ABSTRACT
A key facet of the role of professional associations and government regulatory bodies is to ensure that practitioners acquire knowledge and decision-making skills around ethical issues during their training, and remain informed about ethical issues over the course of their careers, and that procedures are available for clients and service users to complain about ethical misconduct. A key idea in relational ethics is that that of respecting the 'otherness of the Other'. A crucial aspect of relational ethics is that it highlights the significance of the concept of care. Caring becomes not merely an unpaid or low-paid form of work carried out by those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but is regarded as part of the ethical responsibility that all of us hold towards each other. Conceptually, by incorporating relational ethics in the way that it does, pluralistic therapy introduces a different set of criteria to the task of deciding whether therapy has been effective.
