The following material is excerpted from Thomas Shaffer, The Return
of the Gentleman to Professional Ethics, 10 Queen's U.L. Rev. 1, 3,
4-6 (1984):
A . . . way to describe the gentleman's life is to catalogue the
qualities we admire in gentlemen. We start with the understanding
that some people are gentlemen and some are not, and we then try to
notice the characteristics of those we identify as gentlemen. . .
.
The gentleman is civil. He hates to inflict pain . . . .
The gentleman is self-possessed . . . .
The gentleman is steady in leadership. Leadership--and every form
of power--is, to him, not a matter of merit but a matter of circumstance.
This is not noblesse oblige, which regards power as appropriate and
seeks to justify having it. The gentleman's notion is that power is
a form of service.
The center of the gentleman's social morality is a response to what
happens--not a reaction, but a response. He is able to respond; he
believes that "a human being leads himself to do everything he
does."
The gentleman is discriminating . . . .
The gentleman is also diffident. He is firm in his morals but not
without doubt about them. . . . He has "the capacity to take
a firm stand while recognizing that the rightness of doing so is questionable."
* * * *
The 19th-century gentleman in North America gave us slavery, Manifest
Destiny, the theft of half of Mexico, the subjugation of women, the
exploitation of immigrant children, Pinkerton detectives, yellow-dog
contracts, and the implacable genocide of American Indians. You could
make a case that the gentleman is not worth saving. If he has left
the professions, the best thing for us would be to bar the door lest
he get back in. The gentleman's ethic is either inherently useless
or it has been corrupted. At best, gentlemen have deceived themselves,
often and thoroughly.
But all admirable moralities are neglected and corrupted. In the
curious dynamics of self-deception, the nobler the morality the more
likely it will be corrupted. Still, there is a difference between
a corrupt morality and a corrupted morality. There is a difference
between the racism of Hitler and the racism of Rudyard Kipling. It
may be that the gentleman's morality, a thing as old as Aristotle's
Nichomachean Ethics, can be cleaned up and put to use in modern professions.
* * * *
Professions are the way we certify our superiority. Lionel Trilling
noticed this in C.P. Snow's stories about scientists who work for
the government--"men who, by their talents, have risen from .
. . the lower classes." In their new professional world, "differences
of social origin are modified by the attitudes of the scientific group."
That is, of the professional group. "Thus, all the physicists,
no matter what their social origin, are at one in their alienation
from the engineers, whom they regard as of a lower social order."
A similar sorting out is familiar to all of us who observe the hierarchies
in medicine and law. It is also familiar in the distinction between
professionals and their clients, where professionalism means superiority,
disengagement (which we call objectivity), and social processes in
which we divide people up and hand the parts over to experts. In contrast
with this professional arrogance, Lewis Thomas says that the essence
of traditional medicine is a "uniquely subtle, personal relationship"
between doctor and patient that "has roots that go back to the
beginnings of medicine's history . . . ." It takes, he says,
"the best of doctors, the best of friends."
The moral danger of professionalism is absolutely fundamental. The
risk here is idolatry . . . . acting as if success in an occupation
were a moral compass.
* * * *
Ancestry and ownership have been important in the gentleman's ethic.
But they have not been essential . . . .
What, then, is the moral quality of the gentleman's esteem for the
past? I claim that it is not breeding. It is moral tradition. The
gentleman does not regard himself as either an autonomous moral agent
or as a self-ade person. He preserves and honors the values of his
culture. When he stands against his community, his moral argument
is the moral argument of Jesus against the Pharisees, or of Isaiah
against the temple priesthood: He accuses the community of dishonoring
its moral inheritance. That has been the position of some Southern
lawyers against racism in the South. It is the argument of many in
Israel against the current excesses of the political and military
leadership there . . . .
The gentleman recalls to the community its heritage; he insists that
those in institutions look at what they're doing and not behave as
if events were too big or too complicated for them . . . .
The second way the gentleman avoids professional idolatry is through
craftsmanship. Alasdair MacIntyre fashions from Aristotelian ethics
a professional moral tradition he calls the practice. The notion turns
on a distinction between two kinds of benefits we gain from the pursuit
of our callings: One of these is external; for example, money and
the good regard of our neighbors. The other is internal. Internal
benefits relate to the joy of doing what we do, of sharing that joy
with our colleagues, and of subjecting what we do to the standards
of performance we inherit, preserve, and pass on in a profession.
An example is what in business is called a trade secret: Doctors and
lawyers do not have trade secrets. If one of us discovers something,
or thinks he has discovered something, he turns it over to the profession--for
use, for evaluation, and for improvement. When one of us fails to
do that, he is considered unprofessional.
Such professional traditions are what I mean by craftsmanship. When
we behave with honesty and civility, the practice is a way to the
good life; it is a theater for virtue; it honors our professional
ancestors and admits that we are indebted to them; it reaches beyond
professional fashion and fad and gives each of us a place to learn
who he is.
If we keep our metaphors straight, the practice is also a way to
avoid the delusions of professionalism. Craftsmanship, for example,
is not art; when we call it art, we withdraw it from evaluation and
use by our colleagues; we begin to think that what we do is too special
for them. Craftsmanship is not merely work, either. We excise the
mystery from what we do when we come to think of it only as work,
and of our doing it as only a job.
A third way to topple the professional idol is through liberal education.
We are solemn in our professional work--inevitably so, I guess-- but,
as Karl Barth said, we are only children playing before God. I think
that's why Lewis Thomas, and others in medical education . . . use
their influence against extensive premedical curricula; they want
to claim for their profession the liberally educated doctor. It is
a way to save the profession from being too solemn.
Liberal education helps us understand the relation between the patient
or client and the community. It is defensible, surely, to provide
in the community a professional function that does not serve "the
whole man." But we can get away with that only when our community
takes responsibility for the whole man. It is defensible for me to
defend my client against a drunk-driving charge if I am also alert
to the fact that his alcoholism will not be cured in traffic court,
and if I am concerned for-- responsible for--his being more than either
a drunkard or a client of mine.
When Dr. Craig's heart-transplant patient died, he grieved for her--not
for his or the hospital's want of skill, but for Eve, his patient,
who was dead. He shed a tear for his friend. He spoke to a young colleague
about his three decades as a doctor: "I know now how people die,"
he said. "But I still don't know why." On that question
he needed Socrates and Job more than he needed professionalism.
Liberal learning helps us to see the community, and the mystery of
the human person, with diffidence but also with responsibility. It
helps us to begin to learn that we are not defenseless against evil,
but that our professionalism is not enough for a moral life.
Finally, we can fend off professional idolatry by locating and treasuring
the feminine in ourselves and in our professional traditions. The
gentleman's ethic in the professions was but is no longer the creation
and province of men. If it were again to be as masculine as it was
in Trollope's day, it would be, by the fact of its bias, an unacceptable
ethic; it would be corrupted too deeply to be worth returning to.
It would also and again become a justification, as its 19th-century
manifestations were in Britain and in North America, for racism and
exploitation of the poor.
An attempt to locate and describe the feminine quality in the gentleman's
ethic is necessary as a matter of justice. If we succeed at it, we
will not only reduce the sexism in our professions but will also reduce
the other ways in which we are unjust. I am tempted to make an even
bolder claim: Our doing this--our discovering what Jung would have
called the anima in our collective professional soul--is a way to
diminish professional self-deception and the idolatry in which we
see professionalism where we ought to see God.
The question would be how to explicate and treasure the feminine
side of the gentleman's ethic; and on that question I am reliably
told that I don't know what I'm talking about. I do know what I'm
worried about though--what I cannot avoid being worried about, because
I am a teacher of women who are lawyers: I am worried about evasion
of the feminine. . . .
I am struck by a curious feature of stories about women in the professions
in the days when, for the most part, the professions excluded women--about
Myra Bradwell, for example. She was a Chicago housewife, mother, and
editor, who had great influence on the law of Illinois but who was
not allowed admission to the bar until she was old and famous--four
years before her death. Her memory was appropriately celebrated in
a book about American women, written for the bicentennial celebration
in the United States. The curiosity I mentioned appears in this sentence:
"In part, perhaps, because as a woman she was an outsider, Myra
Bradwell was able to perceive many ways in which the operation of
the courts could be improved, and . . . an impressive number of her
suggestions were enacted into law."
Myra Bradwell was a prophetic figure in the life of the law and lawyers
in Illinois. The quotation suggests that this was possible because
she was an outsider; and she was an outsider because she was a woman.
A prophet is always outside his culture and at the same time within
and a part of it. It would be outrageous to suggest, now, that women
not be admitted to the bar because their moral influence will be greater
if they are outside the profession. But there may be a subtle point
about being both outside and inside, and about women who are both
outside and inside, that remains useful.
Note
Atticus
Finch 