Virtue Ethics in Social Work Practice

Richard Hugman, Manohar Pawar, A. W. (Bill) Anscombe, Amelia Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000169027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Using evidence from research with practitioners, integrated with wider material about virtue ethics in the helping professions, this book explores important types of virtue that are central to developing and sustaining excellence in social work.

Comprised of ten chapters and drawing on extensive research with social workers as well as wider debates and analysis, the discussion carefully concentrates on everyday experiences and achievements. This approach enables the book to avoid an idealized and prescriptive approach by making clear that virtues vary between contexts and individuals, while at the same time clearly marking out qualities and characteristics of social work that are foundational to the development of practitioners and of the profession as a whole.

It will be required reading for students on all BSc/BSW and MSc/MSW courses on professional ethics or preparation for practice. It will also be of interest to practitioners in other professions, including human services, health, education and social development or development studies.

1

INTRODUCTION TO VIRTUE ETHICS

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

• To outline the purpose and structure of the book

• To explore virtue ethics as a ground for professional ethics, and to outline its place in social work practice

Professional ethics as a foundation for social work

This book explores the relevance of virtue ethics to social work and the ways in which virtues can assist in understanding and developing good practice. Our interest in this aspect of professional ethics comes from recognising that virtue ethics is addressed much less frequently than the key principles of human rights and social justice. Our goal is to extend the range of thinking about professional ethics in social work and so to add to the ways in which ethics can inform the development of practice.

Social work has long placed great importance on values as key to defining its goals and methods (Timms 1983). Furthermore, some analyses go further and describe social work as a ‘values-based’ profession (Bisman 2004; Chechak 2015: 41–43; Dimitrijoska and Ilievski 2016: 51–52; Reamer 2018: 3). This can be seen in the international definition of social work, which states that ‘[p]rinciples of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities are central to social work’ (IFSW/IASSW 2018: n.p.). For this reason, it is vital that social workers are able to identify and consider critically the values of their work, in order to grasp and to shape its ends and means and the relationship between them. It is this process of identifying and considering values that we understand as ethics (Hinman 2013: 5). This understanding gives ethics a central place as the foundation of social work’s purpose and the forms of practice that make up the profession as a whole.

Banks explains values as ‘particular types of beliefs that people hold about what is regarded as worthy or valuable’ (2012: 8). Banks points out that these include personal and social values, and may be drawn from religious or political beliefs or from philosophy. For philosophers such as MacIntyre (1989) or Hinman (2013), the values that ethics considers are about the purposes and meanings people ascribe to their lives; that is, ethics is concerned with questions of right and wrong, or good and bad in human conduct and character, or in social relationships and systems. This is quite distinct from other forms of value, such as economic valuation of goods, which may be referred to as ‘non-moral values’. In this way we can see that ethics is concerned with moral values, noting that such an understanding is much broader than the interpretation of morality that sees it as a concern with dogmatic prescription regarding specific human behaviours (such as sexual relationships). Rather, such a definition of morality draws on the ancient Roman term ‘mores’, referring to the deep understanding of values across cultures and societies that affect all aspects of life.

In this sense, ethics is a considered framework that provides guidelines to what is good and what is right in human life. From this, we can say that ethics in social work is focused on the conduct and character of social workers in the context of the social relationships and systems within which it is practised. Ethics has become an increasing concern within social work in recent times, and now forms an identifiably specialist strand within the literature that has grown rapidly. Some social work ethicists, such as Reamer (2001), regard this as part of the maturation of social work as a profession. Certainly in this period social work has gained a stronger identity in many countries, in being recognised more by governments, other professions and the wider society. This includes engagement with evidence-based and evidence-informed practice and the refinement of methods and techniques (for example, Smith 2004; Thyer 2013; Plath 2014), as well as more robust debate about issues such as the exercise of power (for example, Hugman 1991; Rees 1991; Clifford and Burke 2009; Pullen-Sansfaçon and Cowden 2013) and colonial and post-colonial dynamics on the development of social work internationally (for example, Gray 2005; Bennett and Green 2019).

From a somewhat different perspective, Banks (2012: xix), herself a major contributor to the process of expanding analysis of social work ethics, notes the way in which this has happened as part of a wider growth of interest in ethics in public life and even more generally in the wider society. Banks links the increasingly broad interest in ethics to perceptions of wrongdoing in public life and of intractable social problems (currently often referred to as ‘wicked’ problems), for which standards need to be established and asserted. For this reason, the increased interest in ethics shown by social work is part of a wider social concern to ensure that occupations that exercise profound influence, even control, over people’s lives act with responsibility. This is achieved, at least partly, through frameworks of accountability that are created by formal, publicly available statements of ethical principles.

In addition, professions tend to focus on ethics not simply to address tangible immediate problems, but also to create a shared sense of occupational values. Under the framework of the international statement of ethical principles for social work (IFSW/IASSW 2018), the professional social work associations in at least 90 countries now either have well-developed codes of ethics or are in the process of creating such documents. The extent to which codes of ethics are established or are developing is a reflection of the length of time for which social work has existed as a profession. In addition, the creation of ethical codes has also tended to be a concern particularly noticeable in countries of the global North (Hugman 2013). However, the inclusion of global Southern perspectives has influenced more recent developments and sought to make the international social work ethical framework more inclusive (Sewpaul 2016). This framework explicitly calls on social work in each country to use it as a means to formulate ethical statements that are appropriate for their own cultures and societies, while remaining part of the global understanding of social work values in relation to its core goals and functions.

REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS/EXERCISES

What is the relationship between values and ethics in social work?

What are the key shared social work values or ethical principles in your country? What about the key shared values in your specific context of practice?

Virtue as a ground for professional ethics

For a long period of time the dominant perspectives that have formed the basis for social work ethics have been found in the principles of human dignity and worth, particularly expressed in human rights, and in social justice (Lundy 2006; Ife 2012). The international statement of ethical principles also emphasises the importance of integrity, which is understood in terms of the factors affecting the interactions of social workers with other people from the perspective of the ethical character and orientation of the social worker. In this way, social work ethics draws on the three classic traditions of deontology (duty to moral principle), consequentialism (in the form of social justice) and virtue ethics (moral character). However, McBeath and Webb (2002) argue that most of the debate about ethics in social work tends to focus on deontology and consequentialism, with relatively little attention paid to virtue ethics. This, they contend, diminishes social work’s consideration of its values and can lead to a rigid, rule-based approach that removes the sense of the individual person within a social and cultural context that social work claims to recognise (compare with IFSW/IASSW 2018) and the necessary engagement of each social worker with moral responsibility and accountability.

Banks agrees with this criticism, noting that the principle-based ethics approaches do not address ‘important features of the moral life and moral judgement, including the character, motives and emotions of the moral agent’ (2012: 69). As the American moral philosopher Hinman puts it (2013: 46), virtue ethics addresses the agent rather than the action. This perspective leads Banks then to argue that although principle-based approaches can provide many ways of grasping values, they are not able to address the way that good or right actions are contextualised in ‘the specific core purposes or service ideals of a profession’ (2012: 74). That is, a virtue ethics is necessarily particular to time and place, specific, partial and, because it is related to personal qualities, different between different practitioners (2012: 70). For example, even though moral courage might be highly valued as a quality in practitioners, trying to specify this as a requirement is problematic because it will be expressed in various ways and to differing degrees depending on who, when, where and how it is present.

Understanding virtues in this way draws heavily on the tradition that is usually ascribed to the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) (Hinman 2013; Papouli 2018). Such an approach regards moral character as closely related to the broader purposes of the social roles that a person performs. Non-moral virtues can even be ascribed to inanimate objects, such as when we say that the virtue of a clock is that it tells the time accurately or a knife that it is sharp (Pawar et al. 2017: 4). Similarly, non-moral values also apply to professions, such as manual dexterity in a surgeon, ability to communicate ideas in a teacher or the capacity to listen in a social worker. However, with human agents (here seen in the form of professional practitioners) non-moral values are less easy to disentangle from moral values in the case of people than inanimate objects. Medical practitioners exercise their practical virtues in the context of the pursuit of health as a moral value, teachers are engaged in the pursuit of learning and social workers in the pursuit of personal and social wellbeing (compare with Koehn 1994). From this, we may then say that the non-moral virtues of social workers lie in the technical qualities of their practice, such as whether or not someone has the capacity to conduct an interview, or make an accurate assessment of a person’s situation, or assist people to advocate for structural change.

This understanding is supported by MacIntyre (1985: 154), who argues that some virtues can be taught through instruction while others need to be learned reflectively through practice. The virtues that can, indeed must, be taught he calls the ‘intellectual virtues’. Those that can and must be learned through practice so that they become habits are the virtues of character, or moral virtues. However, there is a problem for professions such as social work in taking this distinction at face value. Some of the non-moral virtues of professional life, such as techniques, must be learned through both instruction and practice. Examples here include the qualities of being an effective counsellor, or advocate, or social development activist (compare with Pawar and Anscombe 2015). To address this point, we can consider the Aristotelian virtue of practical wisdom (or ‘phronesis’). Instruction, which now takes the form of higher education in many countries (IASSW/IFSW 2004), not only helps the beginning social worker to learn the explanations for why certain practices can be considered good technically, but that through practice these become part of the character of the social worker. Then, as MacIntyre expresses it:

[c]onversely the exercise of practical intelligence requires the virtues of character; otherwise it degenerates into or remains from the outset merely a certain cunning capacity for linking means to any ends rather than those ends which are genuine goods [as defined here by the profession].

(MacIntyre 1985: 154)

An example of the way this occurs can be seen in the injunction in the international statement of ethical principles for social work that ‘social workers should not allow their skills to be used for inhumane purposes, such as torture or terrorism’ (IFSW/IASSW 2018: section 9.3). Despite being phrased as an imperative of moral duty, this statement appears in the section concerning ‘professional integrity’ and is intended as a concrete example of the qualities of respectfulness, justice and care, realised through the virtue of wisdom.

For this reason, non-moral virtues can also be said to be important for the moral values that a profession might claim. One example affecting many professions that attend to human needs is that of justice. Justice, understood as fairness or the balance between competing claims, is part of the ethical statements of allied health, medicine, nursing, social work and teaching (Hugman 2005a; Banks 2012; Beauchamp and Childress 2013; Strike and Soltis 2015). Moreover, each profession asserts this value both as a goal and a way of shaping practices, as well as a virtuous aspect of the character of practitioners (a point to which we return below). At the same time, paying attention to the technical skills of a profession (as non-moral virtues) cannot be separated from the goals of that profession, or from attention to questions of who gains access to them, as moral questions. Similarly, the use of other scarce resources (such as physical equipment, buildings and so on) combines both the non-moral idea of a virtue (the object is good for its purpose) and the moral question of who should benefit in a world where resources are always limited (a consequential ethic). Examples include the nurse making decisions about who should be attended to first in an emergency department or clinic, a teacher balancing attention to one student with complex learning needs and each of the others in a class of 30 students or a social worker considering who should be recommended for access to a specialist service for which demand exceeds availability. Although assessment of physical need will play a part in these deliberations (for instance, the nurse will prioritise someone who is bleeding seriously over someone with pain but whose life is not immediately threatened), psychological and social factors also are important in all such situations. Here questions that may be said to have a moral dimension will be addressed, for example, whether services should be made more available in a neighbourhood that is struggling economically than one that is wealthier.

Although the value of justice is often regarded as a question of principle, since Aristotle justice has also been seen as a moral quality of people. The just person is one who is inclined to seek fairness and equity and to oppose inequality and negative discrimination (Donaldson and Mayer 2014). The complexity of fairness across society is one that makes this a difficult value to pursue. Because of the scarcity of resources relative to need, and the many inequalities that some regard as ‘entirely natural’ (such as physical and intellectual abilities) or that come to be socially justified from some perspectives (such as economic inequality), what it is to be a just person is highly contested. For some practitioners it is found in the tendency to be impartial in dealing with service users, and for other practitioners it is seen in the tendency to prioritise those who are seen to be in particular types of disadvantage. We will return to the virtue of justice in Chapter 6.

The other major element of Aristotle’s thought that is relevant to the discussion presented in the following chapters is that a virtue can be understood as the ‘mean’, or mid-point, between two extremes, which are referred to as vices (MacIntyre 1989: 62–63). In other words, to describe a quality as a virtue is to say that it represents an appropriate balance between too much and too little of that quality: it is not an arithmetic mean (Papouli 2018: 9). For example, if we take ‘compassion’ as an ethical virtue that is understood as an empathic response to the plight of another person, then the excess might be seen as ‘pity’ and the deficit as ‘indifference’. (Compassion is discussed in depth in Chapter 4.) From an Aristotelian perspective, a virtue and its associated vices relate to what is good in the character of the person but also in the way that this quality contributes to the wellbeing of the wider society. This in turn raises the question of whether it is possible to be compassionate in a society that does not value compassion, which we address further later in this chapter.

The idea of virtue can also be seen in other cultural traditions. Confucian teaching, a major pillar of moral thought in Asia, stresses the responsibility of the good person as the foundation of a good society (Shun and Wong 2004). Some scholars are sceptical about the extent of the comparison that can be drawn between Confucius and the classical Greek philosophers (such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle), whose ideas continue to influence global Northern thought (Lai 2006). However, there are some parallels between these philosophies in the focus on a person’s moral characteristics as an approach to ethics, together with the determination of what is good and right being grounded in social relations and structures.

Similar approaches can be seen in African thought (Graham 2002) as well as that of Indigenous peoples of various parts of the world (Voss et al. 1999; Walker 2012; Weaver 2017). In some ways, these ethical approaches share the value of communality, as compared to the individualistic approach of European and other global Northern ethics. Mbiti’s influential translation of the core meaning of ‘ubuntu’ into English is ‘I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am’ (1990: 160). At the same time, within this communal ethics there is also a sense of what European and other global Northern approaches term ethical virtue. For example, Tutu (1999: 31) argues that ‘ubuntu’ is demonstrated through a person being ‘open and available [to others]’, a ‘self-assurance’ that comes from knowledge of being part of the community, combined with a form of respect that is shown by a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to virtue ethics
• 2 Virtue (ethics) in social work practice
• 3 Courage
• 4 Compassion and care
• 5 Hope, perseverance and resilience
• 6 Justice
• 7 Humility
• 8 Practical wisdom
• 9 Integrity
• 10 Ethical virtues in social work – towards virtuous practitioners?
• References
• Index