A Code of Ethics for Rehabilitation Counselors

On September 25, 1972, at San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Delegate Assembly of the National Rehabilitation Counseling Association adopted a draft of a Code of Ethics for Rehabilitation Counselors. The provisions of the Code were based on responses from many members of the Association who had been invited to report ethical dilemmas they had encountered and to suggest acceptable solutions to those dilemmas. A first draft was published in the Summer, 1971, issue of The Journal of Applied Rehabilitation Counseling. Many additional members responded to the invitation to suggest changes in that draft. It was a revised version of the first draft that was adopted at San Juan.While the vote for adoption was almost unanimous, there were some questions raised during the discussion at San Juan and during the three years that the Code was in preparation that should be shared with all Association members. The questions might be placed in three generic types: (a) Does the profession really need a code of ethics? (b) Can a profession that is generally composed of persons who are employees, as opposed to private practitioners, reasonably expect to set its own ethical standards and abide by them? (c) Would it not be preferable merely to state some very broad principles of ethical behavior and refrain from defining for the members what those principles should mean in practice? The attempt will be made here to summarize the apparent rationales of these questions and what seemed to be the conclusions of the Delegate Assembly concerning them.