Values, ethics and social work

Abstract

Getting to grips with social work values and ethics is rather like picking up a live, large and very wet fish out of running stream. Even if you are lucky enough to grab a fish, the chances are that just when you think you have caught it, the fish will vigorously slither out of your hands and jump back in the stream. Values and ethics similarly slither through our fingers for a variety of reasons: we don’t try hard enough to catch them, preferring the practical business of doing social work; the subject matter, if we really investigate it, may sometimes seem complex, hard to grapple with and possibly obscure; there is a lack of conceptual clarity about many of the terms used that form part of the lexicon of ‘social work values and ethics’; the boundaries of ‘social work values and ethics’ are imprecise and ill-defined, so the notion of what should constitute ‘social work values and ethics’ is itself part of a discussion about the nature of social work values. No doubt there are other reasons for not picking up this particular fish! Yet despite these difficulties in picking up the ‘fish’, there is something that intuitively suggests that social work is bound up with values and ethics. Is not ethics, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘the science of morals in human conduct’, and is not social work about human relationships and behaviour? This conjunction is suggestive of a duty upon social workers to understand both ethics and social work.