J. J. Kole

Apart from their responsibility to serve the goals of their organization, employees also have a personal and professional responsibility to work ethically. Ideally, these responsibilities of employee, professional and person coexist in harmony, but in practice they can also be at odds with one another.As members of a profession with a collective professional morality, professionals are expected to follow their own moral judgement about how to work. They have professional moral autonomy. This independent capacity to judge should be considered as their moral capital. If companies create free space for internal ethical debate and dialogue, this professional moral capital can improve the corporate moral climate and lead to business-ethical gains. In companies that create such space, the voice of potential whistle-blowers will be taken seriously, and the risk that problems of many hands occur might diminish. Business ethics should, thus, acknowledge the importance of the personal and professional moral responsibility of employees in business.

Part of being a good professional is, so we contend, to have ideals. Ideals essentially complement the deontic considerations that are usually taken as the main components of professional moral deliberation. Yet the notion of professional ideals is problematic. As professional ideals they refer to a profession collectively, while as professional ideals they are first of all strong personal commitments of individual professionals. As collective aspirations, professional ideals have a kind of external normative thrust on individual professionals, but people cannot be forced to identify with ideals on demand. Endorsing ideals can only come from within. On the basis of an analysis of ?professional ideals? and ?professional identity?, we conclude that professional ideals are necessary constituents of the personal identity of professionals. This explains the dual character of professional ideals: they are pursued by a collective and constitute the group professional identity but they also need to be endorsed by individual professionals in order to be able to say that the ideals are their own. We end with a short and tentative description of some practical implications for the fostering and education of professional ideals