Ethics Calls Us to Be Our Best Selves while the Law Helps Us to Stay Out of Trouble

Psychologists, like most health care professionals among others who offer professional services to the public, are allowed to practice their craft and offer their services only after obtaining the necessary credentials and licensing. Licensing is controlled by the states under most circumstances and there are often unique rules, regulations, and policies that differ from state jurisdiction to state jurisdiction. The purpose of these licensing laws is primarily designed to protect the public from potential abuse, victimization, exploitation, and from unqualified persons. These laws are especially necessary in psychology since many people without any training or credentials may feel confident in providing psychological services, consultation, and advice to the public. After all, it seems that many people consider themselves experts on human behavior and relationships with or without any professional education and training. When people are vulnerable due to psychological, relationship, or behavioral problems they may not know exactly how to find an appropriate and qualified professional who can best help them, especially when they are in a crisis, and may easily fall for those who might prey on their vulnerabilities. This is also true in other areas of care such as medicine as well. So, licensing is critically important to have some way of protecting the public from potential harm and exploitation. We not only license health care professionals but attorneys, contractors, and hairstylists. 

Licensing laws offer standard, but generally minimal, rules for professional activities and services. Ethical guidelines, on the other hand, are more aspirational as well as more universal and thus do not depend on state or other jurisdictions. Our ethical principles articulated in our Code of Ethics is based on the foundation of moral philosophy. Moral philosophy has been developed over several thousand years and thus certainly long before the field of psychology began (Vaughn, 2024).  It tries to answer the question of how might we ought to live and what principles we should use to make decisions about our lives and the lives of others. There are many approaches to ethical decision-making according to moral philosophy such as cultural relativism, utilitarianism, justice, egoism, virtue, and common good approaches to name just a few.  Our Code of Ethics primarily relies on a virtue approach to ethics that includes the following primary virtues that we embrace: responsibility, respect, integrity, competence, and compassion (Knapp  & Fingerhut, 2024; Plante, 2024). It is easy to remember these virtues with the acronym, RRICC (Plante, 2004). We expect psychologists to be responsible and accountable, to respect the rights and dignity of everyone, to be honest, fair, and just, to be competent in all that we do, and to express care and compassion to all. These are aspirational principles that help to guide our actions and decision-making going beyond the legal requirement for managing our professional lives. Our Code of Ethics highlights these ethical principles in Principles A- E and then add standards of care that are specifically relevant for psychotherapy, assessment, teaching, interacting with the public through the media, and other special circumstances (American Psychological Association, 2017). 

Ethics are calling us to be our best selves following agreed upon virtues and values whereas the law helps us to do the minimum to stay out of trouble. This is the difference between ethical and professional floor versus ceiling (i.e., minimum expectations for behavior versus aspirational expectations for behavior; Knapp & Fingerhut, 2024). Keeping these distinctions in mind between law and ethics might be helpful when reflecting on the challenges that we experience in our professional and personal lives and might be worth considering when requesting ethical consultations from our committee. Of course, often our professional challenges are complex where both ethical and legal issues and potential conflicts are intertwined. For example, requests from patients regarding access to their assessment or treatment records or those of their family members may involve both legal and ethical considerations. Another common example is when institutional policies and procedures from medical, psychiatric, government, or educational environments conflict with elements of our Code of Ethics or the legal boundaries of our licenses such as our scope of professional practice. Thus, we need to unpack these dilemmas in a way that identify and if possible, separate, the legal issues from the ethical ones and figure out which bin our problem or question really belongs in (i.e., legal, ethical, clinical, risk management, or multiple; see Behnke, 2014). Our committee is knowledgeable about the Code of Ethics (American Psychological Association, 2017) and can help problem solve ethical dilemmas. Unfortunately, since we are not attorneys we cannot be very helpful with legal questions.

Information about the ABPP ethics committee including their mission, membership, consultation process and request for assistance forms can be found on the ABPP website under Ethics Education and Consultation. The request form is easy and quick to use. Once completed, the chair of the committee reviews the request, submits it to the rest of the committee members for their reflection and advice, and then once received, writes an email response to the professional making the request. Typically, the entire process takes less than a week. 

Ethical issues and challenges are inevitable in our personal and professional lives and the more we look for them the more they will become apparent. As I often tell my students, there is never a bad time for ethics and so we may wish to reflect on our lives and career with ethical lenses in mind as much as we can do so in order to be our best selves and well represent the profession of psychology and our highest standards.