Seeking An Ethical Life: "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue (original) (raw)

Moving Beyond the Surface: Ethics Education in Canadian Social Work Bachelor Programs

2009

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Critical Commentary: Social Work Ethics

British Journal of Social Work, 2008

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes provided that:

The Routledge Handbook of Social Work Ethics and Values

2019

Professionals caring for children and young people face moral dilemmas. Moral case deliberation (MCD) supports professionals and future professionals by stimulating reflection and dialogue on moral dilemmas, following a structured method guided by a trained facilitator. This article presents a description of an MCD in an educational context with future professionals learning to care for children and young people, structured in line with the dilemma method. The dilemma related to how to deal with a pregnant woman with a mild intellectual disability: should one let her decide for herself, or intervene for the sake of safety of the unborn child? The paper describes the process of deliberation in the student group, following the steps of the dilemma method. The discussion presents reflections of three MCD facilitators involved in the teaching program. The reflections focus on the role of experience in MCD with students, the added value of the step of making an individual judgment, and t...

Moral Distress: A Missing but Relevant Concept for Ethics in Social Work

2009

The theoretical concept of “moral distress” developed in the field of nursing to identify the psychological and emotional effects experienced by professionals when they feel blocked by institutional constraints from pursuing a course they perceive is right. While social work literature has recognized the ethical dilemma that workers face in choosing between several appropriate courses of action, each of which may have positive and negative consequences, the idea of moral distress has received little attention. Despite its flaws, the concept of moral distress names political dimensions in professional practice revealing structural issues as ethical concerns. The article also addresses how social workers can overcome the disjunctions between how they would like to act and the constraints they experience. Abrégé : Le concept théorique de la « détresse morale » a vu le jour dans le domaine des soins infirmiers pour identifier les effets psychologiques et émotionnels que ressentent les p...

Journal of Social Work Values & Ethics

2007

Our subscription rates do not follow a seasonal trend, but illustrate slow growth. The subscription rates also suggest that social workers have a growing interest in values and ethics. Based on experience with other journals, we felt that a subscription rate of 600 would be very good. Thus, the entire editorial board is delighted by the interest in our work! Dear Editors: Congratulations on trying to use video as a way of extending the journal, I think it is important that we extend the range of media available to further discussion of ethical issues in the profession. Your observations about the difference in teaching between Britain and the USA were interesting, although I do question whether we should generalise in this way when there are such a range of approaches used in each country. For the future, I would like to see shorter and more focused video content, as I found I was drifting off after about 8 minutes. Certainly our experience of using podcasting and video podcasting h...

Law Versus Morality: Cases and Commentaries on Ethical Issues in Social Work Practice

Ethics and Social Welfare

This article examines two cases that present ethical challenges encountered by social workers in making decisions either to maintain professional boundaries or fulfil moral obligations while working with service users in vulnerable situations. In the first case, a Lebanese social worker narrates how she was motivated to step out of her official responsibilities to assist a refugee mother of three who showed suicidal ideation. In the second case, a Ugandan social worker recounts her experience while working with a family whose 12-year-old daughter was raped and became pregnant, but whose parents refused to accept abortion when medical diagnosis showed that the girl's life was in danger. A commentary from the authors is provided after each case. Both social workers were arguably motivated to act based on their concern to care for people, protect human rights, and save lives in the two case scenarios. This underscores the relevance of the ethics of care and virtue ethics in describing the associated ethical challenges in both cases. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the ethical challenges encountered by the social workers demands open minds and flexibility in decision-making.

Spirituality, Ethics and Social Work

Spirituality, Ethics and Social Work, 2021

The aim of this manual is to offer a guide and training tool for social workers and other helping professions dealing with clients in the dynamic European social, economic, political, cultural, and religious frame in the beginning of the 21st century. After discussions on methods, explained in this book (I.3.), we organized the twenty chapters around four main aspects: a first part with founding elements (I.1. — I.5.), a second part with insights (II.1. — II.3.), a third part with reflections on spirituality and ethics regarding different social levels (III.1. — III.6.), and a fourth part with selected fields of application (IV.1. — IV.6.). With the first chapter (Opatrný, I.1.), readers are placed in the context of the European situation in the new millennium with a growing religious plurality and cultural diversity. These are the result of secularization waves, the adaptations and transformations of Christendom, migration processes, economic changes, and new geopolitical constellations. The second chapter (Gehrig, I.2.) puts in the centre the core reality and reason for existence of the social work profession: the human being. To help other people professionally requires an understanding of the person, the environment, the complexity of life and a reflexive attitude and capacity to comprehend these situations, processes, and persons. The chapter opens the discussion from a Christian humanist perspective with a focus on the concept of person. The third chapter on interdisciplinarity and method (Baumann, I.3.) is like a hinge between the initial contextualization, the following insights and the rest of the book. Its more complex and theoretical orientation based on Lonergan’s model of four levels of conscious intentionality offers a holistic tool for reflection on practice by which social workers can enhance their ability to be more attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. In continuity with the chapter and its interdisciplinary orientations, Gehrig shows in I.4. how spirituality is a field for encounters between theology and social work. Insights concludes with a theoretical comparative reading on the connection of social work to related concepts of law, ethics, and religion as expressions of norms (Birher, I.5.). Social workers are aware of how normative frames influence the professional practice and situations, clients find themselves in our societies. The second part of the book with its three chapters centres the attention on the core concepts of the topic, the founding elements. This part starts with a short explanation of the fundamental ethical and practical question of commitment to clients in social work in the context of spirituality and ethics (Opatrný, II.1.). The issue of commitment appears as a continuous element in the book and its chapters. For understanding of the concept of spirituality in this manual and for social work, chapter II.2. (Opatrný and Gehrig) delivers the necessary 301 understandings, followed by some basic ideas on social ethics addressed to the profession (Lacca, II.3.). In the third, more extensive part of the book, readers find explanations of spirituality and ethics on different social levels in practical fields, especially the context of organizations. Baumann offers a bridging chapter between parts two and three (III.1.), where the spirituality of the clients, of social workers, and the ethos of the organizations in a secular age are connected towards a spiritually and ethically attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible practice. In III.2., Opatrný reflects on the practice of spiritual assessment as a tool and expression of spiritual sensitive practice in the helping professions. Readers can find here some models and practical orientations. The following chapter III.3. (Lacca), enlarges the questions related to assessment by an ethical reflection on the topic. The rest of the third part is dedicated to the organizational field and leadership. Readers will find an example with the case of ecclesial charitable organizations (III.4., Birher), where the author connects with the ideas expressed in I.5. on norms and explains them; in III.5, Blank and Šimr show the cases of a Protestant and a Catholic organization in Germany and the Czech Republic and its support for the topic of spirituality; III.6. (Baumann) finishes part three with reflections on leadership in social work related to spirituality. The fourth part with selected fields of application shows how the topic of spirituality and ethics appears in exemplified groups and fields of reference for social work. IV.1. (Muñoz and Pereñiguez) describes for social workers the dramatic situations of refugees and migrants and the emerging spiritual questions related to it. Both authors then present in IV.2. a dialogue on how spirituality can be a part of female empowerment and an instrument for social change. In chapter IV.3. (Moya Faz and Baumann) we have included the topic of mental health, as spirituality frequently appears in psychological and health care research. Social workers have a strong professional presence in this field, too; actually, mental health is a topic in most of the training programs for social work. Youth work and spirituality in Ireland (IV.4., McManus) expresses an emerging topic and is the result of the enriching encounters and trainings of academics and practitioners in the project. Of course, the challenging European social reality of elderly people is a necessary and urging focus in the topic of social work and spirituality and an ethical practice. Suchomelová and Moya Faz summarize the important aspects in chapter IV.5. The applications part finishes with a short reflection on the community development (Opatrný), as social work is not only case work or organizational practice, and people always belong to communities, groups of reference and relational local social realities which have to be integrated in the spiritually sensitive social work.

Beyond Ethics Professionalism and Social Belonging in Social Workers Moral Deliberations.pdf

Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2019

In professional therapeutic settings, care-providers are required to work through dilemmas in light of a professional ethics that demands the suppression of other aspects that may inform their moral experiences. Drawing upon in-depth conversations with Jewish-Israeli female social workers who talked about dilemmas at work, we analyse how they carry out such deliberations. When recounting their dilemmas, social workers relied on shared professional principles for justifying their decisions, but upon closer examination, differences were apparent in their decisions. Whereas religious (observant) social workers tended to follow professional regulations, seculars (non-observant) favoured clients’ interests and took some liberty in bending rules. Accordingly, we argue that while care-providers follow shared professional ethics, they still implicitly adhere to the local moral worlds that inform their moral experiences. We analyse this discrepancy in relation to the interface between a modernist professional ethos and acknowledged and unacknowledged motives that pragmatically participate in professionals’ deliberations.

Ethical social justice: Do the ends justify the means?

Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 2017

This article offers an ethical decision-making model, informed by community psychology values, as a means for guiding psychologists when engaging in social justice-oriented work. The applicability of this model is demonstrated through a case analysis elucidating how America's psychologists individually and collectively arrived at the decision to endorse torture-ostensibly as a means for preventing terrorism. Critics have wondered how the American Psychological Association succumbed to these involvements, and how to prevent such ethical lapses in the future. Unfortunately, the American Psychological Association's ethical codes fail to provide explicit guidance for psychologists' involvement in social justice work that impacts communities and systems. To address this gap, we present a values-driven, ethical decision-making framework that may be used to guide psychologists' future practices. This framework infuses fundamental community psychology values (i.e., caring and compassion; health; self-determination and participation, human diversity, social justice; and critical reflexivity) into a 9-step model.

Moral sources and emergent ethical theories in social work

British Journal of Social Work, 2010

This paper examines the feminist ethics of care as an emergent ethical theory that casts ethical dispositions in a different way to the deontological focus on duties and rules and consequentialist-utilitarian focus on minimising harm. It is closer to, though different from, virtue ethics with its focus on moral character. The paper highlights the philosophical tensions within and between these disparate theories, suggesting nevertheless that discussions about ethics are enriched by these diverse influences. Since it is not possible within the scope of this paper to deal with all of these ethical theories in depth, following a brief overview of the more established theory of deontology, virtue ethics and the ethics of care are discussed. While the feminist ethics of care attempts to provide a more complete view of morality and ethics in social work, there are important philosophical problems with which social work needs to engage in order to discern whether it offers a better understanding of morality than existing approaches in social work ethics and whether it can address the complexities of the problems social workers deal with and the harsh practice environments in which they work where the 'practice of value' is becoming ever more difficult and strong reasons to care must be found.