Ethics in Professional Education

Book excerpt: Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on ethics education in different professions, such as medicine and teaching. However, the implications of this emphasis for professional education programs have been underdeveloped. In this volume, philosophers, philosophers of education, and ethics educators engaged in a variety of professional contexts in Canada, the UK, Norway, Malta, and Sweden assess the state of ethics education and the role, if any, of philosophical approaches to ethics for those professional contexts. This volume speaks to teacher, medical, and business education, and the education of school psychologists. Each of these fields has its own context, aims and expertise, generating distinctive ethical challenges. As such, ethics curricula cannot be uncritically transplanted from one professional context to another. Nonetheless, the arguments and analyses in this volume point to a shared concern about the role of moral respect, self-understanding, and virtue in the education of professionals. The chapters examine a wide range of topics, including empirical ethics, core concepts in professional ethics, moral agency, the ethics of ethics education, risk-taking, professional ethics as a practice with its own ethical requirements, and the tensions between the individual (client, patient, student) and the increasing generalization of professional systems. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethics in Education.