Interprofessional ethics and public accountability

Many ethical assessments of contemporary moral dilemmas have failed to appreciate the uncertainty and ambiguity that practitioners confront, especially when new and emerging technologies are involved. In an attempt to provide a more realistic and compelling approach to these problems, the seventh CAP Foundation Conference adopted an interprofessional perspective. Interprofessional ethics borrows from the American pragmatist tradition of John Dewey and Jeffrey Stout and the neothomistic perspective of Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma. Professions are public institutions that have made promises to preserve and enhance social goods, eg, health, justice, and tolerance. Yet, in a pluralistic democracy, each institution inevitably finds its moral presuppositions legitimately challenged by the presuppositions of others. The uncertainty and ambiguity that good physicians, lawyers, journalists, and regulators regularly confront arise from the partiality of each of their ethical perspectives. Hence, the more seriously we take our obligations to maintain public trust, the more clearly we should recognize our dependence on other professions.