Page:The Social Significance of Professional Ethics.pdf/7

 responsibility under the cloak of the code. This is most marked in the public services, particularly the civil service and the army and navy — and incidentally it may be noted that the problem of professional ethics is aggravated when the profession as a whole is in the employ of the state. "An official," says M. Faguet in one of his ruthless criticisms of officialdom (The Dread of Responsibility), "is a man whose first and almost only duty is to have no will of his own."

This last case brings us near to what we have called the specific bias of the profession. Each profession has a limited field, a special environment, a group psychology. Each profession tends to leave its distinctive stamp upon a man, so that it is easier in general to distinguish, say the doctor and the priest, the teacher and the judge, the writer and the man of science than it is to discern, outside their work, the electrician from the railwayman or the plumber from the machinist. The group environment creates a group bias. The man of law develops his respect for property at the risk of his respect for personal rights. The teacher is apt to make his teaching an over-narrow discipline. The priest is apt to underestimate the costs of the maintenance of sanctity. The diplomat may overvalue good form and neglect the penalty of exclusiveness. The civil servant may make a fetish of the principle of seniority, and the soldier may interpret morality as mere esprit de corps.

All this, however, is merely to say that group ethics will not by themselves suffice for the guidance of the group, unless they are always related to the ethical standards of the whole community. This fact has a bearing on the question of the limits of professional self-government, though we cannot discuss that here. Professional group ethics are, as a matter of fact, never isolated, and thus they are saved from the narrowness and egotism characteristic of racial group ethics. Their dangers are far more easily controlled, and their services to society, the motive underlying all codes, vastly outweigh what risks they bring. They provide a support for ethical conduct less diffused than that inspired by nationality, less exclusive than that derived from the sense of class, and less instinctive than that begotten of the family. They witness as they grow to the differentiation of community. Their growth is part of the movement by which the fulfilment of function is substituted as a social force for the tradition of birth or race, by which the activity of service supersedes the passivity of station. For all their present imperfections these codes breathe the inspiration of service instead of the inspiration of mere myth or memory. As traditional and authoritative ethics weaken in the social process, the ethics formulated in the light of function bring to the general standard of the community a continuous and creative reinforcement.