Barry Padgett and the Moral Professional

The thesis I've been working on in these blogs has been how contemplative prayer nurtures moral integrity.  I started by considering Augustine's understanding of how the lover is changed as she or he gazes upon the beloved.  Now I'd like to consider some of the ideas in Barry Padgett's Professional Morality and Guilty Bystanding: Merton's Conjectures and the Value of Work.  Padgett draws on Merton to critique standard understandings of professional morality as "compliance," showing how compliance can be inauthentic game playing rather than true morality.  He uses Merton's categories of the false self and the true self to talk about the need for professionals to move through contemplation from the one to the other to be authentically moral.

Padgett sees the primary problem of professional morality (or lack thereof) as the conflict between our sense of personal morality and the demands made upon us by our professions.  This results in what he calls "a fragmentation of self."  On the one hand, we know intuitively what is right because we learned it at a very early age.  On the other hand, there may be duties we have as professionals that ask us to do things that - if we reflected for a moment - we would recognize as morally questionable if not outright wrong.  The antidote to this fragmentation is to find a unity of self in union with others.  Simple enough - but how to do this?  I'll look at unity of self in union with others in the next post.