Michael Miller

In 2025, the American Psychological Association Committee on Accreditation suspended enforcement of key training standards relating to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Taking this decision as an example, I ask how American psychology understands and teaches ethics. An examination of APA policy and research on ethics and training finds little discussion of foundational ethical theory. In its place, I identify a tacit "reciprocity assumption" that takes psychological competence as normative. I then identify three iterations of the resultant notion of "ethico-competence:" Communitarian, Compulsory, and Acculturative, each of which attempts grounding for ethics but fails to escape the reciprocity assumption. Because of their reliance on psychological competence, these models force the abdication of autonomy, authorship, and risk, and are therefore insufficient to ground an ethics.

The critiques of the ego central to the existential, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic traditions have lately been jettisoned by contemporary scholarly and popular discourse about identity recognition, despite its grounding in these traditions. This essay examines a recent example of this turn in recognition theory, which treats the demand for identity recognition as an ethical imperative. Such an imperative asks us not to recognize the "truth" of the self, but rather to mirror the empty and illusory self-certainty of narcissism. This has significant consequences for psychiatric and psychological clinicians—especially those informed by the above traditions—who look to engage what is excessive to the ego. I return to Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Lacan to elaborate these consequences. On the basis of their work, I suggest that the ego-recognition imperative presents an ethical dilemma: the choice between "humble courage" and "solemn cowardice."