Moral Dimensions of Therapy

Providing a clear definition regarding moral dimensions in counseling is complicated because it is a term that encompasses many different aspects of the counseling profession. When counselors refer to ethics, it is often not clear whether they are referring to codes of ethics, moral values, legal limitations, social standards, or to some general sense of the term that encompasses any or all of these concepts. Early research regarding moral dimensions served as the foundational influence for the development of professional codes of ethics, and in today’s graduate-level counseling programs, teaching students about morals in counseling is often [Page 1095]intertwined with ethics. This is true for other noncounseling related professions as well. For example, researcher Friedrich Paulson defined ethics as the science of moral duty. This ...