Page:The Social Significance of Professional Ethics.pdf/1

Rh bodies, cooperating in a study of their ethical standards, methods of training and adequacy of the service to the entire public need, irrespective of class. In the second place, the public interest is great by reason of the fact that the professional ideal alone seems to offer a way out to an inexpertly governed democracy.

Through cooperation between professions the expert can be brought into government through the more powerful public opinion thereby created. In the third place, the professions alone can lay the groundwork of a new society based on the idea of the distinctive functional contribution of each to the common good. They must develop that basic idea into a clearly defined scheme by enlarging their field of cooperation and democratic understanding between professional groups and then through points of contact with every branch of the particular industries to which each is related. They alone can begin the process of relating people to each other in terms of their vocations and thus lay the foundation of that new society based on the functional contribution of each to the whole, of which more than thirty years ago Charles Benoist saw the possibilities in La Crise de l'Etat Moderne.

Far off as it may be to the realization of any such dream, it is in its beginnings at least in the new impulses noticeable in our professional societies as a result of the War, and will be advanced by such cooperation between the professions as will perfect their standards, justify their ideals with the public interests, and lay the foundations of a broader more democratic inclusiveness, based on the prime importance of the functional relationship between individuals, groups, states and nations.

THE spirit and method of the craft banished from industry finds a more permanent home in the profes- sions. Here still prevail the long ap- prenticeship, the distinctive training, the small-scale unit of employment and the intrinsic — as distinct from the economic — interest alike in the process and the product of the work. The sweep of economic evolution seems at first sight to have passed the profes- sions by. The doctor, the lawyer, the architect, the minister of religion, re- main individual practitioners, or at most enter into partnerships of two or three members. Specialization takes place, but in a different way, for the specialist in the professions does not yield his autonomy. He offers his

specialism directly to the public, and only indirectly to his profession. But this very autonomy is the condition under which the social process brings about another and no less significant integration. The limited "corpora- tions" of the business world being thus ruled out, the whole profession assumes something of the aspect of a corporation. It supplements the ad- vantage or the necessity of the small- scale, often the one-man, unit by con- certed action to remove its "natural" disadvantage, that free play of uncontrolled individualism which undermines all essential standards. It achieves an integration not of form but of spirit. Of this spirit nothing is more significant than the ethical code which it creates.