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Care to discuss ethics?
- Thread starter Psyclops
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It seems to me that the two principles of ethics that they have put forth here could conflict. Do no harm, but prevent from doing harm to others. Which superceeds the other? If I could prevent harm from befalling others by hurting one, or tricking one, or lying to one, would that be justified?
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Psyclops said:
We'll it depends on how you look at this. We could take the interesting route and debate philosophically about kantian/totalitarianism/social contract theories of ethical conduct...
OR
We could take the easier way out and interpret what we will from the code of conduct for psychologists. My understanding is that we would first need to identify who is the client - if there is any ambiguity about this (multiple persons involved), then the client is the person who is the most vulnerable (i.e. a child). If you need to lie or trick your client, I believe the only way it can be justified is in the face of actual or very possible serious physical harm or death of another individual(s). I think this would be the same as breaking confidentiality only if we have a very strong reason to believe that the individual might seriously harm themselves or others. In terms of physically harming a client... we'll I don't think that this is likely to come up unless you are doing interrogations on a military base (as suggested in this article), but I wouldn't want to be the ones making those kinds of decisions. I would probably refer to 24 (seasons two or three) to get some grasp on what should be done here. 😎
