Ethi-Call: the Centre’s ethics counselling service

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 79 autumn 2010

Ethi-Call is the Ethics Centre’s free and confidential ethics counselling service. Four Ethi-Call counsellors talk about their work.

Andy Small

Nearly twelve years have passed since Andy Small joined the first group of trainee Ethics Counsellors for a four-month part-time course.

As a recent retiree from thirty-five years in business it was exciting and challenging to learn new ideas from the worlds of philosophy and psychology – and how to complement them by acquiring and using good counselling skills. What that means in practice is asking good questions based on a comprehensive model, and guiding clients towards making choices that best meet their needs.

The phrase ‘ethical dilemma’ doesn’t have a universal meaning. We believe it occurs when one of the values or principles we live by clashes with another, and one has to be sacrificed to enable us to make a decision.

An example may make this clearer. Let’s say your teenage child has been brought up to value telling the truth – and also to value loyalty to friends and family. One day the school principal, knowing your child saw their best friend doing something they shouldn’t have, asks what your child saw. Telling the truth would mean being disloyal to the friend. And vice versa. How should a decision be made? That is the purpose of our counselling. Helping our clients make good ethical choices when none of the options can enable them to honour all of their values and principles.

Sometimes taking someone through our model, or process, creates new ideas and possible solutions, which can be very rewarding. Usually it provides a clearer choice amongst the options and a logic for making it. This can be helpful when the decision is explained to those who may feel disadvantaged by it.
There are no right or wrong answers to ethical dilemmas. Even western philosophers disagreed on how to resolve them. The final choice is a personal one. One that reflects individual values, upbringing, character and life experience. The counsellor’s role is to guide, question and assist – never to advise, as their way of resolving it may be quite different from the particular client.

Often there is confusion with moral dilemmas where choices are usually between right and wrong – but a heavy price may be paid for doing the right thing. St James Ethics Centre is neither a moral nor an ethical policeman. It is not for us to decide in individual cases what is right or wrong or ethical or to tell people what they should do.

The trained Ethi-Call counsellors come from very different educational and professional backgrounds but share a common passion for exploring ethical choices and helping people. Whilst each may bring their own individual approach to using our model, I suspect that decisions made by clients would vary very little, regardless of which counsellor assisted them.

Over the years clients have come from the not-for-profit sector, business and government. Dilemmas have included whether or not to be a whistle blower, how to respond to corporate misbehaviour, racial discrimination and sexual abuse. Their stories can be very moving and the cause of much emotional pain or be about very hard choices when all the options appear bad. In every case we try to explain our process. We hope this gives the client an opportunity to resolve future dilemmas without the need to contact us again. On rare occasions clients call to tell us what decision they made and how events then unfolded. But we would never ask them to do so as we fully respect their privacy and confidentiality.

Far more people have ethical dilemmas than realise it. Many see them as just another tough decision to be made and don’t differentiate. We see them as distinctly different and believe that skills to make better ethical choices would make a worthwhile contribution to the greater enjoyment of life. We encourage the use of our free service and hope you will give us the opportunity of trying to help you!

Jane Potter

Jane Potter trained as an Ethics Counsellor in the late nineties.

I had long been interested in ethics, having been raised in apartheid South Africa. The training we were given was challenging and absorbing with its reliance on philosophy and ethics as a base for the model we use to help people make comprehensive ethical decisions. The training attracted very interesting people from a wide range of work and life-experience. This led to some lively discussion as we went through the course.

Ethi-Call is not an advisory line: it aims to assist callers to identify and clarify parts of the problem being faced and to reach a decision that reflects the values of what the person stands for, whilst providing a response to the question: “What ought I to do?” Not always easy in a world where the ‘end justifies the means’ is a common position.

I came from a background in education, social work and counselling but had to put aside some of my former work skills, as, for example, ethics counselling does not include exploring underlying feelings that may influence decision-making.

The dilemmas we explore cover both personal situations and those in the workplace. An interesting example of the former was a call from a woman drawing up her will (all our work is confidential), trying to decide how to divide her assets most fairly between her two children when she died. One was a divorced mother with part-time work and two young children; the other, a son with a good job, a sound marriage and no children. Two potential beneficiaries with very different needs.

Her initial intention was to divide her estate on the basis of need and leave more to her daughter. After further exploration she recognised her son may not see such a distribution as fair or just: in fact he might feel he had a right to an equal share. Further she realised it was an assumption and not a fact she had based her inclination on: the assumption being that the difference between her two children would remain the same. After looking at all the options she revised her original plan.

This provides an inkling into how this type of counselling can throw light into unexpected corners leading hopefully to a far-reaching, good decision. I have been very fortunate to have been involved in a developing process and having the privilege of sharing some fascinating dilemmas with people over the years.

Elizabeth Anne Riley

For the first twelve months of training to become an Ethi-Call counsellor in 2003, Elizabth Anne Riley was cursing the place.

The concept that most decisions made in daily life are ethical, whether in fact I was willing to admit it or not, was confronting for me. It had dawned on me that by far the majority of all our decisions involve our values or beliefs, our sense of duty or obligation, have consequences and potentially affect many people. Socrates’ quote “The unexamined life is not worth living” took on new meaning as my consciousness was raised to a whole new level. In many ways the logic and intellectual challenge this provided for me both personally and as an Ethi-Call counsellor was ‘a breath of fresh air’ as I now held a new way of thinking that was congruent with my own values and philosophy and directly applicable to everyday life.

As I think about the role of an Ethi-Call counsellor, an aspect that comes to mind is the process model as a strictly logical thinking role and not as an emotional support normally associated with the word counsellor. The individuality of the calls, people and processes, enables an invigorating creativity in asking the ‘good’ questions, thus facilitating the client’s reflective thinking via new perspectives while maintaining a rigid boundary around judgement and opinion.

Callers sometimes ask “What would you do in my situation?” or “What do you think about…?” I am mindful that the client, and not me, has to live with their decision and I sincerely believe that I don’t know what someone else ought to do in their situation as I am not them and I often need to say so.

As I reflect … There exists a lonely side to my life as an Ethi-Call counsellor as the enhanced perspective and impact of good decision-making is excruciatingly difficult to convey to colleagues and committees in bite-size chunks to provide the necessary reflection when speed or ‘being seen to do the right thing’ appears to be the overriding motivator. ‘Good’ questions are then often touted as irrelevant or too hard by the majority.

On the other hand, though, both personally and professionally, I appreciate the composure and quietude available to me as I abide wider perspectives on life and experience in general.

Tim Potter

Tim Potter trained as an Ethics Counsellor with the Centre shortly after retiring as a partner in a large international firm of accountants in 1998.

We were the first group to be trained. The course provided a basic understanding of both philosophy and psychology, the skills to identify the ethical dilemma and to differentiate between that and a ‘moral temptation’. It also helped to distinguish between the role of the counsellor and that of an advisor, quite difficult for those of us coming from the business world.

The purpose of the counselling process is to help answer the question; “What ought I to do?” in the particular circumstances facing the caller. We do this using a decision-making model developed by the Centre.

Amongst other things, it seeks to obtain the relevant facts (as opposed to the assumptions), and to identify the significant stakeholders who could be affected by any decision.

The process emphasises that the counsellor’s role is to help the caller reach a sound decision that reflects the values of the caller and not to impose the views of the counsellor. In fact the ideal situation is achieved if, at the end of the call, the caller does not know what the counsellor would do in the same circumstances.

After over ten years I continue to find this rewarding work most challenging.