Persevering in the good fight

When authoritarians are working to replace established ethical norms with the dictates of the Leader, some of the speed bumps they have to overcome are professional standards. Some people will refuse to play by new rules which violate what they've been taught is responsible -- right and righteous -- behavior. We saw plenty of that during the Trump presidency, notably even from some Trump-appointed judges when the sitting president tried, falsely, to claim he'd been defeated by non-existent election fraud.

Some professionals have been fighting the standards fight for decades. Erudite Partner, in her role as an academic ethicist, worked with professional psychologists during the so-called War on Terror to stigmatize the George W. Bush regime's cooptation of the psychological discipline. Psychologists committed abuses -- torture -- on inmates at our American gulag in Guantanamo. (This admitted torture is why those prisoners, some of them documented "bad guys," have never come to trial; the USofA screwed up, rendering proceedings at law almost impossible.)

Form a 2007 demonstration at an American Psychological Association convention

Psychologist Roy Eidelson reports that the American Psychological Association is still dodging setting effectual ethical standards for members who work with the government. He reports on

... approval of a set of wholly inadequate professional practice guidelines for operational psychology. If this domain is unfamiliar to you, operational psychologists are primarily involved in non-clinical activities linked to national security, national defense, and public safety. Their largest source of employment is the military-intelligence establishment, which includes the Department of Defense and the CIA.

Of particular concern from the standpoint of professional ethics, in some cases these psychologists are called upon to inflict harm, to dispense with informed consent, and to operate in a covert manner such that external oversight by professional boards becomes difficult or impossible. They’re eager to have the APA’s official blessing of this weaponization of the profession because it’s a step toward achieving greater recognition and legitimacy for this kind of work.

In light of the manifest misalignment between key features of operational psychology and the profession’s fundamental ethical principles, I believe the proposed guidelines should have been rejected outright, so as not to lend credence to these practices without sufficient discussion and debate about the profoundly consequential issues involved. 

But it’s worth pointing out that these guidelines deserved a flunking grade simply in comparison to other guidelines recently approved by the APA’s Council for other professional practice areas. For instance, both the guidelines for working with persons with disabilities (2022) and the guidelines for working with sexual minority persons (2021) are each over four-times the length of these vague, abstract, and bare-bones guidelines for operational psychology. Count me among those who find it hard to understand why appropriate guidelines for how to ethically support military-intelligence operations are apparently so much less complicated than guidance for psychologists engaged in other work....

He goes on to remind of past abuses:

What does it actually mean, for instance, to “balance” the government’s urgent demand for actionable intelligence against the human dignity of those suspected of having that information?

Let’s remember too that the military-intelligence establishment has itself engaged in a lot of wordsmithing designed to disguise uncomfortable truths. Most obviously, the CIA used “enhanced interrogation techniques” as a substitute term for a much more familiar one: “torture.” With a similar purpose, the Pentagon reduced the number of reported detainee suicide attempts at Guantanamo by officially reclassifying them as cases of “manipulative self-injurious behavior.” And the number of “juveniles” imprisoned at Guantanamo was decreased by arbitrarily adopting sixteen as the cut-off age—even though a juvenile according to U.S. and international law is someone under eighteen at the time of any alleged crime....

The "War on Terror" taught large elements of the national security state to lie baldly. That lying was the precursor of the recent mendacious Trump presidency. It still matters to call these lies out.

Professional standards aren't enough, unaccompanied by activism, to resist fascism, but they are one sometimes surprising element of the defense of civilization.