Professional ethics is the set of rules of behavior, the so-called "code of ethics", which refers to a particular profession.

Certain activities or professions, because of their unique social characteristics, think of doctors, psychologists or lawyers, must adhere to a certain code of conduct, whose purpose is to prevent harm of dignity or health. That's why professional associations have developed codes of conduct to which they are caretakers through the exercise of disciplinary powers.

At large, it is necessary to make a distinction between professional ethics and code of ethics, The code of ethics in general is induced, it is prescribed, it is done by others, almost always by the professional association; professional ethics, instead, consists of something more than just a code, it covers conduct resulting from constant research and mediation between the opposite "moral" views that conflict often in our daily lives pushing us to take on personal responsibilities.

So says psychologist Cynthia Mion, who introduces in the theme of ethics and professional conduct an essential recollection to distinguish between ethics and morality. We agree that it consists in a distinction purely conventional. Mion highlights the fact that "ethics, from which comes the mode of appearance and behavior in relation to others in the public sphere, is that part of philosophy that deals with a single human being towards his fellows. It Is the philosophical study, universal and abstract of good and evil. It rests on the sense of responsibility and thus presupposes the freedom of a conscious choice, both within the community, and in the field of personal choices. "

The moral concerns essentially what we commonly call the voice of conscience, the parental law internalized, relationship with oneself; it follows from the rules adopted by the group belonging to, by a community or culture, norms built up over time to determine what is right and what is wrong. Based on guilt.

Deontology, or deontological ethics, can be understood as the set of ethical theories that are opposed to consequentialism, a complex of theories that share the vision for which the normative properties depend only on the consequences. In particular, the ethical consequentialist theories define the moral correctness of an action only by means of the consequences of the actions or of something related to them, such as a pattern or a law. While consequentialism determines the quality of the actions from their purpose, ethics states that ends and means are closely dependent on each other, which means that a just end will be the result of using the right means.

The need for a consequential reasoning - says Sen - derives from the fact that the activities have consequences [...]. The core value of any activity is not an adequate reason to ignore its instrumental role ".

Sen is interested in identifying a sort of  "utilitarian structure" shared by the various forms of utilitarianism (of the act, of the rule, of reason), which present themselves, therefore, as possible variants of it. This structure consists of two elements: the first one (a) is consequentialism, for which the rightness of an action (or a rule, or a statement of reasons) depends on the goodness of states of affairs subsequent to it: it is - says Sen - a method to evaluate the actions, rules, motivations. The other element (b) is the result of so-called utilitarianism of the results, which "identifies the goodness of a state with the total sum of individual utilities associated with it" and is therefore a method for evaluating states of affairs.

As already appears from the wording, the latter element involves conceptually other two principles: (b1) the principle ‘order-sum’, so that the suitable aggregation method in the evaluation of utility (of an action, a standard, a motivation) in a given situation is the total sum of all the individual utilities that are in that situation; (b2) the welfarism, for which the criterion for defining the goodness of a state is the individual stay healthy, conceived as a set of individual utility (once defined the '"utility" as "the idea that a person has of his being healthy ", and without getting into" the alternative interpretations of this concept, in terms of "pleasure" or "desire.") "Utilitarianism is the combination of welfarism, ordering-sum and consequentialism".

Thus, welfarism presents as the theory of the good typical of the utilitarian ethical theory in which "one considers the utility as the only thing of intrinsic value." It argues that a state of affairs is to be considered better than another if it entails greater utility for at least one individual over another (generally defined: "Pareto principle") and, in a variant, that a state of affairs is believed to be better than another only if it involves greater utility for all individuals (principle defined, citing K.S. Arrow, "weak Pareto principle"). For the welfarism of both variants, if two states of affairs are identical for the individual utilities, they must be judged equally good regardless of differences for issues not related to the individual utilities.

Returning to the issue of deontology, the aim of Kant in the formulation of ethics was to establish an ethical system, which did not depend on subjective experience, but on an irrefutable logic. So, the ethical correctness of a behavior would be an absolute and undeniable duty.

Kant assigns to logic, then, via the categorical imperative the duty to determine the rightness or wrongness of an action. It is based on the idea of the ‘principle’ that becoming universal contradicts itself. The suitable example is that of those who refuse to help others, because they are indifferent to their fate.

Kant, in this case, tells us that a world in which everyone just think of his own happiness is coherently imaginable; Kant, however, shows us how a will that might establish this principle would be self-contradictory, because each individual would lose the chance to be helped in time of need and this is not rationally desirable by anybody.

Even John Rawls is a ‘deontologist’. His book ‘A Theory of Justice’ states that a system of a fair redistribution should be created that followed a set of moral rules. Another ‘deontologist’ was Arthur Schopenhauer, fierce critic of Immanuel Kant. In his essay ‘The foundation of morality’ Schopenhauer accuses Kant to reproduce in other words, moral theology and to avoid disputes, "with a menacing appeal to the conscience of those who disagree wants to silence all doubts" (The foundation of morality). For Schopenhauer the categorical imperative of Kant was nothing but a real contradiction in adiecto since the concept of duty makes sense only in connection with a promise of reward or threat of punishment. This being an imperative, to put it in the manner of Kant, only hypothetical (conditional to an award or a threat) and never categorical (unconditional).