Learning Objectives: Class 2

Learning Objectives: Class Two
Personal vs. Professional Ethics

This class is intended to demonstrate how your personal ethics are tested in everyday situations. It sometimes serves to distinguish between what you should do and what you would actually do. You might also note how your actions (behaviors) reflect your values and beliefs. Further, we have choices and we are free to choose how to behave when situations present themselves. Sometimes we choose the "moral high ground"; while other times we opt for a different path. But that choice is yours to make.

The concepts of values, mutual respect, and "society building" are introduced. People have choices and need to make decisions about their actions, taking responsibility for the choices they make. If you could choose how you wanted our society to be constructed, what would be important to include? ...being safe, secure, and crime-free? What freedoms would you want everyone to have? What rules would you want to govern how people treated one another? While you can't dictate how society will behave, you can shape it, and create how you would like to live your life. That is the realm of personal ethics.

The action you decide to take has intended and unintended consequences; it has immediate and longer term implications. Over the course of time, new situations arise which challenge your value system. It can be difficult to decide what to do; whether to rigidly apply the existing rules or change them to fit the new situation. Some (conservatives or fundamentalists, for example) view changes as an erosion of values. While others (liberals) often view the strict, literal adherence to values as a failure to keep up with the changing times.

History has shown that change is inevitable; perhaps our hope comes in learning how to change in a way that maintains the integrity of our values while applying them to the current situations and new challenges you will surely face.

There is need for a group (or profession) to hold similar values. As we saw, personal values differ. The intent of a professional code of ethics is to encourage members to subscribe to the same standards, thereby building the credibility of the entire profession.