ABSTRACT
A sample from what is already contained in this chapter may help to illustrate the general approach to be adopted. Take the sentence at the start of this introduction. Those familiar with social work writing probably glanced over it without pausing. A re-consideration suggests certain problems requiring attention before we can be sure that the point of the sentence has been
grasped. Not all difficulties may be described as moral, nor are all moral difficulties dilemmas. What relationship, if any, can be discerned between moral dilemmas and ‘value issues’? How is ‘moral’ to be understood? These may appear obfuscating questions, particularly in view of the ease and frequency with which the adjective ‘moral’ appears in social work writings. We seem satisfied with ‘moral panic’ and ‘moral career’ as explanations of some kind, no matter what. We are pleased to detect signs of (regrettable) life in the ‘moral’ categories of deserving and undeserving; we praise the avoidance of moral judgement, failing to distinguish it from judgements of a moralistic kind. Yet the force and function of ‘moral’ in these and other instances remains blandly unclear. Is it, for instance, the same aspect or aspects of careers, panics, categories, and judgements that make them ‘moral’? Finally, the idea of the explicit expression of a value-position may be relatively easily grasped, particularly in the case of social work. Social work, to judge from its literature, engages in self-conscious refrains around ‘values’ more than any other profession. Yet the notion of values implied in a practice requires unravelling. By what means, for example, can we come to an agreement with another practitioner or outside observer that such and such are indeed the values inescapably caught up in the practice under consideration?
