Professional and Ordinary Morality: A Reply to Freedman

Abstract

After rereading Freedman's original essay, I still find my earlier interpretations to be legitimate renderings of the essay. I must apologize, however, for not supplying the further exegesis warranted by his astute Response. I want to use the allotted space for clarifying further the substantive issues over which we differ concerning the relationship between professional and ordinary morality. The following is a list of a few things that might be meant in drawing a distinction between professional and ordinary morality. They constitute only rough sketches of definitions based upon, respectively, de facto standards, the content of justified principles, the origin of justified principles, and professional status viewed as an act-permitting condition: (1) Professional morality consists of the standards endorsed by professionals or professional societies. Ordinary morality is the set of standards people endorse in their nonprofessional, private lives. (2) Professional morality is the set of binding moral obligations to which professionals ought to be committed because of their special skills, functions, working milieu, etc. Ordinary morality is the set of valid moral considerations and morally correct judgments considered in abstraction from the special context of the professions and the specific moral obligations of professionals. (3) Ordinary morality in some sense 'emanates from' or has its origin (or justification?) in basic features of the human condition, whereas professional morality derives from the special roles of professionals. (4) Professional morality is a set of valid moral principles which sometimes acts that are immoral for anyone except persons having professional status. Ordinary morality is the set of considerations which make the acts immoral in the case of nonprofessional agents. We may set aside 1. In my earlier essay I ascribed 2 to Freedman, not 3. In his Response, Freedmancommits himself to the combination of 3 and 4. Following Freedman's lead, I want to focus on 4. In his words, it requires that professional morality call upon us to do acts (or to refrain from doing acts) whose omission (or performance) be immoral, save for the fact of the actor's professional identity. Ordinary morality consists in what a person would be obliged to do save for the fact of belonging to this profession. These are presented in the Response as