Embracing our principles and moral compass

Embracing our ethos, reclaiming our heart.

A profession's ethos is an interlacing of sentiment, value, and thought that describes its character, conveys its genius, and manifests its spirit. The ethos endures over time, serving as touchstone against which individuals may strike their actions to know their worth. As a profession's inner voice, the ethos inspires individuals and calls them back if they stray too far. This discussion of th...

Embracing diversity in our profession.

353 This is a reflective article that carries the discussion of cultural diversity from more typically considered arenas of clinical practice and education to a less-considered context: the occupational therapy community. The occupational therapy literature offers fine work that targets constructs related to diversity (American Occupational Therapy Association [AOTA], 1995, 1996; Black, 2002; C...

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Family courts, risk assessment, and the moral compass.

The Anglo-American legal system regularly looks to forensic practitioners to provide expert testimony on the likelihood that an individual will pose a risk to others. Experts may be asked to provide risk assessments in the criminal court (with reference to a reoffending risk against either the general public or an identifiable victim) or in the civil courts (usually with reference to named indi...

Moral dilemmas and moral principles: when emotion and cognition unite.

Traditional studies on moral judgement used resolutions of moral dilemmas that were framed in terms of acceptability of the consequentialist action promoting a greater good, thus overlooking the deontological implications (choices cannot be justified by their consequences). Recently, some authors have suggested a parallelism between automatic, unreflective emotional responses and deontological ...