This chapter will begin to help you meet the following National Occupational Standards:
Key Role 6 Demonstrate professional competence in social work practice. G Work within the principles and values underpinning social work practice. G Identify and assess issues, dilemmas and conflicts that might affect your practice. G Devise strategies to deal with ethical issues, dilemmas and conflicts.
This chapter will also help you follow the GSCC’s Code of Practice for Social Care Workers:
1 As a social worker, you must protect the rights and promote the interests of service users and carers.
This includes:
G treating each person as an individual;
G respecting and, where appropriate, promoting the individual views and wishes of both service users
and carers;
G supporting service users’ rights to control their lives and make informed choices about the services
they receive;
G respecting and maintaining the dignity and privacy of service users.
It will also introduce you to the following academic standards as set out in the social work subject benchmark statement:
3.1.3 Values and ethics
G The nature, historical evolution and application of social work values.
G Aspects of philosophical ethics relevant to the understanding and resolution of value dilemmas and
conflicts in both interpersonal and professional contexts.
A C H I E V I N G A S O C I A L W O R K D E G R E E
Joyce Phillips, aged 69, cares for her mother Megan Davies, who is 90 years old. She lives just a few streets away from her mother’s house and has spent increasing amounts of time with her mother, particularly since her mother was widowed some two years ago. Megan is becoming increasingly forgetful. Joyce’s husband, aged 70, suffered a stroke two years ago and relies heavily on Joyce both physically, as he can no longer wash and dress him- self, and emotionally, as he sees little of his friends who find it difficult to visit him.
Introduction
In Chapter 1 we looked at different justifications for why people act ethically. Some people had a strong religious belief which they felt inspired them to act; others came from a secu- lar belief system which involved an ethic of social justice, a sense of what was fair. Similarly Joyce (in the case study above) is expressing her reasons for continuing to care, invoking a principle where she sees care as a duty requiring her to look after her husband and mother. In this chapter we will examine two underpinning philosophical perspectives that have informed the practice of social workers, i.e. principled and consequentialist perspectives. Having established our understanding of these approaches, we will examine some recent alternatives which have challenged these previously dominant ideas in social work values. These are virtue theory and a feminist ethic of care.
Social workers, despite the increasing managerial controls on their professional discretion, still have significant autonomy in their dealings with service users and have been charac- terised as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Evans and Harris, 2004). This refers to the way social workers are able, through use of their professional discretion, to sometimes subvert accepted policy as laid down by their employers when working alone with service users. In effect they create policy through the decisions they make when working directly with service users, when managerial supervision is at its weakest. Professional autonomy remains impor- tant for social work practice as social workers have to apply and interpret policy in relation to individual cases. In this chapter we explore the philosophical and ethical approaches upon which social workers can assist service users in making those moral practical decisions. We can either base our approach upon clear principles to inform our action, for example always tell the truth, or we can decide to weigh up the likely consequences of our actions to see who will benefit the most (see Figure 3.1).
We can consider approaches which call upon our understanding of what an ethical social worker would do in such a situation or we can take into account feminist approaches which require that the social worker considers an ethic of care.
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Joyce gets very tired having to juggle between caring for her husband and her mother. She has never asked for any help from social services. When a social worker did visit her at home she said that she didn’t require help. After all, social workers only help people who can’t help themselves, and anyway she felt it was her duty to look after her husband and her mother. She added: If everybody just dumped their loved ones onto social services then the whole reason for being in a family would just die.
Whether we agree or disagree with this statement Joyce has a clear reason why she wishes to continue to care for her husband and mother. What Joyce is expressing here is not only her own justification for her continued care of her family, but also a deep-seated moral stance about the responsibilities, as she sees it, of family members to one another and what that means in practice.
Given the relatively simple definitions in Figure 3.1, how can we apply these principles to Joyce’s situation in Case Study 3.1 above?
Comment
From the brief description of the two approaches so far, I would hope that you identified that Joyce was employing a principled approach to the care of her husband and mother. Joyce has justified her actions through a principle of responsibility to the other members of her family. Remember that the principled approach is only concerned with the rightness of this principle and that any other reasons should not be considered in justifying the decision. So even if Joyce is finding the reality of caring very difficult to manage and maintain, these difficulties are of lesser importance than upholding the principle of family responsibility. By contrast we could analyse this situation in consequentialist terms. Joyce could reduce the amount of time caring for her mother by accessing home care for her mother; in turn this could lead to Joyce feeling less tired and giving more time to her husband which could improve her relationship with him. In those terms the consequences would benefit
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Make some brief notes on what position you think Joyce is taking in Case study 3.1. G Does she justify her actions based on a particular principle which she believes is
important? or:
G Does she justify her decision to care for her mother and husband in terms of its conse- quences, i.e. that it will have the greatest benefit to the majority of the people involved?
A C T I V I T Y
3 . 1
Explore universally applicable principles which can be applied to any situation. They are worth upholding even if on the face of it bad things may happen as a consequence
of upholding that belief.
Claim that we are obliged to act in a way that will produce the best consequences. Thus when we
make a decision concerning people we are obliged to reach a decision that will benefit all
or as many of those concerned.
Principled approaches
Consequentialist approaches
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two out of the three people involved in this situation so justifying the reduction in the time spent with Joyce’s mother.