| The Ethics as Acculturation Model (EAM; Handelsman, Gottlieb, & Knapp, 2005) of ethics training incorporates the ethical culture of psychology and a student's ethical background to promote ethical excellence, significantly advancing ethics training. However, despite the EAM's discussions of ethical cultures, a crucial concept is missing. Ethics must also include the implicit ethical dimension of culture, embedded in knowledge, practices, assumptions, worldview, configurations of goods, and understandings of the good. Psychological ethics are insensitive to the ethical dimension of the culture of psychology. The empirical methodology used to develop the American Psychological Association's first ethics code failed to capture unacknowledged ethical assumptions. The resultant code defined ethics in such a way as to exclude alternative conceptions of ethics in psychology. A separation between moral concepts and their social embodiment produces an applied psychological ethic that distorts moral concepts and prevents their authentic expression. Compartmentalization and individualism characteristic of US American culture creates a context for the emergence of an ethic impervious to the ethical dimension of the culture of psychology. Ethics training with an expanded ethical autobiography and awareness of formative moral traditions can account for the ethical dimension of culture. The ethical autobiography should focus on the history and culture of the United States and of US American psychology, and one's personal history and social location. Students must become aware of the traditions that have formed themselves, their discipline, and the United States, and engage in those versions of moral traditions that facilitate ethical awareness, critique, and reconstruction.;Keywords: ethics, ethics training, ethics code, culture, acculturation, history. |
