Markets and the Professions

The article begins by describing two worlds… that of the market and that of the professions. These two worlds overlap …. and as individuals we may participate in both worlds simultaneously.

However, there are some radical distinctions between the two that are of relevance to the article’s discussion and engagement.

Adam Smith was not an economist (at least not in any sense we would recognise today). Rather, he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow …. an eminent contributor to the Scottish Enlightenment and the author not only of The Wealth of Nations but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

One needs to read both works in order to obtain a complete understanding of Smith’s thought … which is often surprising to a modern reader exposed only to selective quotations.

Far from being a dedicated champion of the commercial class, Smith was deeply critical of the masters and their proclivity to skew the mechanisms of the market to secure personal gain at the expense of others.

Although hardly remembered these days, Adam Smith accorded no intrinsic value to markets and their associated mechanisms.

Instead, Smith saw markets as means to an end; as tools best designed to achieve his ultimate purpose … an increase in the stock of common good.

That is, for Smith, markets were only justified if their operation increased prosperity for all. It is for this reason that Smith abhorred monopoly or any other distortion that might lead to an unwarranted increase in the private advantage of the few.

However, Smith argued that he had discovered an important truth about what drives people to act. Rather than appealing to a love for others, Smith famously argued that we should expect a love of self (self-interest) to act as the primary source of motivation: ‘’It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages’’.

Earlier in his career, Smith had invoked the idea of an invisible hand that works for the common good … in this case guiding an uncorrupted market to achieve its proper end… a general increase in welfare.

In passing, it should be noted that while the famous passage from The Wealth of Nations, quoted above, explains Smith’s view of why people will trade within a market, it says nothing about how they should trade … where Smith presumes the existence of an ethical framework, based on sympathy and reciprocity, within which people do not lie, cheat or use power oppressively (all recognised as causing distortions in the market).

That aside, wherever modern societies have embraced Adam Smith’s core idea, the pursuit of self-interest has been widely licensed and encouraged, with the expectation that the invisible hand of the market will do its work.

It is against this background that the decision to join a profession can be seen to be such a counter-cultural decision. Members of the professions may serve as participants within the market economy.

However, they explicitly renounce one of its fundamental tenets through their commitment not to pursue self-interest but, instead, to act in a spirit of public service. We can see this idea at work in all countries today.

For example, lawyers have overriding duties to the courts that require practitioners to place the public good (the administration of justice) before those owed to a client.

Similar examples can be cited in relation to medicine, accounting, engineering and so on. If the idea of a profession is to have any significance, then it must hinge on this notion that professionals make a bargain with society in which they promise conscientiously to serve the public interest … even if to do so may, at times, be at their own expense.

In return, society allocates certain privileges. These might include one or more of the following: the right to engage in self-regulation ; the exclusive right to perform particular functions and special status.

A further requirement of professional life is that practitioners seek to understand and promote a particular, defining good. For example, a good society is likely to be one in which people are treated with justice, in which good health is commonplace, in which the environment is rich, rewarding and safe.

One of the tasks of the professional is to seek the social good. It follows from this that one cannot be a professional unless one has some sense of what the social good is . Accordingly, one’s very status as a professional requires that one possess this moral truth.

But it requires more, for each profession seeks the social good in a different form, according to its particular expertise: doctors seek it in the form of health; engineers in the form of safe efficient buildings; and lawyers seek it in the form of justice.

Each profession must seek its own form of the social good. Without such knowledge professionals cannot perform their social roles.

The author is a Development Policy Analyst