Facing ethical dilemmas in industrial-organizational psychology: The case for the principle of double effect

Abstract

We appreciate the work of Lefkowitz (2021) to encourage more reflection regarding the structural forms of ethical dilemmas faced by those in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. As professionals, there are few situations where decisions are entirely free of ethical ambiguity or negative consequences. This notion is made particularly salient by the focal study’s findings that highlight the depth and breadth of ethical dilemmas, defined as a choice between unattractive alternatives that the actor “does not want to make” (Lefkowitz, 2021), faced by Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) members. Given this definition, we extend the focal study’s contribution by using the principle of double effect (PDE), a decision-making approach that serves to guide actors on the moral permissibility of their actions, to argue that I-O practitioners would recognize more situations as presenting a genuine ethical dilemma if they evaluated unintended, but reasonably foreseeable harms that may result from their decisions. In addition to providing a working definition of ethical dilemmas, Lefkowitz (2021) sees these dilemmas as made up of three parts: the necessity of making a decision, the need to apply some form of moral/ethical principle to this decision, and the reality that the decision will have significant consequences for others. Moreover, an implicit assumption of ethical dilemmas is the belief that individuals who are faced with these situations are motivated to do good and have no desire to cause harm. Although we agree with the definition of ethical dilemma brought forward by the author, we suspect that this definition is somewhat conservative and may underestimate the extent to which practitioners experience ethical issues on a daily basis. For example, it may be possible that practitioners make a particular decision without fully thinking through the full spectrum of consequences of their actions, particularly as: “Professional ethics is a rarely considered subject in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, which might imply that it is not of much concern to the field” (Lefkowitz, 2021, p. 297). Given this observation and notion that the structural forms of ethical awareness rely on awareness and intention (e.g., opportunity to prevent harm), it makes sense that practitioners may be unaware or have not fully considered the unanticipated, albeit reasonably foreseeable, consequences of their actions and, therefore, do not initially classify their actions as constituting an ethical dilemma. This limits the scale of the problem and our ability fully to realize the extent to which ethical dilemmas affect I-O practitioners. As a remedy, we propose that, in addition to observing the taxonomy provided by Lefkowitz (2021), practitioners adopt PDE as part of a more systematic and detailed decision-making approach to help actors evaluate decisions that may reasonably lead to or contribute in some way to negative outcomes for others. This, we argue, augments our understanding and classification of ethical dilemmas in I-O psychology, as it expands the conversation to include both the context of the choice and the unintended, but reasonably foreseeable, effects of decisions on