Ethical Behavior in Modern Life - Essay Example

Ethical behavior s This paper contains the information about the ethical behavior, and its reflection in different branches of modern life. The content of “ethical behavior” comprises various meanings, most of which describe it as a set of rules accepted in the society. This term is often connected with the content of “competence”. The aim of this work is to analyze the importance of ethics in competence and indicate the main areas of their interconnection. Competence is a psychological content, which is a part of the professional ethics. During the past decades, the interest to the efficiency of the work of employees, namely to their so-called "competence" increased. The competence of the worker is a term, which has no standard definition. Therefore, each specialist understands it in his own way. In general, it is a part of ethical code, which predetermines the execution of set of norms, established by the Ethical Committee. Consequently, each professional sphere has its own instructions. This paper comprises the examples, which reflect the essence of ethical competence in various situations. The concept of competence combines intellectual and practical components of personal intelligence. Competence of each person has a certain structure, which parts are associated with the ability of the individual to deal with problems in his everyday professional and social life. The structure of individual competence of the person is represented by the independent cognitive activity; the field of civil-social acts; the domestic sphere and the field of cultural and leisure activities. There are some features, which help to determine the level of competence of the individual. They include the ability to self-education, critical thinking, self-direction, self-organization and self-management, teamwork, ability to predict outcomes and possible impacts of different solutions, establishing causal relationships. Competence and ethical behavior are characterized by certain principles in the life and professional sphere of every individual. The first principle of ethical behavior includes honesty. It encourages all individuals to be frank and honest in their business and professional relationships. Honesty implies a fair conduct of business and truthfulness in relation to other people. The competent person will not do any actions, if he considers that: a) the information is false and incorrect; b) the particular data or acts can negatively affect the life of another person; The second principle is objectiveness. The principle encourage people: 1) To maintain their professional knowledge and skills at the high level in order to provide their clients or employers with competent professional services. 2) To act strictly in accordance with the relevant technical and professional standards, providing a professional service. Competent services require sound judgments in the application of the knowledge and skills of the specialist. The professional competence can be divided into two distinct phases: 1) The achievement of professional skills. 2) The support and preservation of professional competence, which requires from the worker a constant awareness and understanding of the technical and business achievements. There are several stages of professional competence. The continuous improvement of professional skills provides the support for a worker to execute his obligations in the ethically correct way. The thoroughness of the professional predetermines that he has to act carefully and cautiously in accordance with the requirements of the job. A professional worker should provide appropriate training for people working under his direction and supervision. One more important feature of the professionally competent worker is to inform the clients, employers or other members of the work team about the situations, emerging during the working process, in order to avoid further misunderstandings and conflicts. The next principle is the principle of confidentiality. It requires from a professional worker to refrain from: 1) The disclosure of confidential information, obtained as a result of professional and business relationships, without a proper and specific permission, except the cases, when this procedure is legal or belongs to the professional right or duty. 2) The use of confidential information, in personal favor or in the favor of the third parties. Every specialist must respect the principle of confidentiality even in the social environment. He should be aware of the possibility of inadvertent disclosure, particularly in the relationships with his colleagues or close relatives. The need to respect the principle of confidentiality is maintained even after the end of the relationships between the worker and the client. The circumstances under which the worker can or should disclose the confidential information: 1) The disclosure is permitted by the law and authorized by the client or employer. 2) There is a professional duty or right to disclose the information if it is not prohibited by law. a) In response to an inquiry or investigation conducted by a member organization or the authority. b) According to the technical standards and ethical requirements. The next principle is a professional behavior. Advertising himself and his work, the specialist should not affect the reputation of the profession. The competent worker must not: 1) Exaggerate the capacity of his qualifications or experience in relation to the services he can provide. 2) Dismissively refer to the work of other professionals or make incorrect comparisons with them. The principle of competent behavior means that the specialist is obliged to comply with relevant laws and regulations and avoid any actions, which may discredit his profession. The notion of competence can also be considered as a flexible one. As the ethical and moral principles are changed with the time, the content of “competence” also acquires new meanings. Mark Rosenberg compares the natural phenomena with the notion of “competence” in the following way: “For millennia, humans looked into the night sky and saw stars they believed were fixed in space. And, of course, the earth was the center of it all. Now we know that nothing is fixed. The stars move, the earth moves, and we move. It’s all relative, depending on where you stand and what’s around you (thanks, Albert Einstein). We can apply this perspective to the notion of “competence”” (2012). It is possible also to analyze this principle according to the cultural difference. For example, in Saudi Arabia women are infringed in their rights. They are prohibited to have a driving license, while in other countries women can drive cars on the same level as men. This case demonstrates the ethical discrepancy in the cultures of different countries. If in Saudi Arabia, the ethical behavior considers it inappropriate to allow women to drive, other countries do not support this idea. Consequently, the notion of Ethical behavior and competence always have a subjective influence. It is very interesting to research competence in the sphere of education. Educational competence is the requirement for the qualitative preparation, expressed by a set of interconnected semantic orientations, knowledge, skills and experience of the student in relation to a certain range of objects of reality, necessary for the implementation of personal and socially meaningful productive activities. The competence and ethical behavior of teachers in relation to their students is one of the most popular questions in the modern society. The level of contact between the teacher and student is also subject to the determination of ethical standards, which largely depend upon the atmosphere in a particular educational establishment. The example of such situation is described by Daniel Feldman in his article “Ancient Ethics for Modern Learning”: “Unlike a teacher, a friend is a peer whom you should use to supplement your teacher’s guidance. You and your friend collaborate and guide each other. By sharing common goals, both of you can learn from each other, and, more importantly, improve your behavior, morals, and even your outlook to your environment. Can your teacher also be your friend? While, certainly, many teachers try to be friendly, the above adage implies that it is not advantageous for teachers to become friends to their students. Teachers should maintain some role of authority. Being on a peer level, friends, ideally, should complement the teacher’s role” (2007). One more interesting sphere in which the notion of competence is widely applied is medicine. The professional competence of the doctor is determined from the perspective of the review of the activities, which belong to this profession. Professional competence is an integral component of training of young specialists in medicine, which causes the ability to solve typical professional tasks, as well as the problems that arise in real situations of their professional activities, using knowledge and expertise. The formation of the professional competence occurs at the stage of training and depends on many factors: the level of development of subject knowledge and skills, characteristics of professional motivation, level of professional orientation, the presence of the necessary personal qualities: kindness, humanity, sensitivity, patience, empathy and so forth. However, the latest researches of the essence of ethical behavior in the sphere of medicine represent that, many people nowadays, try to coordinate the ethical values with personal benefits. Human desire for pleasure defines the motives of the person and the hierarchy of his values, in other words, his way of life. Most of people nowadays build their objectives, in accordance with the pleasure instead moral principles. As medicine is considered to be the most important sphere of science, which concerns the questions of human lives and health, the scientists developed the way to evaluate the level of competence for the future specialists: “This study investigates the construct validity of three methods used to evaluate clinical competence in medicine: standardized test, supervisor performance ratings, and peer performance ratings. “Three attributes of clinical competence are investigated: cognitive abilities, interpersonal skills, and professional qualities. Measures representing each attribute-method combination include: National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) examination (standardized test of cognitive abilities); two scales derived from the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) (standardized test of interpersonal skills and professional qualities); and the three scales derived from the Resident Evaluation Form (REF) (peer and supervisor ratings of all three attributes)” (McGaghie, William. S., 2013). It shows that the notion of competence is of paramount importance for many professions. Moreover, it is often connected with the concept of “morality”. “A central feature of morality is moral principle” (Pojman, Louis P., 1990, 5). Concerning the issues of morality, many people confuse it with ethical values, however, they bear different meanings, despite their close interconnection. The difference between ethics and morality is as follows: morality is a set of traditional manners, while ethics is the understanding of these morals. While describing it, we are still free of evaluative judgments. The evaluation is typical for ethics. Thus, ethics is the understanding of morality. People commit certain acts (morality), but if their actions are wrong or right is determined by ethics. It is clear that ethics cannot exist without morality, while the concept of morality do not include ethics. No one can judge, whether the actions are good or bad, if they are not acquainted with these actions by themselves. However, it is possible to give a description of the actions or morality as a whole, without the assessment of a described object. The distinction between morality and ethics can be expressed as follows: although we can offer individual ethics, there is no concept of individual morality. Any person (male or female) can write a business ethics. However, morality is always a group work. It is a social phenomenon, which is not always obligatory for ethics. As the example, we can consider the following situation, provided by the author of the article “Poll Question. How ethical are you?”: “After a day of long negotiations with a vendor, you take a break and agree to resume negotiations in the morning. You escort the vendor out of your offices and upon returning to the conference room, you realize the vendor left a folder on the conference table. What would you do?”. The article says, that the majority of people (70.6 %) would not look into the folder, which is the right decision according to the content of competence and morality. It shows a high level of ethical values of the population in terms of this situation. Analyzing this information, we can make conclusion, that competence is one of the most important components of ethics. It indicates the situations from the objective point of view and provides the background for the effective and prosperous development of personal skills. As for the professional sphere: “Codes of ethics are established by professional groups for the purpose of protecting consumers, providing guidelines for practitioners, and clarifying the professional stance of the organizations” (Corey, Gerald, 2010, 11). The interconnection between the contents of competence and ethics is a collaboration between the principles of decency and responsibility. Socio-psychological competence of the individual is a special knowledge about society, politics, economy, culture, etc. In other words, it is similar to the content of “worldview”. It allows the individual to navigate in any social situation, make the right decisions and achieve the goals. At the heart of everyday social and psychological competence lies the picture of the ordinary world with its stereotypes, images of art, long-term observations, the national experience and knowledge in a particular area. It is called the folk wisdom, which was reflected in mythology, folklore, proverbs, sayings, traditions, customs, way of life, in other words - in mentality. Socio-psychological competence is related to the ethical issues, since it is based on a thorough knowledge of human psychology and practiced in everyday life. References Corey, G., Corey, M. S., Callanan, P. (2011). Issues and Ethics in the Helping Professions. Eighth edition. The USA: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning. Dipietro, Ben. (2014, July). “Poll Question: “How ethical are you?”. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2014/07/29/poll-question-just-how-ethical-are-you/?KEYWORDS=ethics Feldman, Daniel. (2007, May). “Ancient Ethics for Modern Learning”. Learning Solutions Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/67/ancient-ethics-for-modern-learning McGaghie, William. S. (2013, October). “Constract validity of medical clinical competence measures: a multitraid-multimethod matrix study using confirmatory factor analysis”. American Educational Research Journal. Retrieved from: http://aer.sagepub.com/content/23/2/315.abstract. Pojman, L. P. (1990). Ethics. Discovering right and wrong. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Rosenberg, Mark. (2012, May). “Beyond Competence: It’s the Journey to Mastery That Counts”. Learning Solutions Magazine. 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