Codes of Professional Ethics

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This chapter outlines the features of the professional practice which lead to the necessity for codes of professional ethics, and which underpin the nature and typical content of such codes. There are a variety of codes and regulations regarding professional practices, which may serve different purposes. Members of a profession possess certain skills, knowledge and capacities that their clients and the general public typically lack. This creates a gradient of power and of relative vulnerability between the professional and others. Codes of ethics aim to mitigate the potentially deleterious effects, or the misuse, of such professional power. Codes of professional ethics may be backed up by hard or soft power. Since each profession deals with a certain area of endeavour, codes of professional ethics typically concern themselves with values, benefit and harms in relation to their own area of expertise. Nonetheless, there are general values underlying such codes, even if these are implicit. These may be hard to articulate and may indeed be controversial. The value of autonomy is examined as an example especially relevant to AI. Codes of ethics can only function effectively with both adequate institutional and societal backing. Understanding the history and context of development of codes of ethics is important to understand their underlying values, and especially where social and technological change is occurring. Codes of ethics may develop in response to catastrophe, in anticipation of problems, and with reference to codes of ethics in key areas, and all of these may give rise to problems. Codes of ethics may have certain failings, and in some cases even make a situation worse.