ABSTRACT
Ethical issues are at the heart of a discipline such as social work. Social work is concerned with the care of people who have a variety of needs, with family relationships, with social responses to offending and with needs arising from structural causes (such as poverty). These are each, in different ways, moral concerns, embedded in the mores of society, and so are laden with social values (Timms 1983; Horne 1987). Herein lies the crux of the problem, because value-statements, being views about what is desirable in society, are highly contentious. They say ‘what ought to be the case’ (Shardlow 1989:3), and so open up the potential for disagreement between individuals on grounds of belief and perception (for example, of politics, culture or religion). Not only does this mean that an activity such as social work will always reflect values, because it is required to intervene in important aspects of everyday life, but that it will often be disputed because the goals of social work may not necessarily be equally acceptable to every member of society. To this extent, ethics and values are inherently ‘political’, so any exploration of their implications must be concerned also with the contested nature of social work activity.
