In this thread, mention is made of professionals who specialize in advising and guiding other professionals in making ethical decisions. In other words, “real world” ethics are complex and not always obvious.
Are there any reasonably defined career paths that lead to a career as a professional practitioner of some sort of ethics? E.g. can you become a certified ethical advisor either in general or with respect to the ethics of a specific profession (e.g. medical ethics, legal ethics, accounting ethics, tax preparer ethics, architectural ethics, schoolteacher ethics)? Would you need a university degree that is specifically in ethics, or would having taken X credits of ethics courses be enough as long as you knew enough to pass the certification exam? For career paths involving becoming an expert in the ethics of a specific profession, does one always need to also be a qualified practitioner of the profession, or could one e.g. become a recognized medical ethics advisor without being a physician or other healthcare provider?
Lawyers, as a profession, don’t count because the path to becoming one is already clear, and they are really legal practitioners that practice law in an ethical framework, not practitioners of raw ethics per se. A professional path that led to a position where lawyers called you and asked you for guidance on whether or not such and such a deal constituted a conflict of interest under the Michigan Comprehensive Ethical Code for Legal Professionals, 533rd Edition could be in scope if you could do that without also being an attorney.
No silly business here. A “recognized” professional means a professional that is recognized widely in a reasonable sense or by a significant subset of the population or by at least one jurisdiction for licensing purposes. If “recognition” consists of recognition by you and two drunks you found on the street one day, it doesn’t count.
Most clinical ethicists have their primary education in medicine or nursing, but other members of an ethical review board will have graduate education in philosophy, theology, law, public health, or social science, and will have some published work on ethics.
“Professional ethicists” in the sense of those who work in the field of professional ethics are nearly always practitioners, or former practitioners, of the fields - people who teach, or advise on, legal ethics are lawyers, those who do this in the field of medical ethics are doctors, etc.
But there are people who, professionally, reflect on and/or advise on ethical questions of all kind, and engage in research, education and training in the field of ethics generally. Many of them are academics, and the commonest background is a degree in philosophy, but they can come from any area - education, business studies, journalism.
Good points, thanks. And yes, I think that there really are two different kinds of professionals here. Imagine if a pharmacist asked “Is it ethical for me to buy generic amoxicillin from a company that is owned by my great-uncle?”
A ethicist grounded in the professional ethics of pharmacy might approach the question by checking whether the Code of Ethics of the applicable Board of Pharmacy considers buying from a relative to constitute a conflict of interest, and if so, what the formal definition of “relative” is. Maybe the formal definition only includes immediate family such as spouse, children, siblings, and parents and thus buying from a great-uncle is not a violation. If the ethicist finds that a conflict of interest does exist per the rules, they could check to see what mitigation strategies are allowed - e.g. whether hanging a disclosure notice on the wall saying “Notice: Some medications sold by this pharmacy may have been supplied by a ‘related familial concern’ as that term is defined in Section 4 Subpart Q of the Combined Ethics of Pharmacy Ruleset Edition 3.” is sufficient to mitigate the conflict of interest.
An broader expert in ethics in general might approach the question by briefing the pharmacist on the different systems of ethics and examining the situation under each one. E.g. deontology (Does buying drugs from your great-uncle violate “Thou shalt not steal”? How about “Thou shalt not murder”?), utilitarian ethics (Would buying drugs from your great-uncle do a greater good for a greater number of people than if you bought them from Bill’s Quality Drug and Buggy Whip Manufactory?), and virtue ethics (When you are buying drugs, do you do it with an honest heart and a true desire to do no harm and to help others?). The professional could then guide the pharmacist to develop a true conscience and make their own decision. Whether that decision sparkles with the Board of Pharmacy would be another story.