Professional authority: Its foundation and limits

Abstract

In all the great caring professions, in medicine, law and education, for example, the professionals exist to serve certain ends which we consider to be for the fundamental good of all individuals. Medicine is practised to promote health; law to promote justice. Education, I suggest, promotes the development of the individual as a person through the activities of learning and teaching. The professionals' task, in face to face contact with their 'clients', is to help each individual in the very best achievement of the appropriate end granted the client's personal, maybe unique, circumstances. The job is to look after the client's best interests in a way that the individual, or those customarily responsible for him, cannot alone discern or pursue them. The profession exists to help achieve some general good for particular individuals. And if that is so, then the client, be it patient or pupil (and sometimes parent), stands in a special relationship to the professional, to whom he commits himself, whom he trusts, for certain tasks to be undertaken on his behalf. Professional activity, however, must always be seen as operating within a particular society. In our society, professionals are employed within complex institutional structures which determine to a significant degree the more specific ends the professionals must serve, the range of activities that they can engage in, the resources available to them and so on. The institutional structure peculiar to each profession is to some extent determined by the professionals themselves, but it operates in all cases within a framework that is at least under public scrutiny, if not always under public control, through local and national political machinery. The role of any professional is thus set not merely by some general human good that he serves, but by the specific responsibilities given to him within the institution in which he must work. There are thus firm bounds determined for him that emanate from outside the profession itself as well as from within the profession, which operate through clearly established institutional systems. These bounds limit the authority of the individual professional both as to the matters with which he is to concern himself and the activities he can then engage in on his clients' behalf.