Читать книгу Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling - Kenneth S. Pope - Страница 33

Brabeck and Ting (2000) open a discussion of feminist ethics by quoting the striking claim that feminism itself cannot exist separate from ethics: “In 1991, the political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote, ‘feminism without ethics is inconceivable’ … According to Elshtain, all feminisms offer an ethical position that accompanies a political, activist agenda to achieve social justice and improve women’s lives” (Brabeck & Ting, 2000, p. 17). They then summarize five major themes running through feminist ethics, including:

1 The assumption that women and their experiences have moral significance.

2 The assertion that attentiveness and subjective knowledge can illuminate moral issues.

3 The claim that a feminist critique of male distortions must be accompanied by a critique of all discriminatory distortions.

4 The admonition that feminist ethics engage in analysis of the context and attend to the power dynamics of that context.

5 The injunction that feminist ethics require action directed at achieving social justice.

While ethics is an inextricable part of feminism, multiculturalism is an inextricable part of feminist ethics. Gartrell (2014) wrote that “any discussion of feminist ethics must incorporate diverse experiences due to race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation” (p. 137; see also Greene & Flasch, 2019; Hayden & Crockett, 2020; Powell et al., 2020).

Lerman (2014) discussed the work of the Feminist Therapy Institute in creating their own ethics code based on their conclusions about traditional ethics codes. Their view that most of the current ethics codes were not a good fit for feminist therapists included:

The recognition that most codes are reactive rather than proactive, that ethics is frequently viewed as a good-bad dichotomy rather than as a continuum of actions generated by the complex nature of human interactions, that ethics codes do not customarily teach how to make ethical decisions, that ethics codes have usually ignored issues especially pertinent to minorities and women and that complaint procedures most frequently focus on legally protecting the professional rather than displaying compassion toward the client.