The Code of Ethics for Professional Rehabilitation Counselors: what we have and what we need.

This article provides an overview of the ethical and professional trends and concerns that led to the formation of the Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification "Ethics Task Force." This task force has been charged with rewriting the ethical code for rehabilitation counselors. Historical issues, the Commission's ethics review process, and the present code are briefly analyzed. Procedures used by the task force for revising the code are outlined. Code revisions should serve the profession by guiding ethical and professional practice well into the 21st century.

Ethical decision-making models: a review of the literature.

A comprehensive review of the literature on ethical decision-making models in counseling is presented, beginning in the fall of 1984 through the summer of 1998. (Materials "in press" were considered.) A general overview of the literature is provided. Theoretically or philosophically based, practice-based, and specialty-relevant approaches are surveyed. The literature is rich with publications describing decision-making models, although few models have been assessed empirically, and few models seem well grounded philosophically or theoretically.

The systemic view of violence: an ethical perspective.

Systems theory has been critiqued by a number of feminist writers who felt that it did not adequately address the issues of violence and male domination in families. This essay argues that systems theory describes the world from an "exogenic" perspective--the scientific world of nature, which is intrinsically amoral. In the exogenic world all causality is circular, as nature maintains a system that has survived for billions of years. Bateson found "mind" to be within the system of nature, implying that mind must also be amoral. However, most people view the world from an "endogenic" perspective, a personal construction of reality molded by the environment in which they live, and which inevitably incorporates morality. Humans believe that violence is wrong, not for intellectual reasons, but for moral reasons. Implications for therapy are presented. A postmodern or constructivist position is taken as a way to acknowledge the influence of relationships on problems and definitions of problems, while allowing for a moral or legal consensus to pervade the therapeutic enterprise.

Defining the psychomedical and systemic paradigms in marital and family therapy.

A framework for defining paradigms within the field of marital and family therapy is presented. The term "paradigm" is critically analyzed as applied to mental health services. Paradigm crisis in marital and family therapy is described as resulting primarily from practical-theoretical, professional, andpolitical concerns rather than scientific anomaly. Subsequently, two paradigms are defined as related to marital and family therapy: the psychomedical and the social systems (systemic) paradigms. Both paradigms are defined according to basic propositions and methodological tenets. The need for, and the design of, critical paradigmatic experiments of the psychomedical paradigm against the systemic paradigm are addressed. Critical paradigmatic experiments are viewed as an offshoot of a postpositivistic empiricism in keeping with a contextual view of knowledge.