500 hats: exploring the challenges of boundary and community--reflections on professionalization.

I argue that it is possible to reframe the current debates over professionalization in a way that can account for disagreement without insisting that its advocates and opponents are adversaries. Giles Scofield, and critics like him, may be understood as engaging in the sort of theoretical disagreement that is an inescapable and vital part of our practice. The field could profit from the work of legal theorist Ronald Dworkin who has long argued that people of good will and great competence need not share foundational assumptions. They may, instead, be advancing rival interpretations of what the practice of healthcare ethics (PHE) requires.