Just about the most important developments in the field of professional continuing education (CPE) is the relatively recent concentration on ethics, resulting in the proliferation now of many an ethics CPE course.
While surely a good thing when the professions insist on not just what is legal but what is ethical and, even, moral, additionally it is quite sad that simple human decency should today be so unheard of as to warrant an explicit prerequisite.

Of course, malpractice jokes roasting doctors, lawyers, and accountants have long been a staple of humor and given such a context the now-official admiration for proper behavior is to be applauded.
There are certainly more intense scenarios than having ethics CPE needs – namely, the lack of them with the world still being the way it is: the very way which first made such courses so essential!
But there’s no questioning the fact that when simple human decency needs to be taught so many years after kindergarten, where they were initially encountered (likely an unfortunate fact in itself, as the first place anyone should come across their ethics should be the home!), society is doomed to an evermore unpleasant race to the bottom for all.

Why, just take a look at the well-established practice now of companies hiring unpaid interns to do full-time jobs – real jobs, for which these volunteers usually are not even given the defense of common workplace discrimination and harrassment laws.
No, really!
Even multi-billion-dollar corporations, including General Electric (which managed to pay no taxes for the filing season of 2011), make considerable use of these unpaid workers daily.
What good has all the ethics CPE courses in the world really achieved when corporate bean-counters still carry on to merely invent new ways of posting a profit while increasing productivity and lowering costs on the backs of young people without money?

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