, then ignorance is powerlessness.”
Given this picture of the world(s) of
professionals, May suggests: “One test of character and virtue is what a
person does when no one is watching. A society that rests on expertise
needs more people who can pass that test.”
WHAT RESPONSIBLE
PROFESSIONALISM REQUIRES
• Responsible professionalism in industrial
hygiene requires more than simply following
rules.
• Rules will not resolve the
personal conflicts and moral
dilemmas that arise in
in the profession.
WHO MUST WE PROTECT? WHO IS
USING YOUR PRODUCTS?
• Every day there are new choices to be
.
made in your jobs. These
are choices in
professional integrity.
• The adequacy or inadequacy of the
protection of those who will utilize your
products cannot rely solely upon
procedural safeguards.
GO BEYOND THE RULES: THEY ARE
A MINIMUM STANDARD
• Bounded Ethicality (F)
• Conflict of Interest (F)
• Conformity Bias (F)
HE MADE ME DO IT:
TRUST AND INTEGRITY
• The Jack Abramoff Story:
“In it to Win.”
When you hear his name
what comes to mind?
FADING FROM ETHICS
Ethical Fading (F)
Fundamental Moral Unit (F)
Framing and Mental Models(F)
Incentive Gaming (F)
HASTINGS CENTER GOALS
Hastings Center goals in teaching ethics:
*Stimulate moral imagination
*Recognize moral/ethical issues
*Analyze key concepts and Principles
*Stimulate a sense of responsibility.
*Help us deal with ambiguity and disagreement
ETHICAL GAPS
• We tend to overestimate how ethical we are—
• The person I want to be is not the same as
• The person I actually am
• Deliberate Wrongdoers
• Aware Of Others’ Wrongdoing—but Do Nothing
• Not (Consciously) Aware Of Their Wrongdoing
“Culpable Ignorance”
Incrementalism
WHEN GOOD PEOPLE
PERFORM QUESTIONABLE ACTS
• Moral Agents/Moral Worth: “The processes that lead even good people to
engage in ethically questionable behavior that contradicts their own
preferred ethics.”
• Limits resulting from our self-interest,
concerns for “our near and dear”,
organizational and social factors
• Tendency “to exclude important and relevant information from our
decisions by placing arbitrary and dysfunctional bounds around our
definition of a problem.”
EVERYBODY IS DOING IT,
SO IT MUST BE OK
• Conflicts of interest, loyalty to friend or firm.
• Linguistic Masking:
“Collateral damage” vs. “Dead civilians”
“Creative accounting” vs. “ Cooking
the books”
Chemical pollution as “runoff”
Waste as “by-product”
“Laid off,” “downsized,” “made redundant”
vs. “Fired”
Moral Equilibrium (F)
MENTAL MODELS OF BEHAVIOR
• Overconfidence Bias: We need recognition of our unethical behavior.
(F)
• Awareness of the acts can trigger
mental models operative in our thinking.
• We can then begin exploring means
by which to correct them. It is that
cognition that helps us accept the
responsibility.
ARE ETHICS VIOLATIONS RARE
IN OUR PROFESSION--IH?
• Only a few bad apples?
Why does it happen?
Is it acceptable to lie, deceive
Or conceal?
RECALIBRATE MORALITY
• Role Morality (film)
• We cultivate new behavioral strategies
• Create new habits, and
• Galvanize more intentional and
evolved mental models.
• While we organize and order
our world through mental models,
we do not often do so with the
luxury of analytical hindsight.
SELF-SERVING BIAS
• Failing to attend to our ethics blind spots
creates self serving bias. (film)
• “Vision is one of the best things we do.
We have a huge part of our brain
dedicated to vision. Bigger than dedicated
to anything else . . . We are evolutionarily
designed to do vision.
• And if we have these predictable repeatable mistakes in vision, which
we're so good at, what's the chance that we don't make even more
mistakes in something we're not as good at.
STANLEY MILGRAM AND
OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY
• The central question that challenges each viewer or reader of
Milgram’s obedience experiments is not simply why
the subject/participant acted
in the manner observed, but
how that reader would act if
in the same situation.
MORAL IMAGINATION
• If we do not attend to this blindness;
if we do not revisit our mental models
and develop a strong moral imagination
in order to challenge the intuitions that
otherwise persist without question or
deliberation, we are destined to
accept common bias.
CAN YOU JUST SAY NO?
• So, when faced with a corporate,
professional or organizational opportunity
to say “no” to an inappropriate request or
expectation, what “mental model” would
be operative with us? Would we recognize
the request or expectation as problematic, develop a strong
commitment to our individual choices and values, and then take a firm
stance as needed?
DISASTERS AT BP & HALABURTON
Last moment of the Deep-water Horizon
11 crew died immediately or in
the water, 16 seriously injured
The platform sank 36 hours
after ignition
200 million gallons of light sweet
crude spilled in the Gulf over the
next 100 days
SHARED VALUES FOR
RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT
• HONESTY — conveying information truthfully and honoring
commitments,
• ACCURACY — reporting findings precisely and taking care to avoid
errors
• EFFICIENCY — using resources wisely and avoiding waste
• OBJECTIVITY — letting facts speak for themselves avoiding improper
bias.
DON’T BEND AND STRETCH RULES
Rules are not always reasonable or rationally applied.
Life and colleagues are not always fair.
Good guys do sometimes seem to come in last.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
• Would you report misconduct
even if doing so could put your
career at risk?
• Would you turn in someone for
cheating, or “mind your own
business”?
Nuremburg trials
DON’T IGNORE
PROBLEMS YOU SEE
• Be proactive
• Report concerns to
responsible leaders
• Support those who come
forward to discuss an issue
or report a concern
Don’t ignore a concern------------------
LOCAL RESOLUTION IS A START
• Local resolution is usually the best place
to start
• Use normal supervisory channels
• Units may have assigned specific people
to handle certain concerns