Ian Wight and Ross Mitchell
Abstract: Any profession’s ethics, in practice, may be viewed as a function of a combination of personal ethics and professional ethics – implicating the person that is the professional professing, and the operative professional context, where the professionals commune as practitioners. It involves a meshing of the personal and the professional with a larger societal goal in mind – in ethics terms, a good society, privileging goodness. This is ultimately communal territory, involving a collective sense of ethics; being professional together in this respect may be represented as having a common ethos – more than the sum of all the individuals’ ethics, more of an overarching ethic that resides in the minds and hearts of the collective. This ethos is also more than the reference professional institute’s ethical code of practice or conduct; it has a more interior cast – something made by the professional practitioners, on their insides, together. It is like a professional ‘we-place’, grounding their collective professing.
This presentation explores such ethos-making, from an integral ethics perspective, with ethos as the integration of a collective ethical practice. It features the outcome of one workshop – the ethos represented as Quiet Resolve. Staged in the professional context of planning, and specifically as a component of a capstone Professional Planning Practice course – intended to help students with their own professional-self design, the workshop included a mix of planning students (professionals-in-the making) and professional planners (practitioners professing). It was designed to also assist the participant-practitioners with their own continuing professional development, so that they might potentially be more of a support for one another, especially on ethically-challenging terrain. Quiet Resolve represents a statement of their collective ethos – conceived as an integration of theoretical studies (their knowing), practice experiences (their doing), and personal values and beliefs (their being and becoming). Might this be a context for better bridging theory and practice, in relation to ethics especially – for helping professional practitioners to distill their collective ‘prof-essence’, their being professional together?
Tags: Ian Wight, Ross Mitchell, Professional ethics, Quiet resolve
