A core reason for having a code of professional ethics is that members of the profession commonly encounter ethically charged situations that members of other professions and the general public rarely if ever encounter. Yet all of the principles referred to above are generic, they might be found in the code of any profession whose members routinely sell their services and engage in research and publication. The preamble of the ESA Code does say that "this Code is intended to further ecological understanding," but aside from stating the obvious (that what ecologists are concerned with understanding is ecology), what is there in the ESA Code that distinguishes ecology as a profession? Is there nothing unique or special about the kinds of situations that members of this profession commonly encounter that calls for any principles that would not be found in the Codes of other professions whose members sell their services and do research?

To illustrate my point, consider side-by-side the codes of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The ASCE Code requires members to "hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and shall strive to comply with the principles of sustainable development in the performance of their professional duties" (fundamental canon #1). The ACM code includes, under "General Moral Imperatives," a provision mentioning the public's health and welfare" and "potential damage to the local or global environment" (imperative #1.1), but there is no mention of sustainable development.

There is, however, an imperative to "Access computing and communication resources only when authorized to do so" (#2.8). Thus the two codes address (if somewhat obliquely) the question of what special kinds of situations members of their professions commonly encounter that members of other professions do not. For while civil engineers use computers, they do not, like computer engineers, routinely find themselves in a position to access large amounts of securely stored information which only other people are supposed to access. And for their part, concern for sustainable development is a natural reflection of civil engineering's history. The earliest written laws included provisions that we would now describe as related to the conduct of civil engineers and these provisions were concerned with public welfare and the environment.

When professional societies decide to revise their codes they should attend to the question of what makes their field as a research profession unique and craft principles that reflect what they decide that is.