Responsible to whom? Responsible for what? Some ethical issues in community intervention

Conclusion

Each ethical decision is a blend of general principles and contextual features. Many require compromises between competing values, must be made in the absence of perfect information, and require the courage to confront mistakes.

In community intervention, we have seen that adopting a collaborative paradigm imposes the freedom to determine to whom we are responsible for our actions. A rationale was offered for giving priority to the most vulnerable group, even though this strategy leaves us with an accountability gap in which the group to whom we owe primary loyality is least likely to be able to call us to account.

When we reject the professional-client paradigm in community psychology, we lose the formal contract as a device for setting the terms and limiting the scope of our responsibility. We do the best reconnaissance we can, but even with careful data-gathering we are condemned to act on the basis of imperfect information. We must follow through on unforseen consequences even when we have no formal role to mandate our perseverence.

The community as a setting for psychological intervention faces us, then, with ethical challenges: we work for the well-being of groups too broad to give informed consent to our interventions; we act in collaboration with others, but collaborative action does not free us from professional obligation; we reconnoiter, but reconnaissance does not provide us with perfect information; we may advise while others act, but we cannot walk away from the consequences of their actions. Ethical decision making, in the community as elsewhere, is a creative act in which we invent our profession choice by choice.