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The 21st Century

Civic Ethics

The changes that took place over the course of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st are dizzying. Important new circumstances appeared on the horizon. Professional demography exploded and became more feminised, specialised and digitalised. That is no small thing. Moreover, culturally, the public sphere is no longer exclusively political, a fact that has affected the professions and their institutions. And the extraordinary massification of the professions has made it clear that they are no longer dominated by «the old or new elites»; they are no longer «aristocracy», but «democracy».

The spread of knowledge and the process of its specialisation, which were unrelenting during the 20th century, have generated a much larger workforce in the professions and services. The new key elements for all professions include feminisation – with women gaining widespread access, the exacerbation and «triumph of the markets», the global population explosion, the digital transition and the network society, the intense and chaotic urbanisation of the planet, and the global ecological crisis, together with the growing difficulties associated with civic responsibility and citizenship.

Moreover, in parallel, as Emilio Martínez Navarro aptly explains it, today, as a multitude of social activities have acquired the characteristics of a profession, the old distinction between professions and trades has been blurring and losing its meaning. The term profession now designates virtually any occupation or task, and there has been a progressive loss of the traditional privileges associated with some professions. At the same time, certain trades are demanding to be considered professions. This process of loss of privileges and progressive equalisation in the consideration of social activities is fully consistent with the principles of the liberal revolutions, which put an end to the regimes of absolute monarchy. In modern societies, all citizens have the same fundamental rights and obligations, and it is therefore unacceptable for certain groups to enjoy privileges that others cannot access.18

It is in this completely new context that the philosopher and professor of philosophy Adela Cortina19 offers four contemporary clarifications on Max Weber’s now dated definition:

1. A profession is not only a «source of income», i.e., a subjective end; rather, the profession has a purpose in itself, the achievement of which is what gives it meaning and social legitimacy. In consequence, society can require its fulfilment and demand its quality.

2. A profession, in addition to being an individual activity, is a collective activity, uniting a professional community that has shared goals and uses a common language, with similar methods and its own ethos. In other words, just as there is a personal ethos (‘character, way of being’), there is also a professional ethos of the profession. Architects know a thing or two about this...

3. Therefore, «entering a particular profession and professional community gives the professional a particular identity and generates a particular sense of belonging». In that sense, a profession is way for civil society to assert itself vis-à-vis political power, but it is also a way for public space to assert itself vis-à-vis other spaces, such as economic or religious space.20

4. Ultimately, Adela Cortina proposes a much more integrative definition: «A profession is a cooperative social activity, the internal goal of which is to provide society with a specific good that is indispensable for its survival as a human society, and which requires the joint efforts of the community of professionals who are identified as such in the eyes of society.»

It could not be expressed any better. Based on this contemporary and updated definition, although it is little known and disseminated, the meaning of a profession in our times can become clear, as well as its social relevance. A profession seeks to achieve a good or purpose; its mission is essential and decisive to social life; it is not expendable. Its practice requires the accumulation of knowledge and the cultivation of habits, skills or excellence on the part of the subject and the action being performed. Finally, professional activity is not an isolated individual activity but a communal, cooperative one, which gives it its own identity and character.

That said, there is something else that significantly defines the contemporary nature of the professions. For the Spanish philosophers Victoria Camps and Adela Cortina, pioneers in this reflection, there is no possible dichotomy between civic ethics and professional ethics, since «civic ethics are now the obligatory moral framework for professional ethics». Both authors argue that the content of these ethics are human rights, formulated during their historical development in the 20th century, and from which a set of fairly universal values have been derived, representing the substance of human rights: such as freedom, equality, tolerance, dialogue and solidarity. Moreover, it is worth recalling that in the «welfare state» of the past century some basic needs became civil rights, what are called «second-generation human rights».

Thus, we should be aware of and reveal the indisputable fact that the professions provide services with direct ties to first and second generation human rights, such as the right to education (teachers), to health (health professions, doctors), to housing or habitability (architects) or to justice (lawyers, judges), as well as to economic, environmental and cultural sustainability (engineers, economists) (third generation) and to the rights derived from the digital society (fourth generation). Without these services, human rights are unattainable. We must conclude, therefore, that in the 21st century, professional ethics demands that the professions provide their corresponding good or service, «because it is the path to making human rights a reality».21

From the outset and in parallel, as we mentioned in our discussion of Hippocrates and Cicero, the four principles have always accompanied professional practice: beneficence, autonomy, justice and non-maleficence. These principles can sometimes be contradictory. Thus, according to Augusto Hortal,22 the conflict between the principle of autonomy and that of beneficence is always resolved in favour of autonomy, but he considers the principle of non-maleficence (avoidance of harm) as the priority, even before the principle of autonomy.23

Regarding the validity and usefulness of these principles, it is worth noting, for example, that when the US Bioethics Commission was established, it adopted them for its operations. Similarly, the principles of the Jesuits’ so-called 2030 pedagogical revolution, which we will discuss later on, are oriented towards five closely related guiding principles: conscience, competence, compassion, commitment and creativity, which offer a remarkable and curious parallelism to the classical professional principles.

The Art of Professionals

Finally, in the discussion of the 20th century and the professions, it is impossible not to mention the great contributions of the American sociologist Richard Sennett and the American pedagogue and philosopher Donald Schön because of their importance and decisive influence.

At first sight, Sennett’s contribution24 could be described as heterodox, though unavoidable, and really very inspiring in terms of sparking reflection and encouraging a contemporary professional logic, in his case driven by private law, civil society and anthropology. This is why the influence of Sennett’s logic has taken root more easily in some professional environments than in others.

His approach does involve some retreats, avoiding the use of the word profession, a social and political word, more oriented towards public law. Sennett’s reflection is material and civil, anthropological. With his motto «Making is thinking», his contribution ultimately becomes a reference that might be considered «an antidote». Going to the root, it stands a protection and a defence of a job well done in the face of the risks and threats that professionalism is exposed to in today’s economy – both before and after the triumph of the markets, before and after digitalisation, and before and after the subsequent precarisation of labour. The craftsmanship we are offered today is not only associated with manual work; it is also a broad metaphor for professional practice. One can be a craftsman in technology, in medicine, in architecture, in law, etc. Richard Sennett’s craftsman is focused on «a job well done» – in our terms, on aretè, on excellence.

Of particular interest in Sennett’s work is the definition of a workshop: «A productive space in which people deal face-to-face with issues of authority. [...] No one working alone could figure out, however, how to glaze windows or to draw blood. In craftmanship there must be a superior who sets standards and who trains. In the workshop, inequalities of skill and experience become face-to-face issues.»

Workshops, in the past as well as the present, have been and are a factor in education and social cohesion by virtue of their working rituals, whether that means sharing a cup of tea, mentoring, informal workplace counselling, or the face-to-face sharing of information. As Donald Schön asserts,25 «learning all forms of professional artistry depends, at least in part, on conditions similar to those created in the studios and conservatories [...] with access to coaches who initiate students into the «’traditions of the calling’».

The two most relevant ideas in Sennett’s book are, on the one hand, the definition of craftsmanship as work driven by quality and, on the other, the peculiar notion of skill, broad and complex, that the author proposes. Regarding the former, Sennett explains the social dimension of the craft attitude, which generates honest and reliable citizens: «Learning to work well enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens [...][;] good work molds good citizenship».

Crafts also comprise «material culture» and «tacit knowledge» as genuine assets of «social capital», i.e., knowledge and skills that are accumulated and passed on through social interaction, a real bodily know-how of which we are often not entirely aware. In the workshop, moreover, craftspeople have to cultivate social skills in order to coordinate with their peers, act as a team and respect the principle of authority. Sennett argues that «nearly anyone can become a good craftsman», with all the moral, social and aesthetic consequences that this entails.

Sennett also offers a wake-up call regarding what was an incipient digitisation and its limits. How is it possible to misuse such a useful tool? When CAD was introduced into architectural education to implement and complement hand drawing, a young architect at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) observed that «When you draw a plot of land, when you put the contour lines and the trees on it, it sticks in your head. You get to know the place in a way that is impossible with the computer. You get to know a piece of land by drawing it over and over again, not by letting the computer ‘generate it for you’.» This is not nostalgia: this architect’s observation points to what we lose mentally when screen work replaces physical drawing – or, to borrow Juhanni Pallasmaa’s words, «the thinking hand». Like other visual practices, architectural sketches are often images of possibilities. In the process of rendering and refining these sketches by hand, designers are something like tennis players or musicians – i.e., they become deeply involved in the drawing, their thinking about it matures. The terrain «sticks in your head».

Thus, the word craftsmanship designates «an enduring, basic human impulse; the desire to do a job well for its own sake» As Sennett explains, this implies a dedication to learning and developing skills, to growing as a competent worker – a concept that has been conspicuously absence in recent years, in which very little investment has been made in training or educating workers. A job well done, however, takes time. Sennett suggests that 10,000 hours is a reasonable estimate of the time it takes to become a skilled carpenter or musician.

His gaze seems to be directed backwards; it seems to imply an evocation of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, past eras from which, nevertheless, he extracts key concepts for a contemporary reflection (the craftsman, the workshop), and which are then contextualised in the present, with an eye to the future. It may seem innocuous or marginal, but, as we will see in the following pages, it is not. On the contrary, in the internet age, crafts have emerged as a factor of creativity, regeneration, economic promotion and future employability for professionals.

Sennett’s distaste with the socio-economic reality derived from the absolute predominance of the markets leads him to propose an attitude of resistance, something like an antidote to safeguard professionalism in our times, and he positions himself in favour of a strategy to rebuild a future urban social pact and a new economy.

For his part, Donald A. Schön (Boston, 1930-1997), an American philosopher and educator, is considered an absolutely decisive thinker in the development of the theory and practice of reflective professional learning in the late 20th century. Still today, he is a very important inspirational reference for professionalisation and the ongoing pedagogical revolution. Schön perfectly redefines professionals on the basis of the training they need. He considers that «a professional is someone who knows how to handle practical problems in complex environments». In other words, his position is perfectly in line with the traditional conception of the professional as someone focused on practical knowledge rather than scientific knowledge.

He brilliantly argues how professional praxis is characterised by complexity, uncertainty, instability, singularity and the conflict of values. As a consequence, the technical perspective is not the most suited when it comes to managing education in professional practice. On the contrary, «the professions should be understood as reflective and artistic activities which, in any case, include some technical applications». Hence, Schön proposes looking for a new epistemology for the practice that is implicit in intuitive and artistic processes, in order to educate professionals who will be practicing in situations of uncertainty, instability, singularity and the conflict of values.

Moreover, the problems practitioners face in reality do not appear as well-organised structures. And, of course, the problem of defining the problem does not belong to the category of well-defined problems. According to Schön, problem definition is an ontological process, a way of constructing the world. Technical problem solving will not help us turn a problematic situation into a well-defined problem. Moreover, some conflictive situations are actually cases of conflicts of values, which fall outside the logic of technical rationality.

The practical orientation or «reflection in action» of Schön’s model emerges as a contemporary response intended to overcome the linear and mechanical relationship between a theory or scientific-technical knowledge, understood as «superior», and a practice subordinated to it. Schön studies this ability in depth, understanding it as a process of reflection in action. He posits an awareness of this process as a necessary precondition for understanding professionals’ effective activity when facing unique problems. This reflective process must serve to optimise the response to real situations, given that professionals must use their intellectual resources to respond to the situation, such that real needs can be satisfied in an effective way through a process of analysis and a search for strategies or solutions.

According to Schön, what future practitioners most need to learn about practice is what the training institutions seem least able to teach, putting them in a difficult situation and opening up an opportunity for compulsory continuing education at the hands of professional associations. In the end, we can agree with Donald Schön on one thing that almost no one dares to say: namely that research has not only become detached from the professional world but has become a prisoner of its own agenda, sometimes even becoming an end in itself. Humboldt seems to have won a battle, but the reality is that it has been won by the markets. If there is a crisis of confidence in the professions and their training centres, its origin lies in the epistemology of practice that prevails today. Schön says:

«The question of the relationship between practice competence and professional knowledge needs to be turned upside down. We should not start by asking how to make better use of research-based knowledge but what we can learn from a careful examination of artistry. [...]

•Inherent in the practice of the professionals we recognize as unusually competent is a core of artistry.

•Artistry is an exercise of intelligence, a kind of knowing, though different in crucial respects from our standard model of professional knowledge. It is not inherently mysterious; it is rigorous in its own terms. [...]

•[...] There are an art of problem framing, an art of implementation, and an art of improvisation – all necessary to mediate the use in practice of applied science and technique. [...]

In the early decades of the [20th] century, [...] ‘professionalisation’ meant the replacement of artistry by systematic, preferably scientific, knowledge. [...] However, educators have begun once again to see artistry as an essential component of professional competence».

In fine arts education, remember, it is all about practice. The emphasis is on learning by doing. The artistry of painters, musicians, and designers, bears a strong resemblance to that of lawyers, engineers, managers, doctors, architects and teachers who are extraordinary professionals. It is no coincidence that professionals often make reference to the «state of the art». Thus, with Donald Schön, philo anthropoiè and philo technè merge into a single educational goal: practicum. Therefore, learning a professional art depends on the creation of conditions similar to the ones in workshops, a relevant point on which Richard Sennett (The Craftsman) and Donald Schön (The Training of Reflective Professionals) both agree.26 The art of professionals, ars in Latin, is the equivalent of the Greek technè.

In the 21st century, the art of professionals is founded on a civic and digital ethics, which is gradually taking on its new dimensions by constructing a new craftsmanship – a newly invented kind of craftsmanship that we recognise as not only manual but also digital, a craftsmanship that does not turn its back on the physical world, but which makes full use of fascinating communication and manufacturing technologies.

And although the digital world, immaterial and virtual, is increasingly a part of reality, that reality is far from being exhausted in it. Although we may sometimes forget, the somatism of philo technè and philo anthropoiè make it very noticeable and very evident. The digital world sometimes prevails, but more often than it seems it operates by addition and not only by substitution. The thinking hand is still there, along with the computer.

It is thus interesting to note how, during the different historical periods, Hippocrates’ founding intuition and its two-fold commitment have endured over time, adapting to the socio-cultural and economic changes that have taken place in each era. The philo anthropoiè and the philo technè emerge and interact in very different contexts – in the present, too, with digital disruption and digital craftsmanship in full swing. It is worth recalling once again that the double meaning represented by these two terms is also present in the Latin word for profession, officiis, (‘duties’, but also ‘work completed’), which reveals a clear parallel with Hippocratic philosophy.

Finally, recalling and disseminating the history of professional activity reveals the interest and usefulness of using it as a pedagogical and communicative resource.27 Recovering our history is the first step towards building our future, because, as we know, he who loses his origins loses his identity.

18 Emilio Martínez Navarro, «Ética de la profesión: proyecto personal y compromiso de ciudadanía», Veritas, vol. 1, no. 14, 2006, pp. 121-139.

19 In recent years, the Valencian professor of philosophy Adela Cortina has developed a broad reflection on the professions that has become a fundamental reference. See, for example, among other works, Adela Cortina and Jesús Conill, 10 palabras clave en ética de las profesiones, Verbo Divino, 2000, and Adela Cortina, ¿Para qué sirve realmente la ética? Paidós, 2013.

20 Although they have important ties with the State and the economy, the professions traditionally belong to the third sector, in which the principle of community governs and prevails over the principle of legality (State) and the market (economy).

21 See Guadalupe Ibarra Rosales, «Ética profesional y cívica para la formación universitaria», Boletín Redipe, vol. 4, no. 7, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 15 January 2018. Available at: https://revista.redipe.org/index.php/1/article/view/372. See also, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.

22 Augusto Hortal, Ética general de las profesiones, Bilbao: Desclée, 2002.

23 According to D. Gracia, we can assign two principles to the public sphere (justice and non-maleficence) and two to the private sphere (beneficence and autonomy). From this assignment we would derive the priority of one over the other.

24 See mainly Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) and The Corrosion of Character (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996).

25 Donald Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner (San Francisco: Josey-Bass Publishers, 1987).

26 Ibid.

27 See, for example, Jordi Ludevid, «Aula Profesional», 2018, at www.jordiludevid.com.