sions. "The profession," says the proposed code of the Canadian legal profession, "is a branch of the admin- istration of justice and not a mere money-getting occupation." Such pro- fessions as teaching, the ministry, the civil service and social work by their very nature imply like conceptions of responsibility. They imply that while the profession is of necessity a means of livelihood or of financial reward, the devoted service which it inspires is motivated by other considerations.
In business there is one particular difficulty retarding any like develop- ment of unity and responsibility. It may safely be said that so long as with- in the industrial world the cleavage of interest between capital and labor, em- ployer and employe, retains its present character, business cannot assume the aspect of a profession. This internal strife reveals a fundamental conflict of acquisitive interests within the busi- ness world and not only stresses that interest in both parties to the struggle but makes it impossible for the intrinsic professional ' ' interest to pre vail . The professions are in general saved from that confusion. Within the profession there is not, as a rule, the situation where one group habitually employs for gain another group whose function, economic interest and social position are entirely distinct from its own. The professions have thus been better able to adjust the particular interests of their members to their common interest and so to attain a clearer sense of their relationship to the whole community.
Once that position is attained the problem of occupational conduct takes a new form. It was stated clearly long enough ago by Plato in the Re- public. Each " art," he pointed out, has a special good or service. "Medicine, for example, gives us health; naviga- tion, safety at sea, and so on. . . . Medicine is not the art — or profes-
sion — of receiving pay because a man takes fees while he is engaged in heal- ing. . . . The pay is not derived by the several 'artists' from their respective 'arts.' But the truth is, that while the 'art' of medicine gives health, and the 'art' of the builder builds a house, another 'art' attends them which is the 'art' of pay." The ethical problem of the profession, then, is to reconcile the two "arts," or, more generally, to fulfil as completely as possible the primary service for which it stands while securing the legitimate economic interest of its members. It is the attempt to effect this reconcilia- tion, to find the due place of the intrin- sic and of the extrinsic interest, which gives a profound social significance to professional codes of ethics.
The Group Code Distinctive, not the Standard
The demarcation and integration of the profession is a necessary prelimi- nary to the establishment of the code. Each profession becomes a functional group in a society whose tendency is to organize itself less and less in terms of territory or race or hereditary status, and more and more in terms of func- tion. Each profession thus acquires its distinctive code. It is important to observe that what is distinctive is the code rather than the standard. The different codes of racial or national groups reveal variant ethical standards, but the different codes of professional groups represent rather the deliberate application of a generally accepted social standard to particular spheres of conduct. Medical ethics do not necessarily differ in quality or level from engineering ethics, nor the ethics of law or of statesmanship from those of architecture. The false old notion that there was, for that most ancient, and still most imperfectly defined, profession of statesmanship, a peculiar
