Ethics will be a central concern for any human endeavor, and perhaps particularly those dealing with people and their concerns, their problems, their lives. But when we look at ethics we find a number of different approaches and like in many distinctions, ethics, and ethical concerns are not isolated phenomena. They change in a flow that is timely and coherent with the general social drift.

Minimal standards to belong to a club.

In the Oxford Dictionary the first definition of ethics is concerned with the rules of belonging to a club.  Here the concern is about is what are the minimal standards, the minimal requirements to belong to a club. Ethics committees concern themselves with someone doing something unethical, so in the maintenance of minimal standards they are not concerned so much about ethics as the lack of it.  If someone does not abide by the rules they get thrown out of the club.  If someone doesn’t meet the minimal standards they are expelled from that community.  

This basic fundamental notion within this definition of ethics is concerned with belonging.  If you want to be a member of the APS there are certain things that you have to do. If a Doctor does something they shouldn’t do, they can expect an ethical inquiry. I had a letter sent to me by the Medical Board ten years ago when someone wrote an article about what I was doing in the newspaper because the Board was very sensitive about advertising at that stage and they wanted to know if I approached the journalist or if they approached me. If I had approached them that would of been advertising and I could of been fined or rebuked - it would of been unethical.

Towards excellence.

Another definition in the Oxford Dictionary is not about minimal standards but is about human duty in its widest extent. This invites an ethical approach to working in a clinical circumstances to attend to what can we do to contribute maximally to a client, what can we do that is in their best interest. This shifts the focus from minimal standards to a concern about excellence, and it brings a very different mood.  It’s not about doing the least to stay safe, but rather how to be most useful.

Increasing options.

Heinz von Foester stated what he called his ethical imperative, he was talking not only about therapy but life in general as being to increase options.  We have often said in our work that we want to try to increase the options for our clients and it makes sense because problems have fewer options, solutions are characterised by a range options, so it makes sense clinically to increase options but von Foester is saying that this is an ethical issue. Ethically we have a responsibility, he says an imperative to increase options for our clients and also in education for students and in our family for our family members.

Learning to live together.

Humberto Maturana claims as a biologist that love is the fundamental human social emotion and to have a biologist that thinks this way is interesting.  By love he doesn’t mean sentimentality or been in love.  He takes love as an extension of respect, and he says that love is an emotion in which we grant legitimacy to another person to live in the world beside us. This extends to another creature - a spider or a tree, so love for Maturana is a matter of the legitimacy of another so we can live with them.  

He says that learning to live together is the prime human ethic, and I think this has become the most pressing contemporary issue that our ethics needs to address. “Every human act takes place in language. Every act in language brings forth a world created with others in the act of coexistence which gives rise to what is human. Thus every human act has an ethical meaning because it is an act of constitution of the human world. The linkage of human to human is, in the final analysis, the ground-work of all ethics as a reflection on the legitimacy of the presence of others.” Humberto  Maturana in “Tree of Knowledge” p 247.

Rob