One reason that professional ethics is an important area of investigation for moral theorists is that it forces us to recognize an important distinction often ignored in normative ethics. This is the distinction between the moral content of an action, as judged by ordinary moral criteria, and the authority or responsibility of an agent to act on his own judgment of content according to those criteria. This question of moral authority to act concerns the boundaries of individual autonomy and responsibility, and the drawing of these boundaries has been a central task for traditional normative theory. The recognition that unburdened conscience may not always be the correct guide comes when we begin to apply such theory to social institutions like the professions. Here we encounter norms like that of client advocacy, which may contradict the demands of ordinary conscience.

The question of moral authority arises because of the fallibility of agents in arriving at moral judgments and acting on them. Because agents in certain circumstances are likely to make mistakes when engaged in moral evaluations of alternative actions, it may sometimes be better to impose rules on them that simplify their moral universe by eliminating from consideration certain normally relevant factors. Such rules may require an agent to do what, from his own perspective, might appear wrong; or they may call upon him to refrain from doing what might otherwise appear to be morally required. When these rules apply, the platitudes that a person is always free to do whatever does not harm or violate the rights of others, and that he should always act according to the dictates of his own conscience may be falsified.

Rules thus limiting authority are typical in institutional, and especially professional, contexts for at least three reasons.

First, the actions of agents in these contexts are likely to have broader cumulative effects on the institutions themselves. These cumulative effects may be difficult for the agents to predict from their perspective of particular cases or circumstances.

Second, where action according to limiting institutional principle might cause harm in violating common moral conscience, the institution is to be structured so that agents occupying other positions within it act to prevent such harm. A division of moral labor within the institutions results, in which behavior is to be coordinated toward the greatest good.

Third, agents within such settings must act toward strangers who must be able to predict their courses of conduct. Clients consult professionals in crisis situations, and it is often crucial to be able to count on their reacting in certain fixed ways. Limiting norms render actions more regular and predictable than would direct consideration of all conceivable morally relevant features of situations. The purpose of professional codes of conduct, when these are more than public relations devices, is to make such norms explicit so as to coordinate professional conduct and render it consistent and predictable.

Despite these characteristics of institutional contexts in which professionals function, the burden of proof must remain with those who would defend limiting professional norms. It must be kept in mind that deferral to such norms in morally charged contexts always involves sacrifice, at least by the agent in question, of perceived moral goods or demands, or, most regrettably, of perceived moral rights.

If it appears paradoxical that fundamental moral principles could ever require their own suppression as guides to conduct, the paradox becomes superficial once we are reminded, as we were above, of the fallibility of moral agents and of the complexity of the social institutions within which they function. But if there is no outright paradox, there may remain sacrifice of individual interests and claims that would otherwise appear overriding. There may be moral costs to the agents in question as well relating to their freedom of choice. As noted, special norms often limit moral autonomy and authority, the exercise of which is valuable for agents and for their moral capacities and character development. Regarding the latter, frequent suppression of demands from ordinary moral conscience may stultify its further employment, resulting at worst in the "organization man" mentality, for whom blind loyalty to the profession appears the only virtue.

The assumption that simplifying rules will operate in a morally better way than autonomous moral judgment presupposes a disjunction of more specific premises that remain themselves open to question. First, there may be hidden premises about the structure of the institution, for example the legal or economic systems, to the effect that when the rules in question are obeyed, when for example lawyers pursue only their clients' interests or business managers, profits, an invisible hand of institutional structure will guide and coordinate individual actions toward the greater moral good. But this must be explicitly shown for each institution as it actually functions, and not simply in the ideal case.

Or second, if the hand is not to be so invisible, there may be an assumption of a superior moral viewpoint for those who design the institution or make the rules or policies within it. The general rules they impose are assumed better able to capture fully enlightened moral judgments in aggregate than are the autonomous judgments of individuals directly involved in particular cases. This assumption becomes problematic when we recognize the difficulty in designing general rules, for example civil laws, so that they have the correct moral implications in the diversity of cases to which they might be applied. It is called into question further if we dismiss all claims to moral expertise, by legislators for example. An additional consideration, however, as noted above, may be the need for regularity and coordination among actions of different agents, better effected by the imposition of the simplifying institutional rules. But again here it must be shown that this requirement overrides the need to judge each situation directly on its moral merits.

More generally, to justify limiting institutional norms such as are found in professional codes of conduct, it must be shown that they are required to serve the very values that underlie the more fundamental principles that are to be superceded. It must be shown that the profession or institution in question serves a vital moral function, one that could not be realized as well without the interposition of these norms between agents and their previously developed moral consciences. From the point of view of a rights based moral theory, the values to be served are those that underlie the recognition of individual rights in the first place: most concisely, those constituting necessary conditions for individuals to lead their own lives as they choose, to formulate and pursue other values of their choice. Such conditions include freedom from harm and unwarranted interference, a base of material goods and opportunities, and a social environment predictable enough for agents to form stable expectations and reasonable estimates of what is required to achieve various possible goals.

From this point of view, autonomous moral choice and decision by individuals is of both intrinsic and instrumental value. It is intrinsically valuable because individuals value the freedom to choose as they deem best, to weigh all morally relevant factors as they perceive them. It is of instrumental value because making morally unrestricted choices develops the character to make broader and deeper choices about the course of one's life as it affects others, and because individuals who formulate diverse values for themselves and encounter such diversity in others are usually in a better position to evaluate situations in which they are directly involved than are outsiders. If social institutions and professions within them are to impose special norms that limit the moral autonomy of their agents to judge and act on direct moral principle, their justification must show how this better proteas the capacity for such choices among the citizens in the society at large.

Institutional Norms in the Legal Profession
We may descend from this level of abstraction to illustrate the attempted justification of special professional norms in the legal profession, for both judges and lawyers in our legal system.

The case of judges illustrates nicely how several of the considerations raised above in the abstract justify a special institutional norm to guide their conduct. The norm here demands that, except in extreme cases, they hand down legal decisions in accordance with requirements of law, even when their direct moral perception of the cases and consequences of their decisions disagree with those requirements. The values to be served here by the imposition of this special norm include the ability of citizens to form stable expectations in relation to the legal system and be free from unwarranted interference from officials of the law. These necessary conditions for enjoying many other rights require in turn consistency and predictability in the decisions of judges. To be able to know what the law is and which legal requirements apply to various courses of conduct, citizens and the lawyers they consult must be able to predict how judges will decide prospective cases. This predictability, requiring consistency or coordination of individual decisions, is more easily achieved when decisions are made according to perception of law, including legal precedent, rather than according to perception of moral merits in each case.

Other justifying considerations here include moral fallibility and the division of authority within the political and legal structure. We trust more to the cumulative legal tradition and to legislators answerable to an electorate to frame guidelines for judicial decisions than we trust the moral perceptions of individual judges, especially given how many factors might enter into the overall moral deserts of litigants, factors that may be private matters and that legal trials are not designed to elicit. It may be particularly difficult for individual judges to estimate the cumulative effects of decisions on direct moral grounds. A trial court judge might correctly believe that a departure from legal requirement in the particular case before him will have little effect in itself upon the legal system. But if many judges so reasoned, the consistency and predictability of law, necessary to its social function, would be lost. Such discrepancy between individual and cumulative or collective rationality in decision making processes again typically justifies the imposition of special norms to achieve the desired social effect.

A final consideration here is that, if judges do not accept the institutional norm in question, they not only jeopardize that consistency necessary for lawyers and citizens to know what the law requires, they also nullify the effects of legislative decisions and therefore violate democratic process. If judges can ignore not only precedent, but statute, for moral reasons they perceive to apply directly to the cases before them, then legislative decisions lose their force, and we have a government of judges rather than one of divided powers. Thus a norm blocking direct moral judgment seems justified in this casein being necessary for the realization of the fundamental purpose of the legal system: to subject the behavior of citizens to fixed and known rules through democratic political processes. Since this broad institution intern serves a vital moral function in providing a social environment in which rights maybe better protected and their enjoyment facilitated, the argument here fits the full model proposed in the abstract above.

Similar arguments may be offered in favor of a special professional norm for lawyers, to the effect that they ought not to block legal objectives of their clients on directly perceived moral grounds. Again the appeal is to moral fallibility and the division of authority, autonomy and responsibility within the legal system.

It is argued that attorneys who forego objectives or strategies within the bounds of law because they find them morally objectionable usurp the roles of legislators, judges and juries in relation to their clients. They limit the exercise of legal rights when it is not their place to do so. Hence they usurp as well their clients' autonomy of decision. Each citizen, it is said, has a right to have his freedom limited only through proper channels; no one should be subject to a de facto government of lawyers. If lawyers take it upon themselves to judge clients on moral grounds, then not only will some clients suffer extralegal restraint, but others with politically unpopular causes may remain without competent legal representation at all.

And of course there is no guarantee that the lawyer's moral perception incorrect. If it exceeds in stringency the requirements of law, it will impose more severe restraint upon free action than the political system saw fit to impose. In order to maintain a government bylaw rather than by lawyers, the latter must therefore restrict themselves to the role of advocates within the legal system.

While the arguments here resemble the prior ones in form and content, more serious questions can be raised regarding their moral soundness. Again the value to be served by client advocacy is one fundamental in a rights-based morality-in this case the autonomy of legal clients within the political system. But exclusive focus upon the freedom of clients assumes equally competent representation for adversaries or third parties to counteract zealous advocacy in apparent violation of moral rights, and this assumed protection may not exist. From the point of view of lawyers themselves, it is simply not true that they would restrict legal rights as would judges if both acted on direct moral perception. A client can seek and obtain another lawyer whose moral views are more in accord with his own if a first attorney refuses aid on moral grounds; but clients' positions vis a vis judges is clearly different.

Nor do lawyers' decisions have the direct effects upon law and the legal system that judicial rulings have; there is not the same danger of a de facto government of lawyers. The moral qualms of lawyers when their clients demand violation of perceived moral rights can only temper the functioning of the legal system, not determine in themselves the application of law to the behavior of citizens. It remains an open question whether the goal of protecting those values and rights that underlie the justification of the legal system are better served by a norm of single-minded client advocacy by lawyers.

We may illustrate the difficulty with the principle of zealous advocacy by moving to a yet more concrete example. Suppose a corporate lawyer on retainer is asked to block implementation of a proposed regulation by the FDA, so that his client can continue to market a product that the lawyer is convinced can cause serious harm. The present A.B.A. Code of Professional Responsibility allows a lawyer to withdraw from employment in such a case, if it has not reached the state of adjudication; but, if he continues to represent the corporation, the Code requires him to do his legal best to achieve its objective. Certainly there is no suggestion, even in the section that posits ethical ideals rather than legal require menu, that a lawyer ought to withdraw on grounds of conscience. Indeed the Code is quite explicit that an attorney need not agree personally with the goals of his client in order properly to pursue them with utmost vigor.

Yet in this case the assumption that the system will provide adequate protection before the fact for those who may be harmed by the objective that the lawyer helps to achieve appears false. And there is little danger in this context that refusals of aid by individual morally minded lawyers will leave the corporate powers without legal representation. The situation is likely to remain the opposite-a great imbalance of legal expertise on the side of those with the resources to command it. Even when all sides to a dispute are legally represented, as long as fully zealous advocacy remains the norm and lawyers may use tactics designed to thwart decision on the moral or legal merits, cases will be decided more on the basis of adversarial skills than litigant rights.

I have argued this issue elsewhere and use it only for purposes of further illustration, to illustrate again how considerations of fallibility and consistency, and division of authority and autonomy within social institutions, all to serve those values underlying fundamental principles that define individual rights, figure in arguments for and against special norms. These norms are special because they generate duties for those in institutional (professional) roles that are independent of the immediate moral content of the actions they require. Such duties, we have seen, are intelligible and possible, but we must be cautious and refuse to accept them too readily. We must be sensitive to the sacrifice of perceived rights of others, and to the limitations placed on autonomous moral judgments by the agents in these roles, as such limitations affect moral character and its exercise in other contexts as well.

In my opinion this theme is central to the moral philosopher's interest in professional ethics. Variations on it can be played out for each profession, determining in each case whether there really is a distinct professional ethic to be obeyed. The central considerations will remain the same, but they will figure differently in each case, so that, as has been intimated in relation to judges and lawyers, we should not expect a uniform answer to this question of special norms across professions and roles within them.

Analogies with Other Professions
We may cite several more examples to illustrate analogies with the legal profession. Arguments regarding the norm of profit maximization for business managers closely resemble those for lawyer advocacy, and they are equally open to question. Again the central assumption is that the institution, now the free market economy, will operate so as to maximize welfare and freedom of choice for consumers. It is said that potential profits represent future satisfaction of consumer desires, that their pursuit allows the buying public to impose its own values on business enterprises, that when managers forego possible profits, they substitute their own values for consumer preferences and usurp the taxing function of government in relation to stockholders. Again such arguments assume institutional forces to counteract possible harm from single-minded adherence to the norm; here the countervailing forces include business competition and assumed expertise and ability on the part of consumers to impose and protect their interests. Once more such forces may be nonexistent or insufficient for their task, calling into serious question the norm itself.

Related arguments by economists apply to a more specific business practice that is directly relevant to professions as well, namely the setting of prices or fees. Free market economists argue that when prices are held artificially low rather than set to maximize profits, this will interfere with the market mechanism for rationing resources and goods in the optimal way. If prices are too low, demand for the good in question will be artificially high, creating over consumption in the short run and shortages in the long run. In addition, existing supply will fail to be rationed according to relative demand, as measured by willingness to pay. Some other mode of rationing will then be required, and for some goods this alternative may include black markets that operate less fairly than a normally operating free market.

Here questionable assumptions include the premise that supply of the good or service in question is normally responsive to demand, and, more important, that willingness to pay correlates with some morally relevant parameter for distribution, e.g. need, desire, etc. In the case of professional services both assumptions again appear false, so that direct perception by professionals of relative needs and abilities to pay ought to play a more prominent role in setting fees and providing services. A social obligation to cater first to relative need seems a reasonable demand upon professionals, especially in exchange for allowing professional organizations to maintain monopolistic control over supply.

Problems in the division of moral autonomy, authority and responsibility emerge more clearly in relation to junior business executives and in other professions in which there are fixed hierarchical role relations, e.g. the military, the police, and the nursing profession. Standard rigid accounts, according to which those in higher positions have all the authority and those lower in the hierarchy owe obedience and loyalty, may oversimplify by exaggerating the authority of the former not only in relation to air subordinates, but visa via their clients or the public at large.

If, for example, doctors lack moral authority to make major medical decisions, which resides rather with their patients after they are fully informed, then nurses would appear to have a duty to provide relevant information to patients, even when that information reflects badly on the doctors' procedures. Similarly, police and military personnel ought to follow orders of superiors only when the latter have moral (end not simply institutional) authority to impose the policies or action in question on third parties, only when the actions meet minimal standards of moral decency. These standards, however, as viewed by subordinates, need not require actions morally best from their point of view, since such stringency would negate all authority for their superiors.

Considerations of fallibility and consistency also enter directly into the justification of special norms in other professions. Consider the assignment of grades by professors. Since grades not only inform students of the quality of their work, but may drastically affect the future course of their lives, there may appear to be many morally relevant factors other than the quality of their work that enter into proper grading. A major problem with allowing such factors to influence grading, however, is that they cannot be consistently and fairly taken into account, given professors' fallibility and ignorance of the personal situations of many students. It is not simply that students and admissions officers alike expect grades to be assigned on the basis of scholastic achievement, since we can still ask whether such expectations are proper. It is also that, despite the scholastically superfluous function of sorting students for later careers, professors are not in a position to evaluate in a consistent way the moral deserts of students, their material and psychological needs, backgrounds, etc., that might be relevant in the abstract to a moral distribution of career positions.

Conclusion
There is space here neither to multiply examples further nor to do justice to the ones we have considered. But morals can be drawn for both the morally minded professional and for the professional moral philosopher. For the former the most fundamental question is whether he should trust to his conscience and ordinary processes of moral reasoning in professional contexts, or whether he should rather adopt certain fixed professional norms in advance and resolve to abide by them. Only after this methodological issue is settled can decision procedure in morally charged contexts proceed. Of course the method for resolving the methodological issue at this level must itself derive from ordinary moral reasoning and more basic moral principle, but this does not necessarily stack the deck against special, middle-level, institutional norms.

For the moral philosopher, the resolution of the professional's question will affect the structure of ethical theory, complicating it when the answer is affirmative. At the least the attention to professions has shown that many traditional presentations of moral theory in terms of a few extremely general principles may be of no use in direct application to concrete situations within institutional settings. The cooperation of the professional and the philosopher addressing this question of moral authority simultaneously to moral theory and concrete cases across professions thus enriches the practice of the one and the theory of the other.