Striking a healthy balance in ethics

By Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD
APA President

I have to confess that I have spent almost as much time in my adult life playing bridge as doing psychology. A wasted adulthood, I often think. But not when it comes to ethics. Ethics in high-level bridge is taken very seriously, and I would guess that the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) has spent fully as much time and money as APA has on ethics.

Ethics in bridge used to be about punishing cheaters, reprimanding bad conduct at the table and enforcing the complicated laws of bridge. About a decade ago there was a revolution in ethics in bridge, and the emphasis shifted from punishing bad behavior to promoting 'active' ethics. The ACBL reasoned that part of its job was to help the great mass of its 150,000 members?the honest and well-behaved ones?become even better citizens at the table. Playing tournament bridge has now become an ethical joy: Instead of trying to conceal partnership understandings, for example, your opponents now bend over backwards to explain their conventions. Instead of peeking, opponents now tell you to hold your cards back.

A higher mission for APA

It is time for the same shift in emphasis at APA: from virtually exclusive concern with wrongdoing to the promotion of active ethics. APA spent more than $5 million on ethics from 1993 to 1997. The bulk of these funds was used to pursue wrongdoers. In the last five years, 86 of our members were censured or reprimanded and 125 lost their memberships. Five years and $5 million (plus uncounted voluntary hours from our dedicated ethics committee members) to take relatively few corrective actions and to get some bad apples?0.2 percent of our membership?out.

Lest you misunderstand me, I strongly believe there are good reasons to go after the bad apples: protecting the public, boosting the reputation of psychologists, removing wrongdoers from our midst or even in a few cases rehabilitating them, deterring potential wrongdoers and putting teeth into our standards. But APA has another, higher mission: raising the level of ethical behavior among the other 99.8 percent of our members?the honest, idealistic ones who devote their entire lives to serving others and who want to work at the highest ethical level.

It is easy for the well-meaning member not to violate the enforceable standards of professional conduct APA has set: Don?t molest patients, don?t steal data and the like. We do not need a great deal of help and education to avoid professional wrongdoing. When Meno asked Socrates, 'What is good and what is not good?' Socrates replied 'Need we anyone to teach us this?'

But living ethically is much more than not living unethically. It is much harder to live out exemplary standards of professional conduct than it is to avoid wrongdoing. The usual ethical dilemmas the practitioner and the academic face are very hard, and they are almost never dilemmas in which one of the alternatives is wrong-doing: when to be brutally honest with a patient or a student, when?if ever?to hug, how long to treat, how much pro bono work, whether to get human subject clearance for pilot work and miss a fellowship deadline, balancing the needs of a patient against the dictates of a case manager, what to say in a letter of recommendation that can become public, is this harassment and should I report it, who deserves to be a co-author. I could go on and on.

A radical proposal

Those of you who read this column regularly will notice the parallels with my call for a 'positive' social science (April 1998). I believe that when we became a healing profession concerned with repairing damage, psychology, as a field, neglected its other great mission: measuring, understanding and nurturing human strength and civic virtue. To try to undo the worst things in life, we forgot the mission of building the best things in life. Striking the same healthy balance is very much the issue for ethics as well. And so I have a radical proposal.

Let us find a way to use our Ethics Office to strike a much better balance between the punishment of wrongdoing and the promotion of active ethics among our members. Let us find a way to streamline and prune the punishment arm and use these funds to educate our membership to higher moral reasoning about the ethical dilemmas that face us all. We can?t do everything with limited funds, and I realize that there is a cost to this proposal. We may miss 'catching' some wrongdoers. But there is a great benefit as well: helping psychology practice and teach and do research on the highest ethical plane.