The Riggs Difference: Where Understanding Leads to Recovery
Presenter: Cathleen M. Morey, PhD, LICSW
This ethics course is approved for AMA PRA Credit™ risk management study
Traditional approaches to professional ethics often emphasize compliance, risk management, and individual decision-making. While these models are important, they frequently fail to address the deeper sociopolitical realities—such as systemic racism, gender bias, institutional hierarchies, and structural oppression—that shape ethical practice in the real world.
This course reimagines ethics through a justice-centered, anti-oppressive lens. Drawing on over two decades of clinical practice, teaching, and research, Dr. Morey introduces a practical, reflective framework for ethical action that moves beyond traditional Eurocentric models and integrates equity, accountability, and restorative practices.
Through lecture, case analysis, and guided reflection, participants will:
- Explore the four supraordinate principles of anti-oppressive ethics: aspirational practice, recognition of whiteness in traditional ethics, epistemic justice, and intersectional ethics.
- Examine a real-world case study that highlights how basement ethics, bias, and systemic power dynamics can lead to ethical collapse, and how an anti-oppressive framework can transform practice.
- Learn how to create ethical formulations that account for systemic and organizational dynamics alongside clinical concerns.
- Apply tools of ethical discernment, including reflexivity, humility, and values clarification, to strengthen daily practice.
- Learn and apply a step-by-step decision-making framework that integrates restorative practices, centers marginalized voices, and promotes systemic accountability.
By the end of the course, participants will be able to recognize ethical dilemmas in their broader cultural and organizational context, engage with ethics as a proactive resource rather than a compliance requirement, and adopt practices that foster dignity, justice, and repair.