A character in Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma (1911) famously said “all professions are conspiracies against the laity.” Nowhere is this better shown than in the codes of ethics that professional institutions set out. Like mission statements, quality assurance management strategies, promises of service, and the other devices of modern managerialism, they contain sensible, indeed unexceptionable, guides for action. Yet somehow they protect the interests of the institutions, rather than those they ostensibly serve, customers, clients, patients. They defuse complaint and forestall litigation. The idea of professional codes of conduct has so infected modern moral attitude and its expression that they have shifted concern from doing the right and proper thing by a fellow human being to following the appropriate code. It has indeed become common to criticize someone, perhaps a colleague, not for doing something harmful to