Ethics and Professionalization; Professionalization from a Global Perspective

How far can we go using ethics as an excuse to protect professional colleagues, instead society? Latin America is a region of contrasts, where one can find rich and poor living together, and in mostly of cases, with less differences than inequalities. In general, it is considered a developing region, but countries in that part of the world are more inequitable than poor. In this scenario is not surprise that undernutrition survives along with overweight and even obesity. For example, Brazil is a leading country in gain of body weight/person/year (0.5kg). Trying facing that problem, enormous effort has been put on education since it is ever taken as utmost importance to change this situation. Besides the increase in undergraduate courses, another impressive recent phenomenon is the multiplication of post graduation courses, at specialization, master and doctoral levels. The later are preparing people for academic careers mostly; meanwhile the formers are dealing with the formation of the professional who will work at "the real world". Indeed, this year data confirm that lower middle class has reached the university level, because the increase of new students coming from that strata. However, weakness in the undergraduate system seems to pressure new professional to take specialization to get ready for the market. In all that system the attention to ethics is almost nil. Few classes, if so; low status ranked in regards to others; which might explain in part why the distance between the everyday work of a professional and the human concern of his former academic discipline.  Another intriguing point is the quick develop of a corporative feeling, where no rare institutions, like Associations and Councils, play more the union’s role than the promotion of the careers values, and the society protection. In other words, in many cases it clear the use of knowledge as a tool to explore and not build a better society. If one claims that it might happen in the well-developed countries, it becomes more critical in the developing world, where the scarce governmental resources have been invested in education with focus on solving population problems and not on personal ones.  It urges to develop a system in which more attention should be given to use information/formation period to build students attitudes, based upon on commitments, among them ethics such as person respect, equity and justice. From our perspective, the search for a solid commitment is the best chance for developing better attitudes, that may build solid results, with a promising impact on society and human being. Although national and international documents, which are concerned about protection of research subjects, have been developed, similar instruments are needed to improve ethics among professionals in sports sciences.