Professions under Siege: Can Ethical Autonomy Survive?

31 Robert N. Bellah Professions under Siege: Can Ethical Autonomy Survive? This evening I want to consider a number of issues related to the topic ofthis series. I want to talk first about what the professions are. We cannot take for granted the meaning of the professions ; that meaning has become strongly contested in recent decades. Second, I would like to consider the sources of the crisis in the professions—I clearly believe there is one as I called this talk "Professions under Siege"—and then, finally, I want to turn to the question of the rights and responsibilities of professionals today, focusing on "ethical autonomy" as indicated in my subtitle. Becoming a professional in America has for a long time meant attaining a kind of middle class, actually upper middle-class, respectability. Members of the professions, particularly what were traditionally called the learned professions, felt a degree of superiority not only to the less educated populace as a whole, but to the The first paper in a series sponsored by the University of St. Thomas and the William Mitchell College of Law: "Rights and Responsibilities: The Crisis in the Professions and Their Communities." Logos 1:3 1997 32 Logos business community engaged in more mundane pursuits. This attitude was expressed in die way professionals thought about monetary reward not very many generations ago. A professional man, and until fairly recently most professionals were men, expected what was called a competence—enough to live on comfortably in order to pursue one's profession and care for one's family.The professional in this understanding was not interested in money for its own sake, not in profit, although what professionals considered a competence normally put them in the higher income brackets. This attitude toward money has always made the idea of business as a profession ambiguous, even after graduate education became increasingly a prerequisite for a business career. Through much of the 1 9th century, the learning that made the professions "learned" was quite informal; for example one became a lawyer by serving as the clerk of a successful lawyer and gradually learning the law by participating in his practice. But by the end ofthe 19th century the older professions had institutionalized their educational practices in law schools, medical schools, and so forth—the original profession , the ministry, had long had its established schools—and by the early 20th century had managed to get graduation from accredited schools, and/or the passing of tests administered by the professions , made into legal requirements for professional practice, something that has come to be known as credentialing. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then it is not surprising that the respectability and assumed superiority ofthe traditional professions stimulated other occupations to style themselves as professionals as well. The 20th century has seen an explosion of both professional education and credentialing. What has resulted is a wide spectrum of"professions" with inevitably varying degrees of prestige: social workers probably do not command die respect that doctors and lawyers do; nor do primary school teachers, alas, command the respect that university professors do; but all have advanced education and credentials. Professions under Siege: Can Ethical Autonomy Survive?33 Deeper than the sociological characteristics of the professions that I have just been describing has been a tradition of ethical responsibility, the ultimate source of the professional's claim to respectability and competence. This aspect of die professions is indicated most dramatically in the case of the original profession, the priesthood or ministry. Priests and ministers are responsible to their people, to be sure, but their primary responsibility is to God; they are called by God and are answerable to God. The very words "calling" and "vocation" have their roots in this idea, which has been generalized to other professions and occupations, particularly but not exclusively in the Calvinist tradition. It is worth remembering that the oldest usage of die word profession in English, in the 13th century, is, according to the OED, "The declaration, promise, or vow made by one entering a religious order; hence the action of entering such an order; the fact of being professed in a religious order." Later the word came...