From Assessing to Exploring: Less Parent, More Adult in Ethical Reasoning?

Abstract

In this reflective essay, the author shares some thoughts on how his attitude to ethics changed radically during his years as a member and one of the cochairs of the International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA) Ethics Committee. Being certified in both the psychotherapy and the organizational fields had already started him thinking in a new way about analyzing from a combination of the individual perspective and the systemic. Today, for him ethics is no longer about judging an individual’s errors but about understanding the thinking, feeling, and acting of (all) the people involved in an undesirable outcome. The author suggests that we need to do whatever it takes to see through, defuse, and fix the causes of ethical missteps. We need to understand what is not going well in a broader context in order to provide an adequate response. Only in this way can all those involved learn and the system within which the error was committed improve. A brief history of ethical thought and some TA perspectives are followed by reflections on the work of the ethics committee, and the essay ends with a summary of the work of Dekker, a forerunner in innovative thinking about ethics. (For the record: This reflection mainly contains the author’s view on recent developments and not necessarily the view of all members of the ITAA Ethics Committee.)