How Can Social Workers Act Ethically and Politically?
Social work as a profession, nationally and internationally, has established Codes of Ethics and principles to guide social worker’s practice (IFSW 1994). Recently, social work codes of ethics have been critiqued for their universalism and liberal individualism, and through a turn to postmodernism, hopes for including diversity, contingency, and particularism articulated (Briskman and Nobel 1999:57). The challenge posed by Hugman and Smith (1995:6) is whether social work should ‘seize the postmodernist moment and be remoulded ethically according to context and subject’. In this paper, I seek to explore how Foucault and Arendt’s insights on ethics and the political can assist social workers to enact ethical political social work practice.
I intent to take up this challenge by problematising the notion of ethics in relation to social work’s notions of a ‘sovereign self’ and ‘equal moral agency’ (Lee 1994), and by exploring the conjunction between principle and power; and the self’s responsibility and freedom. Traditionally, social work has, like philosophy itself ‘sought to liberate the self by resisting the political and by searching for sovereign mastery over a self’ (Orlie 1997: 182). It is, in relation to these points, that poststructuralism, particularly Foucault’s insights on power, subjectivity and care of the self, offer some important reconceptualisations for social work’s theorising of ethics.
Using both Arendt and Foucault’s theorising of ‘the political’, I seek to outline how social workers’ responsibility and freedom, can be articulated in ways that assist us to think and act deliberately within power relations. Arendt and Foucault encourage us to engage in ethics in ways that treat social norms and rules in terms of dialogue rather than command, by recognising the ‘inseparability of power and principle, by emphasizing ethical relations rather than normative codes, and by problematizing what has become normalized’ (Orlie 1997: 188). The challenge, I seek to articulate, is how to enact social work principles in ethically political ways.