Many philosophers I know think professional ethics is an uninteresting subject that exists only because there is a market for it. Just as failed pop singers perform in the Catskills, they think, failed metaphysicians do Ethical Issues in Consumer Research. Except for the genuine problems of biomedical ethics, triviality prevails.

This is unfair, of course. II is partly a reflection of snobbism on the part of illuminate who still wish to keep philosophy pure. But such attitudes also reflect the fact that very little has been written in professional ethics that is as good as Alan Goldman's The Moral Foundations of Professional Ethics.

Goldman does not simply rehearse for us what a deontologist, and a utilitarian, and a libertarian, and a contractor fan would say about professionals' obligations. Instead, he develops a unified rights-based theory, in the liberal tradition, that generates a sustained criticism of professionals' ideologies. Goldman is an intelligent and careful philosopher, whose method is to develop the strongest possible arguments for the positions he wishes to criticize, and then to pick them apart one by one. He tries scrupulously to be fair, with the result that even in the places that his critique is convincing it is devastatingly so. He is not always convincing; but in a book that is wall-to-wall arguments no one expects to agree with everything.

Professions and Roles
Goldman rightly focuses on the key philosophic issue for the professions: whether they are governed by special moral principles that are different from, or even in conflict with, our common moral framework. In Goldman's terminology a profession governed by such principles is "strongly role-differentiated.' Many doctors assume that the "Hippocratic principle" means that their only duty is to the patient's health, even if that means fooling or manipulating the patient; lawyers assume that the "principle of full advocacy" authorizes them to trample other people's moral rights to further their clients' interests. Business managers may believe that their public obligations are discharged when and only when they maximize profits for their stockholders; and politicians may accept that their office requires them to dirty their hands with moral wrong (the "omelette/egg principle" made respectable when Machiavelli wrote, "I love my native city more than my own soul"). At the risk of giving away the plot, let me say at the outset that Goldman rejects all these claims. The fifth profession he discusses is judging; it is the only one that Goldman thinks is strongly differentiated. The judge must rule solely on the legal, not the moral, merits of the cases; ordinary citizens, by contrast, may "conscientiously object" to morally bad laws, and in this sense the judge's moral duty contradicts our ordinary framework.

Goldman's chapters on lawyers and doctors are particularly persuasive. He considers the usual arguments that a lawyer must not breach a client's trust by refusing on moral grounds to assist him or her; that the adversary system requires moral ruthlessness of lawyers: and that if lawyers refused morally unsavory cases they would be assuming oligarchic control over the legal system. Goldman simply demolishes these arguments. Similarly, he shows that patients must be told depressing or even traumatic facts about their own condition, and permitted to make their own decisions about how to proceed, because that may be the only way they will be able to bring their life's work to a satisfactory conclusion, and realize the values that make life worth living.

Other chapters are less convincing Goldman's argument that a judge must consider only the legal, rather than the moral, merits of case ignores the large realist literature on adjudication, which suggests that this distinction might not even be meaningful. (Statutory interpretation, realists argued, is always done in the light of public policy and "the equities.") More important, Goldman's main argument, that if judges were to consider the moral merits we would be unable to form stable expectations of the law, introduces a subtle class bias. Only legally sophisticated people, or people who routinely consult lawyers, form their expectations on the basis of black-letter common law. Less fortunate or educated people generally assume that the equities as they perceive them will be endorsed by the courts, and are often stunned when they lose to "legalisms"; their stable expectations would be shattered by Goldmanian judges. (I leave aside the added question of whether social stability under bad laws is as important as Goldman assumes it to be.)

Even less satisfactory is the chapter on business ethics. Goldman asserts the rights of consumers-only one page is devoted to the rights of workers-against the arguments of laissez-faire free market apologists. This introduces an odd, almost surrealistic bias to the discussion: what are we to make of an essay on business ethics in which Karl Marx is not even mentioned? One need not be a Marxist to think that the argument that business systematically violates the rights of workers by exploiting their labor must somehow be addressed. I suspect that outside the United States Goldman's chapter will be regarded as simply irrelevant. Perhaps he considered it important to beat back Milton Friedman on his own narrowly ideological turf; but earnestly Speaking Truth to Power in this way is liberalism at its most exasperating.

The Framework of Moral Rights
Judge, politician, lawyer, doctor, executive: this appears to be an olla podrida of professions. One main theme, however, unifies the book. Goldman believes "that special institutional obligations exist when their recognition has better moral consequences than would refusing to recognize them." This is consequentialism, but it is not utilitarianism, because Goldman thinks that the most vital moral consequences are rights, not utilities ("mere utilities," he often says). For Goldman, a strongly differentiated principle must be justified by showing that it leads, by and large, to enhanced fulfillment of rights. Utilitarian justifications will not do, and utilitarians are among Goldman's principal targets. When he contrasts professionals' supposed principles with "our common moral framework," Goldman usually means by the latter the framework of moral rights, and he insists that nothing can outweigh a right except another right.

What, then, are rights? For Goldman, they are interests that are especially important because they are "protective of the integrity of the individual person." They "stake out a moral space in which individuals can develop and pursue their own values within a social context." The most fundamental rights, he believes, are those of autonomy and equality, though the latter does not figure prominently in Goldman's argument. Indeed, on page 109 Goldman suggests that autonomy alone is the foundational value in his theory. Autonomy means developing and pursuing our own values. It is important because we want to make our own decisions; because other people are less likely to make decisions for us that satisfy our wants; and because even if we did not want autonomy, autonomous beings are more worthy of respect. The value of autonomy appears directly in Goldman's argument in his chapter on doctors: he argues strikingly and successfully that our self-determined projects can be more important to us than life itself, and thus that the Hippocratic principle is false. Autonomy appears indirectly in the rest of the book, as the basis for the various rights to security, sustenance, and liberty that professionals might override. These interests count as rights because they are necessary for us to formulate and pursue our autonomous projects.

All this is interesting and plausible. I doubt, however, that the concept of rights will bear the weight that Goldman puts on it. The chapters on political and business ethics illustrate the difficulties.

Both politicians and business executives are commonly faced with situations in which, by violating the rights of some people they can realize gains, sometimes very large ones, in overall utility (Goldman assumes, for the sake of argument, the Invisible Hand claim that in a free market what is good for business is good for overall utility.) This seems to justify sacrificing the rights. Against this Goldman offers the thought that rights trump utilities-that no violation of rights, however small, can be compensated by any gain in "mere" utility, however large. Goldman illustrates that with a civil liberties example: even if it would make many people much happier, it would be wrong to silence an offensive political speaker (say, a white supremacist); the right to free speech trumps all the aggregate utilities.

Similarly, an extremely unsafe production process would have to be shut down even though it was the only way to produce goods that people very much wanted, because the rights of the workers, or the locals whose air and water are being poisoned, trump the aggregate utility of stockholders and consumers. In the political context, it would be wrong for an official to smear an opponent, or bug someone's home, even if that were the only way to implement an extremely useful policy.

Putting such a theory into practice, however, would shut down the entire economy and totally halt the practice of politics. The production of the most basic goods, such as electricity and petroleum, is extremely dangerous both to workers and to the environment. But without them-no economy. It is similarly wrong to think that politicians could implement any policy without employing practices that violate some people's rights. Certainly Goldman cannot mean to advocate a principle of Fiat jus, perect mundi. But that seems to be the inevitable consequence of viewing rights as trumps over utility. (Ronald Dworkin, who introduced the imagery of trumps in Tatting Rights Seriously, is not nearly as absolute about it as Goldman: Dworkin allows that rights may be violated in cases of "special urgency.")

Rights and Trumps
Goldman suggests a way out in the chapter on political ethics: although rights are trumps, some rights are more important than others (the ace of trumps beats the knave). A politician can violate some rights if that is the only way to protect more vital ones. Politicians find themselves in such a position much more frequently than private citizens, and this creates the illusion that they can override rights to increase utility. In reality, the interests for which politicians are responsible are often so vital that they should be regarded as rights, not utilities.

We may extend the same reasoning to the other example (though Goldman does not himself do so). Disastrous economic consequences are no longer "mere utilities": we have rights to basic goods, and these are more important than the rights that must be overridden to produce them. Up to a point, we should absorb the costs of workplace and environmental safety-these are utilities whereas physical safety is a right-but when it is a question of shutting down the country, rights are at stake.

This too is plausible. The problem comes when we talk of stages intermediate to the extremes of catastrophic loss of utility and mere annoyance-when we talk, that is, about real-life cases. How much must the price of electricity go up before loss of utility becomes violation of rights? How good must a policy be before we have a right that politicians enact it? (Think of rural electrification or public transportation.) Long before our way of life is literally shut down, we can experience losses of utility that diminish our autonomy in quite tangible ways and have some claim to be regarded as rights.

It is futile to rely on the theory of rights to resolve real problems. In order to void an impossibly strong version of the rights-trumps-utilities thesis, certain "mere" utilities must be regarded as rights. This, however, is strictly a verbal change, and all the old utilitarian problems of aggregation and comparison-safety versus price, political ruthlessness versus political ineffectuality, many small harms versus a few greater ones, acid rain for all versus low-level radiation for some-must still be addressed under the guise of rank ordering rights.

Two possibilities follow: either the rights-trumps-utilities thesis is a purely formal analysis of rights and utilities, which by itself tells nothing about how we should regard particular interests that conflict in various contexts; or else it is simply not true that rights always trump utilities. In either case, merely showing that rights are at stake in a certain situation will not be enough to answer hard questions.

For this reason, the rights-trump utilities thesis cannot be used to derive important conclusions. Rather, the thesis must itself be the conclusion of arguments that independently assess webs of competing values. When Goldman is convincing, he shows us that professional prerogatives cannot trump other values. It is curious, then, that his account and the professional ideologies he so effectively debunks share the assumption that one sort of value trumps all others. Ours is world without trumps.

Goldman's criticism of professional ideologies is-to my mind, at any rate-much more convincing than the rights-based principles he suggests in their place, for example, that a lawyer must "aid his clients in achieving all and only that to which they have moral rights." Kafka, we may suppose, had a morel right to have his life's work burned after his death; would that mean, however, that were Max Brad his lawyer, Brad would have done wrong to save The Trial from the conflagration? It is not clear that Kafka's right trumps the value to us of great art. This is just one example of moral complexity in the world-without-trumps.

What is clear, however, is that professionals have usually assumed that their prerogatives trump our common moral framework. Goldman shows us that, at the deepest level, the fetish is a fiction.

Reproduced by permission of the Hastings Center Report. @Institute of Society. Ethics and the Life Sciences, 360 Broadway. Hastingson-Hudson. N.Y. 10706