Professional Ethics and Community Psychology

Abstract

Helping professional ethics, traditionally functioning within the framework of individualism, needs to be reconsidered in terms of community psychology. Its basic concepts such as decision making, moral agent and profession, usually defined in rationalist outlook, must integrate irrational factors mostly associated with community life. Both professional ethics and community psychology are expected to be theoretically elaborated by communitarianism, and now invited to meet challenges of increasingly dominant intellectual trends in the world today: social contract theory and neoliberalism. Finally, community psychology may adequately contribute to the coping with problems, especially on the management of boundaries, facing professionals practicing in small communities.