Ethical Guidelines Are Especially Crucial in Mental

¶ … ethical guidelines are especially crucial in mental health facililties, so I was happy to read about the structures in place in the organization where you work. Your example also raises the interesting relationship between ethics, responsibility, and the law, since so many of your ethical guidelines are somewhat pre-determined by legal restrictions. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this relationship, especially as it relates to responsibility? In making ethical choices, are you more beholden to the patient or to the legal code? I think this points to a difference between responsibility and obligation. One might say that you have a responsibility to the patient, but an obligation to the law. Do these ever conflict?

Second Response: You give detailed information about both your organization and the concepts of ethics and responsibility, which I appreciate. I'm also very impressed with the steps that your organization takes, and would like to know more. You say that Seven Counties "fosters an environment that promotes ethical decision-making." I think that is so important but sometimes difficult to achieve. In my experience, there is a risk in being overbearing or stifling when trying to guide employees ethically. Besides the training, are there other ways that Seven Counties creates this environment without being moral watchdogs? If so, their system might be a wonderful example for others to follow.

Third Response: Your response posed an interesting concept of ethical leadership that I hadn't considered: the idea of ethical leadership as a responsibility to maximize human potential and creativity. At first I thought that I didn't agree -- it seems that maximizing human potential would be acting in the self-interest of the leader, not the worker or even the client, and that it could be open to all sorts of behavior that would seem to most to be unethical. But then it occurred to me that maximizing human potential is not the same thing as maximizing human capital, and that such leadership would necessarily be in the best interests of all involved and most likely ethical.

Fourth Response: I thought your observation that My Sister's House was perhaps not ethical in its first-come, first-serve policy was very thought-provoking. One of the difficult things about ethics, in my opinion, is that it depends so much on the frame of reference. While it's true that the emergency might take precedence (certainly to the person in the emergency), it would also seem to me to be unethical to turn out someone who had perhaps gone to great lengths to get there in time for a spot. I imagine no one staying in that facility is facing an easy time. So, while I'm not sure I agree with your assertion, it does reveal a lot about the complexity of creating ethical policies.

Fifth Response: I think your choice of the Pro-Life Organization was a good one to show how complicated it gets when ethics come up against ethics. If what you posit at the beginning is true -- that ethics are a chosen set of principles and not, as some think, a reflection of absolute rights and wrongs, then an organization can be acting ethically as far as it is concerned and unethically as far as others are concerned. The Ku Klux Klan comes to mind. I think that group ethics need to be strongly tied to social morality as opposed to individual morality for this very reason.