Ethical Considerations: Protecting the Client, Yourself and Your Profession

This chapter highlights the importance of ethical considerations as the very foundation of a sport psychologist’s practice, emphasizing that ethical issues permeate every aspect of the sport psychologist’s role. Put simply, ethical considerations pertain to morals — and can be construed both as an outcome of practice and a process one undertakes (Hays, 2006; also called ‘virtue’ ethics by Aoyagi & Portenga, 2010). Definitions of ethics as an outcome include both codes of behaviour considered correct; or the moral fitness of a decision, or course of action. In contrast, ethics as a process can be defined as the philosophical study of the moral value of human conduct and of the rules and principles that ought to govern it. In the words of Pope and Vasquez (1998, p. xiii), ethics can also be ‘a process through which we awaken, enhance, inform, expand and improve our ability to respond effectively to those who come to us for help’. Notably, if one has a strong ethical process, then the resultant ethical outcomes should be much more defensible.