COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: A Facebook request: Write a code of tech ethics.

But Zuckerberg should be aiming higher. The question isn’t just what rules should a reformed Facebook follow. The bigger question is what all the big tech companies’ relationships with users should look like. The framework needed can’t be created out of whole cloth just by new government regulation; it has to be grounded in professional ethics.

Doctors and lawyers, as they became increasingly professionalized in the 19th century, developed formal ethical codes that became the seeds of modern-day professional practice. Tech-company professionals should follow their example. An industry-wide code of ethics could guide companies through the big questions of privacy and harmful content.

State governments made compliance with these codes mandatory to get a license to practice medicine or law. Lawyers’ ethics require that they meet obligations — sometimes called “fiduciary” duties —of confidentiality, loyalty and care. Modern-day medical ethics are framed to include autonomy (i.e. respect for individual self-determination), “non-maleficence” (Hippocrates’ “first, do no harm”), beneficence and justice — concepts that reflect the same kinds of values.

I admire the sentiment, but as Peter Morgan and I wrote over 20 years ago, such “ethical codes” tend to be more about preventing competition and protecting insider interests than about actual ethical behavior. Often they reflect what we call (after Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones) the Grand Blifil Paradox, in which talk of ethics is used to conceal a fundamentally unethical enterprise.