Professional Ethics in Teaching in Higher Education; India

Professional ethics represent a cornerstone of effective and trustworthy practices in any field. They encompass the principles and standards that guide behavior, ensuring that professionals act with integrity, responsibility, and respect towards others. In essence, professional ethics help define what is acceptable conduct in various professions, thereby establishing a framework for making sound decisions and maintaining public trust. A profession is a social calling that ensure a vocation which provides one with the means to earn one’s livelihood.  Professional ethics is based on certain ethical values and norms which a profession is supposed to follow. It is necessary to reveal, sustain and enhance certain basic human values. These values are kindness, care and compassion trust and reliability, truthfulness and honesty, justice and fairness, performance of a duty for the benefit of others, non-violence and non-injury, and accountability and social responsibility. A value is defined as a principle that promotes well-being or prevents harm. Values are our guidelines for our success our paradigm about what is acceptable. Values are the scales we used to weigh our choices for our actions, whether to move towards or away from something. Personal values are defined as: Emotional beliefs in principles regarded as particularly favorable or important for the individual. A personal value can be defined as an absolute or relative ethical value, the assumption of which can be basis for ethical actions. Personal Ethics deals with how we treat others in our day to day lives. Professional Ethics often involves choices in an organizational level rather than a personal level.