Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Page 62

is to maintain or restore health; lawyers are concerned with the proper observ-
ance of the law. Each ‘practice’ has inherent and specific notions of excellence.
Professionals jealously guard their practices against unqualified interlopers. I
cannot set up as a lawyer or a surgeon even if I want to, because I have not
been trained, accepted and initiated into the professional guild, the craft, or
what used sometimes in the past to be called the ‘mystery’.
This last term is a useful reminder that there is still a mystique surrounding
the practice of professionals. The profession safeguards its practice from oth-
ers, and rarely allows its proceedings to be scrutinised by outsiders. It prefers
to regulate its practices and discipline its members itself. Hence suspicious
outsiders constantly echo George Bernard Shaw’s epigram: ‘All professions
are conspiracies against the laity.’ And with good cause, for professions can
indeed act in a selfish way; practice can be abused for the benefit of the prac-
titioner at the expense of the client or patent.
Patterns of practice with their own inbuilt standards of excellence are useful
for the community as a whole, although sometimes professionals defend their
own interests against the common good. Practice is not an isolated matter; it
takes place in fellowships, in solidarity with others. And any practice has inbuilt
norms and excellences of various sorts. A dentist, for example, must know the
right way to fill a cavity, and how to extract a tooth, and so on. Behind this
technical skill there lies knowledge of more than technique - of anatomy, and
physiology, and so forth. But the dentist must also obey norms of conduct
towards his patients; he must have a precise kind of personal integrity as part
of his professional identity. If he is incompetent, or makes sexual advances to
patients, he is disciplined, struck off the register and not allowed to practise. A
practice has thus built into it standards of excellence, as Alasdair Maclntyre ar-
gues in After Virtue:. ‘By a “practice” I ... mean any coherent and complex form
of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal
to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those stand-
ards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form
of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human
conceptions of the ends and good involved are systematically extended.’24
24 Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue. London: Duckworth, 1981, p. 175.