The Birth of Professional Ethics: Some Comparisons among Medicine, Law and Intelligence Communities

Abstract

Doctors in antiquity used leeches, herbs and shamanistic rituals to try to help their patients heal from the wounds and illnesses of life. Yet even in this long pre-scientific period, some felt a need to develop an ethos and codes of ethics specific to their craft.

One goal was prestige, a social good of intangible but real value (especially when practitioners are ridiculed by many, common when medicine was young). Close behind was another goal, a privileged and eventually exclusive right to practice their craft commercially. As science and technology advanced, a third goal emerged. This was continuing professional education to meet a growing need for both technical competence and some systematic way to evaluate novel dilemmas that emerged as medicine became truly effective. The best examples of those dilemmas come from “test-tube babies,” but there are many other dilemmas like end of life issues when machines can sustain a brain-dead body, or access to intrinsically scarce resources like transplantable organs.

The concept of a professional medical ethos was built upon more general ethics of the Greeks (and independently within the Chinese and Indian civilizations at least). Its earliest generally recognized form was the oath of Hippocrates. This served to identify special responsibilities to be assumed by those who would call themselves ‘professionals’ of the healing arts. Sometimes rights were included, but the responsibilities were primary to Hippocrates, like his famous injunction to first, “do no harm.” In addition to that he urged doctors to take care of mentors who trained them and to not dishonor the emerging profession by sexual acts with patients or their families, or by inducing abortion.

American Law developed a variety of professional ethos over about 100 years, which is another long story. Intelligence professionals (a.k.a. 'spies') who desired to improve the reputation of 'the world's second oldest profession' began thinking about ethics for spies in the early 2000's, and created an International Intelligence Ethics Association in 2005 as part of a broader effort to "professionalize" what was, in practice, a craft. This paper attempts to integrate these three paths to thinking about codified "professional ethics" and records some of the early efforts in that direction among intelligence professionals and those who study them.