Reconsidering Ethics: Ripples Across Time, Place, and People

We are living in historic times. Significant changes are occurring in our societies. One of the processes through which this change is occurring is through efforts to decenter and transform the colonial power of our institutions. This is not an easy process and requires a great deal of reflection on how our systems have served as vehicles of oppression even when we tried not to be oppressive. It also requires careful reconsideration of the built structures and relational forms, and willingness to put in the labor necessary to build new structures that account for and do not replicate the colonial legacy of exploitation, erasure, and oppression. In human services, professional codes of ethics and how they are operationalized in practice represent one domain in need of reexamination through the lens of such an anti-colonial (Tuck & Yang, 2012) analysis.

Like many other professions, the health and human service professions (among them child and youth care, education, and social work) have developed standards of conduct that are largely codified rather than relational. The ethical codes for most of these professions (and their professional associations) start from a set of values propositions central to the profession in question. In spite of this grounding in values, however, the codes are often used in practice simply as rules for behavior. Put differently, in use, these codes often focus more on what not to do rather than upon how to be, or what behaviors to avoid rather than how to make values-informed decisions in practice. This has contributed to a disconnection between who we want to be as professionals and how we interact with people. We have come to believe that we are being ethical if we do not violate our behavioral codes.

This tendency in our practice contexts reflects a much broader trend in the human services professions over recent decades toward increasingly instrumentalist and technical orientations to education and practice – as evidenced by the increased prevalence of competency-based education. It speaks to a deontological ethical undercurrent, in which actions themselves are assumed to carry right or wrong ethical associations, regardless of their consequences or unique circumstances. This is of course in tension with teleological ethical traditions that center questions of circumstance, consequence, and conduct in ethical decision making. In these traditions, the behaviors themselves carry meaning only insofar as they are situated and examined in their right context. This is perhaps the fundamental intention of professional ethics as written – rooted in statements of values that are intended to guide ethical decision making more than determinations of right conduct – but in practice we far too often default to decontextualized and fixed notions of rightness and wrongness in conduct. The important, messy, unfinished conversation of values and impact fades in favor of a tidier dichotomous decision-tree of “good” and “bad” behavior.

But we suggest this is both a limited and colonial interpretation of whether what we are doing is beneficial or effective. To truly be ethical we have to learn to look past our current narrow codified view of human interaction to one that takes into account the dynamics and realities of human relationships. We have to learn to look beyond dichotomous and fixed determinations of what is right and good, widening our lens to take in consequences and implications of our actions through the perspective of our values, our histories, our communities, and our times.

We need to accept that ethical practice is more than doing the right thing as determined by the narrow confines of our codes. We have to understand that being ethical is relational and that this transcends the current “here and now” and the “you and I in this moment” lens through which we often try to determine whether our conduct is ethical. This means that we have to look beyond our intentions to see both how our actions affirm our core values, and how they will impact not just the individual but also those connected with the individual. We need to look at the impact of our actions over time and across relationship. Behaving ethically means that we need to begin to think about the consequences of our actions past the person and the moment.

To illustrate how our actions can influence people over time we are going to use a model Charles and Degagne (2013) have developed of a pebble in a pond to conceptualize the impact of abuse and oppression experienced in the Indian Residential School System in Canada on Indigenous communities beyond the pain suffered by an individual. In this model the initial acts of oppression on an individual ripple out to impact their immediate and extended families, their communities, the broader society and ultimately their descendants. The initial trauma radiates outwards and has an impact upon ever greater numbers of peoples and communities until it also has an influence on society. The initial trauma experienced by a child in a school is the pebble that causes the first ripple in the pond and the subsequent ripples are the consequences of that initial abuse. In order for healing to occur then it has to happen across peoples and places and time. It is not singular or lineal. The impact of the unethical behavior by the abuser of the child doesn’t stop with the individual. It impacts directly or indirectly countless other people over time.

To understand the impact of the initial unethical action requires that we discard a colonial and codified linear approach and adapt a more expansive ecological, developmental and relational viewpoint. We need to see over time and place. To act ethically then means learning to anticipate the systematic and chronological impact of our actions. We need to be able to begin to see how what we are doing with an individual will influence the people and communities in their lives not just now but also over time. We need to consider how context may shift an interpretation of a behavior’s rightness or wrongness – rural human services work, for instance, or work performed by marginalized people within their own marginalized communities require different and non-colonial orientations to practice that decenter the notion of the outside actor enacting ethical behavior through distance and rigid professional boundaries.

It is our hope that as human services professions respond to and take up calls to dismantle colonial hegemony, for critical attention to legacies of oppression and marginalization, we refocus our ethical attention on questions of how we come to make determinations of rightness and wrongness rather than simply which conduct is endorsed and which is condemned. This orientation demands critical, contextual, relational, and reflective thought to identify the potential implications of our actions or inactions in each given situation in the moment and over time – what does it mean about what we value if we do this behavior or that one? It demands reorganizing conversations about and institutions governing professional ethics to take a long view, and a broad view, of the implications and contexts for professional conduct. It demands that we engage complexity and discomfort as we examine our determinations of rightness and wrongness, well beyond the simplicity of decontextualized behavioral checklists.