Program in Ethics and the Professions marks first decade

By Eileen K. McCluskey

Special to the Gazette

Students and faculty once scrutinized the ethical aspects of their fields of study as vigorously as they did the other dimensions of their scholarly pursuits. But, says Dennis F. Thompson, director of the Program in Ethics and the Professions, "the increasing specialization in the professions as well as in the social sciences and even some of the humanities, leaves little time for the discussion of ethical issues."

So it was with a vision of bringing ethics back into the center of both undergraduate and professional education that Thompson accepted the directorship of the newly created Program in Ethics and the Professions in 1986. Program literature describes the primary mission as "encouraging teaching and research about ethical issues in public and professional life."

The Program's central activity is that of the Fellowships in Ethics. Through the Fellowships, faculty from Harvard and other universities, and graduate students from across the University, enter a year of intensive exploration of the ethical dimensions in their fields of expertise. The idea is that these practitioners and scholars, teachers and students will carry the gospel of ethics back into their spheres of influence, whether it be teaching, medicine, law, religion, or the military.

The first class of Fellows was welcomed into the Program in 1987, and by now more than 100 faculty and graduate students have participated. Many have gone on to establish ethics programs elsewhere in the United States and abroad, and more than a dozen have won faculty appointments at Harvard. This month the Program celebrates the end of its first decade, and Thompson shares his reflections of how the Program operates in a complex and quickly changing world.

"We are interested not just in the problems that confront individual professionals but in the whole range of ethical issues that should engage all citizens -- including such pressing problems as physician-assisted suicide, genetic engineering, campaign finance, and Internet regulation," Thompson explains. "That is why we have drawn on the intellectual resources of the whole University -- not only the professional Schools but also philosophy, religion, and the social sciences -- and it is also why we have paid attention to undergraduate education." The Program has supported the development of some 50 new or revised courses covering 20 different disciplines in the College.

"One of the Program's themes," Thompson says, "is that ethics in an institutional setting poses problems that are sometimes more complex and often quite different than in individual relations." He offers the example of a doctor working in an HMO: "You're making decisions about patient care, but in the back of your mind, you know that you also have a responsibility to allocate resources efficiently and fairly. You have conflicting loyalties. It's not just about profits; you're concerned about the welfare of all the patients that might be served by this institution. Yet, your primary loyalty should be to the patients you're caring for. How do you reconcile such conflicts? We try to develop frameworks of analysis that one can use in thinking about questions like these."

Program participants are offered tools to help them find their way through the modern moral haze. "The first step is to recognize ethical issues when they see them. This can be harder than you might think," Thompson notes. "In business, medicine, journalism -- all the professions -- training tends to focus on providing the expert knowledge that defines the professional practice." But this approach, he says, "tends to make students and professionals turn nearly all issues that they face into technical issues. For instance, in medicine, the difference between ordinary and extraordinary care is often thought to be a purely medical question, but, in fact, this and indeed most critical decisions in medicine have an ethical or value component.

"Much the same is true in the legal profession," Thompson continues. "First-year law students are taught to think like lawyers, which sometimes means suppressing ordinary ethical concerns. They learn to be comfortable with the idea of zealously defending their clients without regard to whether the client is guilty or their defense harms innocent parties." Thompson feels that, although zealous advocacy serves a useful purpose in our legal system, it also raises some fundamental moral issues that lawyers sometimes neglect -- such as the just distribution of legal resources.

"Another goal," Thompson says, "is to provide a common vocabulary to help us discuss our moral differences and help us make decisions about common problems. This is to overcome the misconception that questions of value or ethics are only a matter of personal opinion or individual conscience. If we treat moral judgments like preferences -- 'I like vanilla ice cream, you like chocolate ice cream' -- we will not be able to understand, let alone reconcile, our moral disagreements."

Through the Program, Thompson and his colleagues open a path for discussion: "We provide a framework for allowing people to analyze moral questions. Then even if in the end you can't prove conclusively that someone's right or wrong, you can show that their reasons for believing what they do are not very sound; perhaps because they're inconsistent or don't cohere with other beliefs they have. And, of course, you may find that your own moral views are mistaken, too."

Although ethical controversy is increasing in public life, Thompson does not think that this is a sign that the ethical character of our leaders or our society is declining. "One reason there is more ethical disagreement is simply that there is more diversity among the people who are making the ethical decisions that affect us all," he observes. "It is actually a healthy sign because it means that more people from different backgrounds and with different perspectives have more of a voice than they used to have."

But this poses a challenge for ethics education. "We have to learn better how to deal with our disagreements, many of which cannot and should not be resolved," Thompson says. "And we have to recognize that this is not just a problem of individual ethics but requires what might be called public ethics." Thompson thinks that in practice, this may call for changing the institutions in which we make ethical decisions.

"You find yourself," he says, "facing a dilemma -- for example, how to ration organs for transplants; and then you need to see that this question is difficult in part because it arises within a social or institutional structure that is defective in some way." The Ethics Program "helps people step back from the institutions in which they're deciding these ethical questions, and seek ways to change those institutions.

"We should not accept the world as it is, so full of ethical dilemmas, " Thompson notes. "Some of these dilemmas don't have to be as troublesome as they are if we change the institutions in which they arise."