Michael Davis

In 2016, Davis and Zhang surveyed 71 Chinese engineers to investigate the claim that the concept of “profession” may have a far wider range than the term. They concluded that China seems to have a profession of engineering even though the Chinese still lacked an exact translation of the English term. In part, the survey reported here simply continues the work of Davis and Zhang. It confirms their result using a much larger, better educated, demographically different pool of 229 Chinese engineers. But, in part too, it does something else. It investigates the concept professional competence—the perceived knowledge, skill, and judgment that those surveyed attribute to themselves and other engineers. The article has four parts. The first part describes the basics of the survey. The second part describes some important features of the survey’s questions, explaining how the questions closely track both the concept of profession and the concept of professional competence. The third part reports and interprets the results relevant to the presence or absence of the concepts of profession and professional competence. The fourth part reports the conclusions.

Since Henry Shue’s classic 1978 paper on torture, the “ticking-bomb case” has seemed to demonstrate that torture is morally justified in some moral emergencies (even if not as an institution). After presenting an analysis of torture as such and an explanation of why it, and anything much like it, is morally wrong, I argue that the ticking-bomb case demonstrates nothing at all—for at least three reasons. First, it is an appeal to intuition. The intuition is not as widely shared as necessary to constitute the required demonstration. Second, the intuition is not as reliable as necessary for such a demonstration. We lack the experience that would vouch for it. And, third, Shue’s own discussion suggests that what we are intuiting (if we share Shue’s intuition) is an excuse rather than a justification.

What are the conceptual connections between torture and profession? Exploring this question requires exploring at least two others. Before we can work out the conceptual connections between profession and torture, we must have a suitable conception of both profession and torture. We seem to have several conceptions of each. So, I first identify several alternative conceptions of profession, explaining why one should be preferred over the others. Next, I do the same for torture; and then, I argue that, given the preferred conception of torture and the preferred conception of profession, there can be no profession of torturers. In the final section, I argue that deliberately torturing or aiding in torture is always unprofessional. The fact that some conceptions of profession do not yield this conclusion tells us more about the inadequacy of those conceptions than about professions.

My question is: How far into the future is it possible for engineers as such to plan? For example, the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository was to have been designed to store nuclear waste safely for between ten thousand and one million years. Is that the sort of planning engineers as such can do? The planning engineers do would not be philosophically interesting were it not in general so often successful, much more successful than the gambles of ordinary life. So, how is such planning possible—and what are its limits. Is one million years beyond the limits of what engineers, as such, can plan? Is a thousand years? Is a hundred years? Is there an nth generation for what engineers can plan? The answer I consider here is that engineers can plan only as far into the future as they can reasonably expect engineers to be present. That is only a few generations at most.

By “case,” I mean a proxy for some state of affairs, event, sequence of events, or other fact. A case may be as short as a phrase (“a promise to your dying grandfather”) or (in principle, at least) longer than War and Peace. A case may consist of words (as in the typical philosophical example) or have a more dramatic form, such as a movie, stage performance, or computer simulation. Imaginary cases plainly have an important role in contemporary ethics, especially in applied or practical ethics. This paper is a systematic critique of imaginary cases in ethics (what Kant would have called a “prolegomenon” to their use). There are two main parts. The first explains what it is to imagine a case and what limits there are to what can be imagined. The limits of imagination are, in general, determined by the purpose to which the case is to be put. The second part distinguishes nine uses of imaginary cases: rhetorical; probative (subdivided into counterexample, proof of possibility, and pattern-proving); and heuristic (subdivided into illustrative, experiment in theory, insight-sharpening, commitment-mapping, and exploring reasoning process). Some of these uses are (more or less) unobjectionable (whether the particular case succeeds or fails in its objective) but some require special care or outright avoidance. I give examples of how philosophers and other ethicists would be better off if they were more cautious in their use of imaginary cases (including some classic examples, such as Nozick’s book thruster and Thompson’s famous violinist). This paper is especially concerned with the use of imaginary cases in contemporary defenses of torture.

The first code of professional ethics must: (1)be a code of ethics; (2) apply to members of a profession; (3) apply to allmembers of that profession; and (4) apply only to members of that profession. The value of these criteria depends on how we define “code”, “ethics”, and “profession”, terms the literature on professions has defined in many ways. This paper applies one set of definitions of “code”, “ethics”, and “profession” to a part of what we now know of the history of professions, there by illustrating how the choice of definition can alter substantially both our answer to the question of which came first and (more importantly) our understanding of professional codes (and the professions that adopt them). Because most who write on codes of professional ethics seem to take for granted that physicians produced the first professional code, whether the Hippocratic Oath, Percival’s Medical Ethics, the 1847 Code of Ethicsof the American Medical Association (AMA), or some other document, I focus my discussion on these codes.

After twenty-five years of integrating ethics across the curriculum at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions conducted a survey of full-time faculty to investigate: a) what ethical topics faculty thought students from their discipline should be aware of when they graduate, b) how widely ethics is currently being taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, c) what ethical topics are being covered in these courses, and d) what teaching methods are being used. The survey found that while progress spreading ethics across the curriculum has been substantial, it remains incomplete. The faculty think more should be done. From these findings we draw six lessons for ethics centers engaged in encouraging ethics across the curriculum.

After twenty-five years of integrating ethics across the curriculum at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions conducted a survey of full-time faculty to investigate: a) what ethical topics faculty thought students from their discipline should be aware of when they graduate, b) how widely ethics is currently being taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, c) what ethical topics are being covered in these courses, and d) what teaching methods are being used. The survey found that while progress spreading ethics across the curriculum has been substantial, it remains incomplete. The faculty think more should be done. From these findings we draw six lessons for ethics centers engaged in encouraging ethics across the curriculum.

While we’re inclined to think that a person is “above all price,” we in fact make a lot of decisions that seem to set a price on persons—or, at least, on their life. For example, I was recently involved with setting standards for buildings in areas susceptible to earthquakes. The consensus seemed to be $3/sq. ft. increase in construction cost was reasonable, more than that was not, even though lives could be saved if the standard were higher, assuring the survival of more buildings. Though the Ford Pinto remains the classic case of unjustifiably putting a price on persons, it is at once not such a clear case and also useful for thinking about when putting a price on life can be justified.

Since 2010, Section 922 of the Dodd-Frank Act has required the Securities and Exchange Commission to give a significant financial reward to any whistleblower who voluntarily discloses original information concerning fraud or other unlawful activity. How, if at all, might such “incentives” change our understanding of whistleblowing? My answer is that, while incentives should not change the definition of whistleblowing, it should change our understanding of the justification of whistleblowing. We need to distinguish the public justification of whistleblowing, its public defense, from its personal justification, the defense the whistleblower should be able to present to conscience. Motive is relevant only to the personal justification—but, since motive is relevant to that, statutes should be written so as not to interfere with personal justification, for example, by offering incentives when compensation would do. Though the paper’s focus is Section 922, its argument and conclusions are quite general.

Philosophical counselors are now debating whether they should be licensed in the way psychiatrists, psychologists, and other similar helping professions are. The side favoring licensing claim it is a step on the way to making philosophical counseling “a profession.” In this paper I explain why licensing has nothing to do with making a profession of philosophical counseling—and what does. In particular, I offer a definition of profession, explain its application to philosophical counseling, and defend it against competitors (especially various sociological definitions). I also explain the importance of licensing, registration, and certification—and its disadvantages for philosophical counseling.