| Description |
In the last several years, philosophical enthusiasm for applied professional ethics has spread from medicine to law, education, government, engineering, business, and to other professional and semiprofessional fields. Each involves an institutional structure within which professional practitioners provide specific services to those who seek them, and within which practitioner behavior in providing these services is regulated by both formal and informal institutional codes and conventions. Recent work in applied ethics has forced reinspection of these codes and conventions and of the moral features of the professional practices they govern from client confidentiality to the exchange of fees and has revealed characteristic dilemmas and conflicts which are endemic to these areas of professional activity. Indeed, in some cases - for instance, in the de-paternalization of medicine - the inquiries of applied professional ethicists have begun to produce quite striking changes in professional practice itself. But there remains one area of institutional practice which has not yet come under the scrutiny of contemporary applied professional ethics: this is the provision of religious services, or, more generally, the institutional practice of religion. In this exploratory paper, I'd like to do two things: first, to show that because religious practitioners are in many important ways like professionals in other fields, we may expect their practices to generate the same sorts of issues discussed in other areas of applied professional ethics; and second, to consider the special methodological problems analysis of these moral issues might present. |
