Making the Professions Moral?
Symposium Wrestles with the How-To's

By Warren Duffie

Should engineers be concerned that millions of people around the world lack safe drinking water? Is it more important for chemistry students to learn about chemical compounds or about how to use them responsibly? Should ethics and morality be incorporated into all liberal arts curriculums? Are Catholic colleges and universities better prepared than secular ones to teach about morality?

A dozen CUA professors and deans will grapple with these questions during a March 11 symposium titled “Professions and the Common Good,” a daylong event (9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.) to be held in the Columbus School of Law that is open to the public but aimed primarily at the CUA community.

The symposium explores the idea that professionals should work toward the betterment of society (i.e., the common good). The academics in attendance — spanning all disciplines — will discuss topics such as Thomas Aquinas’ views on balancing self-interest and the common good, how engineers can strive to improve sewage systems for impoverished areas, the roles nurses and social workers can play in healing the human spirit, and how Catholic schools develop students spiritually as well as intellectually. The speakers will include Provost John Convey; William F. Fox, dean of the Columbus School of Law; Nalini Jairath, dean of the School of Nursing; Martha Hale, dean of the School of Library and Information Science; and James Zabora, dean of the National Catholic School of Social Service. (A complete list of speakers and topics is provided at the end of this article.)

Professor Leonard DeFiore

“Librarianship has long focused on people who need information and don’t know how to get it, and those who receive too much and don’t know how to assess its value,” says Dean Hale, who will discuss ethical issues in providing information to library patrons. “Because information-seekers span all professions, we need to work with other schools to figure out what we have in common and how to serve the common good.”

“There’s an old Catholic idea of people working toward the benefit of each other,” says Daniel Lynch, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, who is organizing the symposium. “Because what we do for a living dictates much of who we are, the question the symposium speakers will answer is, ‘What does your profession do for the good of mankind and what can it do better?”

Lynch, who teaches a Dartmouth class called Ethics and Engineering, likes to use his field of expertise as an example of a profession facing such a question. Many of the world’s 10 billion people live in abject poverty, in towns that lack basic sanitation and potable drinking water. With technology growing by leaps and bounds every day, Lynch wonders why many people live much as their ancestors did 100 years ago.

“The question for engineers is that, since they are associated with creating a high standard of material living, why are there still so many desperate problems,” Lynch says. “The answer is that many engineers are working to develop new forms of Teflon, bombs and spacecraft, but missing the basics like clean water.”

According to Lynch, many professionals in recent decades have morphed into “occupational specialists” who seem dedicated solely to the corporate bottom line. In addition, downsizing and new technology such as the Internet have made professionals busier than ever. Who has time to think of the common good when a contract deadline is looming?

“Most people are moral in their personal lives,” DeFiore says. “The challenge is translating that into our professional lives. Look at the Catholic politicians who say that their personal religious beliefs do not inform their public policy positions on issues like abortion. If your faith doesn’t affect your world view, what good is it?”

Idea for the Symposium
Lynch has long been interested in exploring how Catholic institutions teach ethics and morality. He wanted to oganize a symposium on this topic at CUA because it’s the “bishops’ university” and is located in Washington, D.C., close to the halls of government power, renowned law firms and media headquarters. He is also a friend of Rev. Kurt Pritzl, O.P., dean of the School of Philosophy. Dean Pritzl agreed to host such a symposium and Dean Fox suggested using the law school as the symposium location.

“CUA is a great place to hold this because the university does an excellent job of promoting ethics and morality as part of its curriculum,” Lynch says.

After the symposium is held, Lynch would like to partner with The Catholic University of America Press to publish a small book on what is discussed.

“What I would like to see emerge from this symposium is for professors and others to move their professions forward in developing ethical concerns for what they do,” he says. “There are very few conferences like this one, so hopefully we can start a trend.”

Ethics and the Academy
Students hear repeatedly how they are expected to get a degree, find a job and earn a living. In secular institutions, the idea of using one’s living to benefit society is often overlooked, Lynch says. To prepare students to be moral as well as competent professionals, Lynch advocates introducing ethics and morality classes into the liberal arts curriculums of both secular and religious colleges and universities.

Professor Daniel Lynch

"Colleges and universities need a moral dimension to their curriculums or else they’re doing a disservice to their students,” he says. “How can you touch the mind without touching the heart as well? Most people have a basic understanding of how to be a good person, but how do you apply that to a complex professional life in which you’re certifying a building being built in another country by people you don’t know?”

Although most learning institutions have classes on legal ethics, Lynch says, they deal primarily with case studies of corporate scandals, what laws were broken, and the consequences and legal implications of such issues. The professor believes the classes should consider these factors but also analyze problems through the prisms of basic human goodness and morality.

That moral dimension is what sets Catholic institutions apart. For example, as in many Catholic schools, CUA undergraduates are required to take classes in philosophy and theology. In addition, CUA offers classes on how Catholic thought relates to specific fields of study, such as Law 163: Catholic Social Teaching, Jurisprudence and the Law and the National Catholic School of Social Service’s class titled Contemporary Social Issues.

Moreover, CUA’s curriculum is permeated by the history of Catholic social thought, which dictates that human beings are entitled to a certain level of dignity and that professionals should use their skills to improve the common good.

However, more could be done, Lynch says, for example offering philosophy and theology classes at the graduate level, when students are in the process of determining their professional identities.

“If you come from a Catholic institution, you should not only be trained to be a competent professional, but a moral and ethical one as well,” says DeFiore, who will lecture at the symposium about how Catholic schools work to improve society. “It’s important for CUA to demonstrate a strong commitment to this symposium because if we — as the Catholic University of America — don’t lead the discussion of morality and ethics in the professions, then who else will?”

Program
Professions and the Common Good
March 11, 2005

Welcome  9:00 AM    William F. Fox Jr., Host

Session I: 9:10-10:40     Rev. Kurt Pritzl, O.P., Facilitator

Professions: The Third Way
Daniel R. Lynch
The Common Good in Classical Political Philosophy
V. Bradey Lewis
Aquinas on “True & False Prudence”: Reconciling Self-Interest and the Common Good. 
William Wagner
Codes of Professional Conduct and the Common Good
William F. Fox Jr.

Session II: 11:00 – 12:30    Daniel Lynch, Facilitator

Engineering  for Sustainable Development and the Common Good
William E. Kelly
Engineering  as a Profession and the Common Good
Daniel  Maher
Beauty, the Common Good and the Built Environment
John V. Yanik
The Catholic Imagination — Cities of Men, City of God and the Utopian Ideal
George Martin

-- LUNCH and Parallel Informal Discussion Sessions --

Session III: 2:00-3:30   William F. Fox Jr., Facilitator

Nursing and the Common Good
Nalini Jairath, Patricia McMullen, Sister Rosemary Donley, Cynthia Grandjean, Deborah Shelton
The Person and the Social Environment: Social Workers’ Mission to Actualize the Common Good 
Barbara Early, Elizabeth Smith, James R. Zabora
Economics and the Common Good
Alberto Martinez Piedra
Bankruptcy and Moral Dilemmas
Veryl Miles

Session IV: 4:00-5:30   Randall Ott, Facilitator

The Life Cycle of Information and the Ethics of Provision
 Martha L. Hale, Carrie Gardner
Catholic Schools and the Common Good 
 Leonard DeFiore, John Convey
The Common Good and the Academic Profession: Exploring the Unity of the Self and the Dialogic Nature of Professional Identity
 Michael J. James
Summary — Professions and the Common Good
Daniel R. Lynch

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