Professionals in the helping professions are faced with a myriad of ethical issues in their work related to duty of care provisions, duty to clients, themselves, the public and their profession. These may be heightened or different when working with vulnerable populations, people with complex needs, or those from diverse cultural or religious backgrounds. When faced with such challenges, two things commonly happen: they seek out their supervisor’s counsel, or their consult their code. Often this feels insufficient. Further, the practice of counselling and psychotherapy for example, occur with a sole worker and a sole family/client. Often times the worker has to think on his/her feet, to have a readymade and practiced approach to ethical responsiveness and decision making. These are skills that don’t arrive “out of the blue”, but require conscious moral deliberation. Ideally this is honed and expanded issue by issue, response by response, as a person evolves their professional, ethical practice.

In our view, many ethical texts focused on community services are focused on content areas related to key principles of practice, and offer guidelines for their management. Our goal was to provide a book for individual reflection on developing one’s own ethical maturity: honing one’s moral sensitivity, understanding moral development and influences, fostering effective decision making in line with core values, feeling confident in responding ethically and being able to live peacefully with one’s decisions. In this enterprise, we wanted to look at the key philosophical traditions, but to also consider research in the last fifteen years on the influences of neuroscience, education, psychology, and organizational behaviour on moral development and decision making.