The professions include doctors,, lawyers, engineers, and accountants. Arguably, the professions do not include all occupations. For example, street-cleaning is not considered to be a profession. But are the defining features of a profession? Do professions necessarily have an ethical purpose, eg. lawyers exist to serve justice. What is the relation between ethical principles that people in ordinary life ought to comply with, and ethical principles that might be thought to be particular to a given profession. For example, accuracy in relation to counting is not normally regarded as an ethical requirement, but perhaps it is for accountants.

When successfully completed, students will have developed a good theoretical understanding both of central and current issues in professional ethics and of some key philosophical issues of importance to applied ethics more generally.

Class participation (10%), 4,000 word writing assignment (60%) and 2,000 word writing assignment (30%).

Electronic reserve readings can be found here: http://library.anu.edu.au/search/r?SEARCH=PAAE8007

Additional Recommended Readings have been suggested for most topics- these are optional. Such readings may or may not be placed on electronic reserve- but, especially in the case of journal articles, you will often still be able to find them online via the library (i.e., in cases where the library subscribes to the journal) You can search for journals electronically available from the ANU library here: http://anulib.anu.edu.au/lib_home.html (where it says ''Full text e-journals'').

(Further information on getting journal articles online is provided below.) Lecture Notes for each week's topic will generally be made available on Alliance at least one week before the topic is scheduled.

Enrolment in the MA(PAE) or with the permission of the coordinator.