After World War II, as the allies planned the prosecution of Germans for crimes committed during the war, they anticipated the possibility that defendants would use the defense that they were "just following orders" and were thus not morally culpable for their actions. The rules governing the Nuremberg trials stated:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

This defense of following orders has been known ever since as the "Nuremberg defense" and has been regularly rejected in both U.S. and international law.  In fact, the very term "Nuremberg defense" is often derided as the attempt of scoundrels to avoid moral and criminal responsibility.

Given this history, it might seem surprising that this precise principle was built in to the ethics code governing psychologists in this country – that of the American Psychological Association –  during the last revision of that code in 2002. Prior to 2002, psychologists were required to follow their ethics code when it conflicted with laws or orders:

"If psychologists’ ethical responsibilities conflict with law, psychologists make known their commitment to the Ethics Code and take steps to resolve the conflict in a responsible manner."

However, in the newest revision this injunction was transformed to allow psychologists to follow laws or orders in violation of their professional ethics:

"If psychologists’ ethical responsibilities conflict with law, regulations, or other governing legal authority, psychologists make known their commitment to the Ethics Code and take steps to resolve the conflict. If the conflict is unresolvable via such means, psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority."

The APA explains this change, known as ethics standard 1.02,  by referring to certain issues regarding court orders requiring release of confidential clinical records. Yet they cannot explain why such a sweeping undermining of ethical standards was necessary to deal with what was a relatively minor conflict. Other ethicists intimately familiar with the APA’s ethics process, including Ken Pope, a former chair of the APA’s ethics committee argue that this radical revision was unnecessary in that an exception for court orders to produce records was already in the code. The absence of any reasonable explanation for the sweeping nature of this ethics loophole, hard to justify in the pot-Nuremberg era, is thus suspicious. While there is no direct evidence that the military-intelligence establishment influenced this writing of the Nuremberg defense into the ethics code, given the extensive influence of that establishment over organized psychology in general and the APA in particular, surreptitious influence cannot be entirely ruled out.  

With the development of the Bush administration’s program of official torture, this ethics clause became of supreme importance.

 

 

---