Ethical Conduct and the Professional's Dilemma: Choosing Between Service and Success

Written for practitioners in law, medicine, nursing, accounting, and securities and insurance marketing, this volume explores the dilemma encountered by professionals who have a commitment to being ethical but who also live in a competitive environment that subjects them to financial pressures toward enhancing income. Banks McDowell offers an unusually frank discussion of the ethical principles that should govern decisions in this difficult area and analyzes the pressures that drive some professionals to sell unnecessary or excessive services. Throughout, McDowell raises questions and explores their implications in the hope that once problems are understood, effective actions can be more easily developed. McDowell devotes separate chapters to the role of the professional, the ethical expectations that society holds for practitioners, the tensions introduced by the pressure for financial success, and the ease of rationalization in the absence of clearcut guidelines. He considers the ways in which professional structures might be altered to minimize or eliminate the dilemma by reformulating ethical standards, separating the consultative and service providing functions, expanding informed consent, compelling compliance by law, or using professional education to prepare professionals to make better ethical judgments. Finally, McDowell analyzes the related problem faced by subordinates who are aware of the unethical actions of supervising professionals, yet are torn between conflicting loyalties to co-workers and the recipients of unnecessary services. In addition to practitioners, students preparing to enter the professions as well as those responsible for their education will find this book enlightening and provocative reading.