Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Principle over convenience
Ethics items are built around situations where the easy, instructed, or locally popular action is not the defensible one. The recurring principles are integrity, objectivity, competence, confidentiality, respect for persons, and accountability for consequences.
Concepts you must hold
- Legal is not the same as ethical. The minimum permitted by law can still be exploitative, biased, or damaging to trust.
- Conflicts of interest must be identified, declared, and managed - usually avoided where the conflict is material. Undisclosed conflicts damage credibility even when the decision was sound.
- Boundaries of competence: competent practitioners recognise the edge of their expertise and refer or seek supervision rather than improvising.
- Informed consent: people affected by a decision or included in data should understand purpose, use, risks, and their ability to decline.
- Confidentiality is not absolute: it yields to defined duties such as preventing serious harm, and those limits should be disclosed in advance wherever possible.
- Honest reporting: no cherry-picking favourable results, no suppressing inconvenient findings, no silent revision of definitions.
- Escalation: when instructed to act improperly, the sequence is to raise it, document it, and escalate through the appropriate channel.
Traps
Treating client instruction as ethical justification. Assuming confidence equals competence. Describing confidentiality as absolute. Believing that anonymised data removes all ethical duties - re-identification and group harm remain possible.
Rule of thumb
Apply the documentation test: would you be comfortable if the decision, and your reasoning, were written down and read by the people it affects?
Worked example
A manager asks an analyst to remove data points that make a programme look poor. The analyst should decline to alter the record, present the findings with appropriate caveats and context, document the request, and escalate if pressure continues. Selecting evidence to fit a preferred conclusion is a misrepresentation even when every individual figure is accurate.