Professional ethics, personal moral commitment, and the law

Abstract

The following article by Sjoberg et al. challenges sociologists to concern them selves with issues of human rights if our discipline is to address defining events of the twentieth century such as the Holocaust. One must remember, of course, that Nazi genocide was performed by representatives of the German government and was technically legal under German law. These events apparently were not lost on University of Chicago sociologists trained during and after the rise of National Socialism. The moral commitment of these University of Chicago soci ologists was such that they often decided that they were on the side of the law violators, as opposed to lawmakers and enforcers. For example, Lindesmith (1965), Becker (1963), Finestone (1957), and Gusfield (1963) clearly placed themselves on the side of those violating substance abuse laws. Troy Duster's essay is consistent with such a commitment in that he convinc ingly demonstrates that the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s is misnamed and is really a war against African-American males. While the drug abuse of affluent whites goes largely ignored the numbers of young African-American males incarcerated spirals ever upward. His outrage regarding these patterns clearly reflects the traditional underdog perspective of Howard Becker (1963) and the late Alfred Lindesmith (1965). In contrast to Duster, Farrell and Koch describe the perspective of the numer ous vocationally oriented criminal justice programs that have popped up across the country in regional and community colleges within the past 25 years empha sizing police training. Farrell and Koch argue that, unlike the humanist-sociologi