Do Unique Ethical Principles of Online Practice Exist?
Several major organizations offer ethical or ‘best practice’ guidelines on online therapeutic work (ACA, 1999; APA, 1997; ISMHO, 2000; Kane & Sands, 1998; NBCC, 2001), making them freely available to both consumers and professionals via the web.[3] Yet, as far as I can tell, no fundamentally new ethical territory has been created by the advance of technology which enables online counselling to take place. There is, rather, merely new technological territory. These ‘guidelines’ are primarily what ethicists call technology assessment documents, providing introduction and orientation to the technological context and its ramifications for our existing normative principles, such as the principles of non-maleficence or fidelity embodied in BACP’s Ethical Framework (Bond, 2002). Technology assessment documents are subject to debate and disagreement, are virtually never complete, and typically go out of date quickly — unlike the underlying normative principles themselves, which do not change
