ABSTRACT
Pragmatically and philosophically, implicitly and explicitly, ethics is indispensable to social work. Social work in the United Kingdom (UK) is an intensely personalized ethical occupation of daily practice of decision-making, and weighing up of “logic, emotion, moral conscience or possible repercussions” typified by uncertainty, differences, and dilemmas. Deciding what constitutes a decent minimum is a decision based on a value judgment. Austerity strips back the ethical decision-making of social workers and agencies, increasingly monetizing the value of care, compelling comparative judgments between the merits and value of one individual’s needs over another. Decision-making has become a changing comparative cynical calculation. Ethical decision-making has become reduced to a pragmatic and rule-based calculation, an inconsistent formulaic process, dependent on parochial organizational culture located in specific place and time. Austerity strips back the capacity of the practitioner to make entirely professionally independent ethically principled decisions based on essential humanistic principles.
