Professional Ethics and Personal Integrity

Professional roles are often thought to bring role-specific permissions and obligation, which may allow or require role-occupants to do things they would not be permitted or required to do outside their roles, and which as individuals they would rather not do. This feature of professional roles appears to bring them into conflict both with ‘ordinary’ or non-role morality, and with personal integrity which is often thought to demand some form of personal endorsement of one’s conduct. How are we to reconcile the demands of roles with ordinary morality and with personal integrity? This collection draws together a set of papers which explore these questions as they bear upon a number of different professional roles, including those of the lawyer, the judge and the politician, and from a variety of perspectives, including contemporary analytic moral theory, jurisprudence, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and contextualism, and, more broadly, from philosophy and legal academia and practice.