Awareness and Decision Making in Professional Ethics

The paper describes the development of the 1998 revision of the Psychological Society of Ireland's Code of Professional Ethics. The Code incorporates the European Meta-Code of Ethics and an ethical decision-making procedure borrowed from the Canadian Psychological Association. An example using the procedure is presented. To aid decision making, a classification of different kinds of stakeholder (i.e., interested party) affected by ethical decisions is offered. The author contends (1) that psychologists should assert the right, which is an important aspect of professional autonomy, to make discretionary judgments, (2) that to be justified in doing so they need to educate themselves in sound and deliberative judgment, and (3) that the process is facilitated by a code such as the Irish one, which emphasizes ethical awareness and decision making. The need for awareness and judgment is underlined by the variability in the ethical codes of different organizations and different European states: in such a context, codes should be used as broad yardsticks, rather than precise templates.