Wendy-Ann Smith and Jonathan Passmore have invited Philippe Rosinski to contribute to this new collective book! I (Philippe) am grateful for this opportunity to bring a new contribution to our field and also thank Liz Pavese for her help.  

Coaches typically refer to coaching codes of ethics and to their own judgment to act ethically. However, deeper awareness and reflection are called for to make informed ethical judgments amid the complexity we face today, interacting with clients from different backgrounds, serving multiple stakeholders, and dealing with systemic and planetary challenges. This ethical reflection can be enlightened by a combination of philosophical ethics and interculturalism.

Both disciplines invite us to go beyond our current worldviews, to challenge our assumptions, to question our notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Philosophical ethics allows us to appreciate the multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives great philosophers offer about ethics. Interculturalism enables us to become aware of our cultural biases, to suspend premature judgments that merely reflect these biases, and to be able instead to make informed choices that consider alternative cultural views as well.

My contribution here consists in trying to explain how philosophical ethics (particularly deontology and teleology) and interculturalism (particularly using the Cultural Orientations Framework COF) can be integrated into coaching, allowing us to enrich our conception of coaching ethics and enabling us to make sounder ethical judgments.

I believe that current coaching codes of ethics, as useful as they are, tend to reflect a deontology-teleology imbalance, and propose that coaching becomes aimed at “doing the greatest good for the greatest number” by referring to the United Nations 17 sustainable development goals.

The book chapter also discusses how the COF can serve both to identify ethical risks linked to cultural biases and to offer new solutions by leveraging alternative cultural polarities.

Of course, this is a collective book and there is much more you will discover from esteemed colleagues around the world!