Viewpoint: Ethical considerations of the practitioner in private practice

Abstract

Private practice can be defined as "one's own, or a personal pursuit or exercise in a particular discipline" whilst ethics is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as "relating to morals or the treating of moral questions". Town planning on the other hand can be defined in a number of ways; inter alia the follow­mg:
(a) "Planning is a process for deter­mining appropriate future action through a sequence of choices" (Davidoff and Reiner, Faludi, 1978);
(b) "Self direction is the objective of planning which is an activity by which man in society endeavours to gain mastery over himself and to shape his collective future con­sciously by power of his reason (Friedman J; Bruton, 1974);
(c) "Planning is the process of pre­paring a set of decisions for action in the future, directed at achieving goals by preferable means" (Dror, Faludi, 1978);
(d) "I look upon planning as a living process whereby the vast number of diverse, often inarticulate, often conflicting interests which the various elements of a community have in the use of land become transmitted into the physical en­vironment" (Levin E. A., 1966).