It may seem odd at first glance, but the relatively recent insistence on ethics continuing education for professionals such as lawyers and accountants is actually the good sign its proponents intend it to be. That is, we may take the requirement at face value and not view it cynically as a sign of just how corrupt our times have become such that what would have been common sense in an earlier age – namely, don’t cheat, don’t steal, follow the rules – should need to be not only taught, but taught continuously, as if as a reminder to otherwise natural-born thieves.
Part of the confusion may lie in the mistaken notion that such ethics continuing education is primarily if not solely targeted at the thieves, the cheaters. Even among professionals themselves there may exist quite a bit of eye-rolling at having to endure a course in basic honesty and consideration of others. But the real function of these ethics courses – where they draw their main power – is in targeting the bystanders, as it were, not the cheats themselves.
At least not directly so. For what ethics continuing education does is foster an atmosphere where such cheating is not tolerable by the bystanders. After all, “a leopard never changes his spots” and so forth – but bystanders, so-called fence-sitters…these are the people who make it possible for all the scandals to occur.
They are, to adopt a term from the psychological literature, enablers, however unwittingly. They enable scandal by their acquiescence, their passivity, their very willingness to turn a blind eye and look the other way. What ethics courses do is convince these people, and not so much the cheats, that scandal is not only seriously, deeply wrong, but that it simply will not be tolerated. For “all that takes for evil to succeed in the world is for the good people to do nothing.”