This document discusses ethics, morality, law, and their relationship to counseling. It defines ethics as concerned with human conduct and moral decision making. Morality involves evaluating actions as good or bad. Law codifies governing standards to ensure legal and moral justice. Counselors are concerned with ethics and values. Unethical behaviors include violating confidentiality, exceeding competence, and imposing values on clients. To address ethics, counselors have developed professional codes of ethics and standards of conduct based on shared values. Codes help regulate the profession, control disagreements, and protect practitioners from legal issues. They also increase public trust and protect clients.

1. ETHICS
 Ethics involves “making decisions of a moral nature about people and
their interaction in society”.
 Ethics is generally defined as a philosophical discipline that is
concerned with human conduct and moral decision making.
 Ethics are normative in nature and focus on principles and standards
that govern relationships between individuals.
 “Professional ethics are beliefs about behavior and conduct that guide
professional practices,” such as those between counselors and clients.

2.  Counselors have morals, and the theories counselors employ have embedded
within them moral presuppositions about human nature that explicitly and
implicitly question first “what is a person and second, what should a person be or
become?”.
 Morality, however involves judgment or evaluation of action. It is associated with
such words as good, bad, right, wrong, ought and should.
MORALITY

3. LAW
 Law is the precise codification of governing standards that are
established to ensure legal and moral justice.
 Law is created by legislation, court decision, and tradition, as in
English common law. The law does not dictate what is ethical in a
given situation but what is legal.

4. ETHICS AND COUNSELING
 Professional counselors are concerned with ethics and values.
 Patterson(1971) has observed that counselors ’professional identity is related to
their knowledge and practice of ethics. Welfel (2016) has added that the
effectiveness of counselors is connected to their ethical knowledge and behavior
as well.
 Unethical behavior in counselling can take many forms. The temptations
common to people everywhere exist for counselors. They include “physical
intimacy, the titillation of gossip, or the opportunity (if the gamble pays off) to
advance one’s career". Some forms of unethical behavior are obvious and willful,
whereas others are more subtle and unintentional.

5. Some of the most prevalent forms of unethical behaviors in counselling:
 Violation of confidentiality
 Exceeding one's level of professional competence
 Negligent practice
 Claiming expertise one does not possess
 Imposing one’s values on a client

6.  Creating dependency in a client
 Sexual activity with a client
 Certain conflicts of interests, such as dual or multiple relationships in
which the role of the counsellor is combined with another relationship
(either personal or professional) and not monitored for appropriateness
of boundaries,
 Questionable financial arrangements, such as charging excessive fees
 Improper advertising
 Plagiarism

7. PROFESSIONAL CODES OF ETHICS AND STANDARDS
To address ethical situation, counselors have developed
professional codes of ethics and standards of conduct based on
an agreed on set of values.
Among its many purposes, a code of ethical conduct is
designed to offer formal statements for ensuring protection of
clients’ rights while identifying expectations of practitioners”.
Ethics not only help professionalize an association on a
general level but “are designed to provide some guidelines for
the professional behavior of members on a personnel level”.

8.  Three other reasons for the existence of ethical codes according to Van
Hoose and Kottler (1985) are as follows:
1. Ethical codes protect the profession from government. They allow the
profession to regulate itself and function autonomously instead of
being controlled by legislation.
2. Ethical codes help control internal disagreements and bickering, thus
promoting stability within the profession.
3. Ethical codes protect practitioners from the public, especially in regard
to malpractice suits. If counseling professionals behave according to
ethical guidelines, the behavior is judged to be in compliance with
accepted standards.

9.  Ethical codes help increase public trust in the integrity of a
profession and provide clients with some protection from charlatans
and incompetent counselors. Like counselors, clients can use codes
of ethics and standards as a guide in evaluating questionable
treatment.

10. THANK YOU