These policies certainly have the force of law, and they can impact a writing center's ethics in significant ways. We want students to feel good about their writing, and much of what we do in conferences is point out student strengths and indicate what we like about what they've written. By doing so, we help the student feel good, and this makes us feel good as well. It has useful, practical value as well. By helping students to believe in themselves and their writing abilities, we can help them to overcome their fear, their tentativeness, and their writing blocks.
Writing centers exist, in part, to intervene in and support student writing processes.
We work with students and texts as they develop over time. Tutors want to teach students how to become better writers, and one of the ethical criteria we can use to measure what we do is how effective our practices are in helping students to realize this end. I think that most writing center personnel, for example, have a sense that writing centers are innately ethical, that a writing center's value is embodied in the very activities that go on there, independent of any externally-imposed standard or criterion or set of consequences. Yet, this rather facile application of epistemological perspectives seems insufficient to a full elaboration or understanding of a writing center ethics. In idealized circumstances, it might be possible to say that the standard of natural law should reign supreme in writing center ethics, that rational thought, logical deduction, and empirical research should determine how to act ethically in tutorial conferences.