Chapter 3 Ethics and professional conduct
ETHICS
As stated, ethics can be described as the study of what should be done in a given situation. The Macquarie Dictionary offers a definition of ethics as ‘a system of moral principles by which human actions and proposals may be judged to be good or bad or right or wrong’ and goes on to say ‘the rules of conduct recognised in respect of a particular class of human actions’.[1] While these definitions may be superficially attractive, closer examination reveals other questions that need to be addressed. In the first part it could reasonably be asked which system of moral principles would be invoked when judging an action or a proposal; in the second, who defines the rules of conduct and whose interests are being served by those ‘rules’?
While it is difficult to concisely define ethics other than to say ethics is ‘what should be done in a given situation’ or consider it in the terms of ‘…do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, some authors, in an effort to further clarify matters, have found it useful to say what ethics is not.[2, 3]
Further consideration of ethics may reveal the ethical field can be divided into normative ethics and meta-ethics.[4] ‘Normative ethics’ attempts to develop moral principles or rules to guide our action and judge our behaviour, while ‘meta-ethics’ is concerned with the meaning of terms such as ‘right’, ‘justice’, ‘common good’, and ‘virtue’. One class of normative ethics is ‘practical ethics’ which considers those questions that arise in specific contexts, such as the biological sciences. It is here that bioethics is located, which includes ‘medical ethics’, ‘nursing ethics’ and ‘pharmacy ethics’ as subsets.
Lewins has in fact argued that any study of bioethical issues is dichotomous in nature in that it contains two distinctly different approaches.[5] The first he termed the academic approach, which poses and attempts to answer questions of an ethical nature in health care, such as those relating to issues of abortion, life support and the allocation of resources. The second, the imperative approach, is where behaviour is standardised via modification and control through the development of certain structures, such as hospital-based ethics committees or the formulation of codes of conduct.
PHARMACY AS A PROFESSION
The Macquarie Dictionary defines a profession as a ‘…vocation requiring knowledge of some department of learning or science…’[1] However, this definition could be considered unnecessarily narrow and not accounting for other factors beyond the mere existence of a body of knowledge. Appelbe and Wingfield have suggested a series of tests that characterise a profession in contemporary society.[6] As well as an intellectual discipline and requisite standard of knowledge, these tests also include:
… agree to conscientiously serve the public interest, even when the public interest conflicts with self-interest. Based on this agreement society in return allows the profession certain privileges. The idea of self-regulation that most professionals enjoy is one of those privileges. The core of this privilege involves accountability to and sanctioning by one’s professional peers — a professional web that has agreed to serve the common good …[7]
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