ABSTRACT
There is a strong rationale for cross-disciplinary understanding of professional ethics, conduct, and standards of behavior, regulatory processes, diverse worldviews, and cultural practices. The complexity of organizational structures and workplaces that dominate health, social services, education, legal, environmental, and housing sectors demand coworkers to share decision-making processes that often have ethical dimensions. Social workers must acquire good knowledge not only of their own professional codes of ethics and value positions, but also reach an understanding of the positions of colleagues who have quite different discipline backgrounds. Rigorous and principled ethical decision-making depends on professionals who can collectively consider a case from a range of vantage points, using a common language to identify ethical dimensions based on ethical theory to provide justified decisions. This strengthens the argument for ethics to be viewed as an interprofessional endeavor.
