On Codes of Ethics,The Individual and Performance

In this paper I contend that, although codes of ethics are very good things and could potentially improve performance by acting as a normalising agent for a profession, they are not problem‐free. In particular, they lend themselves to reification (making something abstract into something concrete and thus, reduce the potential for their full impact), they are time dependent (that is, they are relevant only to the time in which they were formulated), subject to different lenses (that is, they are relevant only to the culture in which they were formulated), and emotionally challenged (that is, they are rarely formulated in a way that encompasses the emotions around the particular situation). An individual's role in a situation is hard to delineate via codes of ethics and, thus, these codes of ethics should be seen as a proposition, rather than as a solution for performance problems regarding ethical challenges.