ABSTRACT
The need to make ethical decisions does not start the day one enters his/her first job. Encounters with ethical concepts begin early in life. Sometime in our youth, before most of us have any active memory, our parents almost certainly encouraged us to tell the truth. Ethics becomes a dilemma for the professional when confronted with difficult choices or apparent conflicts between two ethical imperatives. A modern term for the outcome of such dilemmas is "situational ethics" which refers to the temptation to bend the rules when a situation seems to have no satisfactory or satisfying solution. The second conflict of ethical imperatives stated introduces issues that an environmental management professional is likely to encounter. Most professionals belong to one or more professional organizations which commonly adopt a code of ethics for their members. Variations in circumstances can produce an infinite number of dilemmas arising from conflicts and difficult choices.
