Reclaiming professionalism in the face of productivism

I want to suggest here that the professions, and professionalism, involve a form of knowledge or science that is inherently oriented to be in the service of a specific dimension of ‘human existence as it has been given’. These forms of knowledge (scientific disciplines) are constructed so that they constitute practices of service to specific human goods. Like all science, these professional disciplines are informed by rigorous conceptual, logical and evidential procedure, but how they operate as sciences is directed by how they make practical provision for a specific human good. For this good to be attended to by a profession, its specificity has to be addressed – not just what this good is conceptually (e.g., health), but how it manifests in relation to the practical condition and context of individuals and their communities. In offering a conception of professionalism as both a public and an ethical phenomenon, and as will become clear in this account, I am calling into question uses and abuses of professionalism that follow upon its reduction to a form of technical expertise. Reduced to expertise, professionalism is driven by private objectives, whether these are those of the professional herself and/or her employing organisation. Productivism abstracts from the living reality of human beings in relation to the life system of which they are part: the integrity, or wholeness, of human beings as this is expressed as a set of needs, is set to one side in favour of reconstituting reality as so many resources to be mined, exchanged, calculated and monetised. In a productivist universe the logic of the commodity form prevails: things are valued only in relation to their exchange value, and all that is specific and concrete about them in relation to the specificity of human needs disappears. There is no human being the integrity of whom the professional serves by attending to a specific good that serves this integrity. There are only productive enterprises and consumers. In the face of a productivist ethos, the professions appear as so many barriers to this radical and systematic refusal of human integrity in favour of producing and maximising monetised value. The reason for this is that the professions are nothing if they are not passionately committed stewards of distinctive goods that bear on the question of human integrity.