Teaching Ethical Decision Making: Helping Students Reconcile Personal and Professional Values

The articles in this special section of the Journal of Counseling & Development, along with recent legal cases (e.g., Keeton v Anderson-Wiley, 2010; Ward v. Wilbanks, 2010), highlight the challenges professional counselors face when confronted with what they perceive as conflicts between professional codes of ethics and their own values. Although even the most experienced professionals find such situations difficult, the process of learning to make value-laden, ethical decisions is even more challenging for students. As a counselor educator, I see students struggle to let go of their needs for black/white, right/wrong answers and to reconcile their long-held beliefs with the standards set by the profession. In this article, I describe my approach to teaching ethical decision making and share observations about the process that one group of students went through as they learned to grapple with these challenges. * Learning Ethical Decision Making Becoming an ethical professional has been described as a developmental process (Neukrug, Lovell, & Parker, 1996) that involves movement from memorizing standards toward learning to integrate professional ethics with personal values (Handelsman, Gottlieb, & Knapp, 2005). To facilitate this movement, training programs need to help students develop the "philosophical sophistication" to reconcile personal and professional values (Mintz et al., 2009, p. 644). Similarly, Basche, Anderson, Handelsman, and Klevansky (2007) noted that students enter graduate programs with preexisting ideas of right and wrong professional behavior, based in large part on their own backgrounds. For students, learning to make ethical decisions is a developmental process of acculturating to the ethics of the profession and eventually integrating professional ethics with their own values and beliefs. Handelsman et al. (2005) adapted Berry's (2003) model of social or ethnic acculturation to describe four strategies (marginalization, separation, assimilation, and integration) that students use as they try to adapt to a new professional culture that may differ significantly from the values and beliefs of their cultures of origin. Each strategy reflects a high or low level of identification with the culture of origin and with the new professional culture. To illustrate how a counselor facing an ethical dilemma might use these acculturation strategies, consider a counselor faced with a 16-year-old client who is threatening to commit suicide and is pleading with the counselor not to tell her parents. Marginalization reflects low identification with both old (personal) and new (professional) cultures, without either a well-developed personal moral sense or a sense of professional ethics (Handelsman et al., 2005). A counselor using a marginalization strategy in this scenario would not be aware of personal values or beliefs about suicide, the parents' right to know, or an adolescent's ability to make such a decision. This person would also not have an understanding of the profession's stance on the ethical issues raised by the case, such as a counselor's responsibility to keep the client safe. A separation strategy (Handelsman et al., 2005) describes someone who has a well developed personal, moral sense but does not identify with the values of the profession. In this case, the counselor would be aware of his or her personal values or beliefs about suicide (e.g., suicide is a personal choice and people have a right to commit suicide), but would not be influenced by the profession's ethical stance (e.g., do no harm/keep clients safe). Decision making would be based only on personal beliefs about suicide. The assimilation strategy (Handelsman et al., 2005) reflects complete adoption of the new culture's values while discarding the values of the culture of origin. Thus, a counselor who entered the profession believing strongly in the right to commit suicide may decide to inform the client's parents about the suicide threat because the profession's code of ethics gives the counselor the responsibility to judge the seriousness of a threat and protect the client from serious and foreseeable harm. …