The Deformation of Professional Formation: Managerial Targets and the Undermining of Professional Judgement

Is it helpful to model the idea of professional formation on ethical formation? Abstracting from the specifically ethical interest of Aristotle's own doctrine, in the ‘narrow’, ‘moral’ sense of ethical, and aiming at the same time for an inclusive, ‘broad’ formulation which extends to various types of métiers (occupations/professions), this paper argues that an Aristotelian perspective offers a more robust concept of personal, professional and civic responsibility—‘responsibleness’—than any that our present ‘managerial’ rationality can promote. Drawing on some Aristotelian texts, I show that the practical knowledge of one with ‘formation’ (appropriate to the métier in question) enables an agent to find the relevant end and the appropriate act in the name of that end—as if simultaneously. The end and the means to the end are perfectly suited to one another. Crucially, the structure of the agent's practical reasoning is grounded on the telos which guides the agent and this is summoned implicitly from formation. This Aristotelian model of practical rationality stands as a rival to the public rationality that now predominates, a rationality which sees the meeting of explicit, pre-specified outcomes, objectives or targets as the chief way in which the accountability of agents may be secured.