DP6

DecisionPoint
http://proethica.org/ontology/cases#DecisionPoint

DP6

Should the Board's ethical analysis rest on the complaint's unresolved procedural status as categorically sufficient to permit non-disclosure and continuation of services, or should it require an independent substantive assessment of whether the competence concerns had merit before concluding that non-disclosure was ethical?

The Board must determine whether its ethical conclusion — that Engineer A's non-disclosure was permissible — rests on a substantive assessment of Engineer A's actual competence or solely on the procedural status of the complaint as unresolved, and whether this procedural dependency reveals that the allegation-adjudication distinction functions as a disclosure rule rather than a competence protection mechanism.

Hold that the complaint's unresolved procedural status is categorically sufficient to permit both non-disclosure and continuation of services, on the grounds that an unproven allegation does not constitute evidence of actual incompetence and the adjudication process is the appropriate mechanism for surfacing genuine competence failures.

Hold that the NSPE competence standard requires Engineer A to conduct an affirmative self-assessment of whether the competence concerns raised by Client C's complaint have substantive merit before concluding that continuation of similar services for Client B is ethically permissible, and that the result of that assessment — not merely the complaint's procedural status — should govern both the continuation and disclosure decisions.

Explicitly separate the disclosure question (governed by the allegation-adjudication distinction) from the competence question (governed by the NSPE competence standard), holding that while non-disclosure may be permissible under the former, the latter independently requires Engineer A to assess whether the competence concerns had merit and to take appropriate remedial action if they did — regardless of the complaint's unresolved status.

NSPE Board of Ethical Review