Are There Universal Competencies?
Preamble
In our 21st-century world, buzzing with talk of digital technologies, smart cities, artificial intelligence, and hyper-specialized job markets, humanity confronted an epidemic from the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The crisis would still rage on without the power of human resilience that ultimately contained it. I’m referring to universal competencies — the topic of so much debate and confusion.
This raises the key question we all must address: Do these universal competencies truly exist? And if they do, what exactly are they?
Relevance
The COVID-19 outbreak, starting in Wuhan in December 2019, severely disrupted provincial economies, with healthcare costs reaching about 4.49 billion yuan monthly (You, Wang, Zhang, Song, Xu, Lai, 2020). China’s challenges were far from unique. By April 2020, International Labour Organization research showed that “full or partial lockdown measures” affected “almost 2.7 billion workers, representing around 81 per cent of the world’s workforce” (ILO, 2020, 1). Manufacturers suffered especially, as their processes relied on workers’ narrow, specialized skills (Didier, 2020, 145) — highlighting how such specialization fails to equip humanity for systemic decision-making.
Doctors faced these limitations first, battling an unknown virus daily. For the first time in decades, interdisciplinary medical teams formed to fight the infection. In Russia, state-level coordination created such teams: under Order No. 198n from the Ministry of Health dated 19 March 2020, “On the Temporary Procedure for Organizing Health Institutions’ Operations to Prevent and Mitigate COVID-19 Spread Risks”, the National Medical Research Center for Phthisiopulmonology and Infectious Diseases was tasked with assembling mobile interdisciplinary teams to support Russian regions in treating COVID-19 patients (see Ministry of Health Order No. 198n, 19 March 2020).
In Italy, retired medical professionals of all specialties were mobilized to combat the epidemic (Manzoni & Milillo, 2020). This extended across medical fields: “Urologists, as is the case for any other surgical and non-surgical specialty, will have to dedicate part, if not all, of their practice to the treatment of patients with COVID-19 and drastically reduce their own clinical practice.” (Naspro & Da Pozzo, 2020, 252).
Ultimately, emergency regulatory changes in numerous countries enabled doctors to unite against the novel coronavirus, with ethical commitment to saving lives as the key motivator. This leads naturally to a discussion of ethics, which underpins the central argument of this essay.
Demonstration and Proposals
The notion of ‘competence,’ especially in education, remains deeply contested. Definitions evolve continually, particularly for so-called universal competencies — or ‘general professional competencies’ in some educational standards. Certain scholars (Mulder, 2004; Hassall & Dunlop, 1996, 30) tie it to behaviourism, but this adds little insight, as behaviourism relies on a mechanistic ‘stimulus-response’ model rather than human free will.
Debates over ‘competence’ echo the medieval nominalist-realist dispute on universals: nominalists saw only empirically verifiable particulars as real, while realists viewed universals as the true essence, with empirical objects as fleeting shadows.
Immanuel Kant offers a rare synthesis absent in the nominalist-realist debate, grounding human goodwill in moral absolutes. In the Critique of Pure Reason, after positing pure reason’s three ideas (soul, world, God), he envisions a moral ‘kingdom of ends’ where individuals create mutual well-being (Critique of Pure Reason, B 837). Here, each acts via the categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Kant, Works, Moscow, 1997, Vol. 3, p. 143). A key variant of this categorial imperative adds: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
Yet the ideal moral subject remains abstract. Bridging it to reality requires activity: purposeful transformation of objects or processes, leveraging skills, knowledge, and abilities that form competence. Within morality, activity’s effectiveness hinges on rationally applying ideas, with quality tied to qualification level. Qualification defines both the quality of activity and one’s overall capacity to perform it. Thus, a set of competencies distinguishes qualification, while competence itself is the ability to execute a specific action at the required qualification level.
From Kantian ethics, only one competence qualifies as a true moral principle: enacting the categorical imperative. This demands behaviour universally valid for all rational beings — precisely what doctors exemplified during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Summary
Ultimately, one truth emerges: the sole universal competence is moral action itself — no others exist (excluding composite or complex forms here).
By rallying around moral values, humanity can avert, as Kant put it, the unnatural end of all things.
One practical approach to fostering moral behaviour: establish an international educational institution to uphold, oversee, and integrate universal human values at the national level.
