In Professions We Trust: fostering virtuous practitioners in teaching, law and medicine

The professions of law, medicine and teaching provide a vital link between public service and the wider common good. Yet this understanding of their purpose has already broken or is close to breaking. Despite the heroic efforts of many practitioners, the professions are losing their civic moorings and too often have come to be seen as self-serving interest groups. Moreover, even the conception of professionalism founded on the performance of duties has been eroded, with transactional activity and the meeting of imposed targets coming to characterise practice. The resultant loss of trust has been detrimental to both practitioners and users of services.

In Professions We Trust: Fostering virtuous practitioners in teaching, law and medicine the argument is made that members of the professions need to serve the common good in order to return law, medicine, and teaching to their proper status as vocations. This entails not just asking practitioners to reassert their sense of professional purpose that is no longer enough. What they must do is make their own values manifest and get the public to validate and see them as what they indeed want from professionals. Creating this new relational good between professions and those who call upon them is the precondition of any progress at all. Private virtues are no longer enough, what is needed is the establishment once more of the public virtues that the professions uphold and the shaping and endorsement of these by the general public.