SOCIAL WORK VALUES AND ETHICS
FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL WORK KNOWLEDGE
FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL WORK KNOWLEDGE
FREDERIC G. REAMER, SERIES EDITOR
Social work has a unique history, purpose, perspective, and method. The primary purpose of this series is to articulate these distinct qualities and to define and explore the ideas, concepts, and skills that together constitute social works intellectual foundations and boundaries and its emerging issues and concerns.
To accomplish this goal, the series will publish a cohesive collection of books that address both the core knowledge of the profession and its newly emerging topics. The core is defined by the evolving consensus, as primarily reflected in the Council of Social Work Educations Curriculum Policy Statement, concerning what courses accredited social work education programs must include in their curricula. The series will be characterized by an emphasis on the widely embraced ecological perspective; attention to issues concerning direct and indirect practice; and emphasis on cultural diversity and multiculturalism, social justice, oppression, populations at risk, and social work values and ethics. The series will have a dual focus on practice traditions and emerging issues and concepts.
The complete series list follows the index.
Frederic G. Reamer
SOCIAL WORK VALUES AND ETHICS FOURTH EDITION
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Copyright 2013 Columbia University Press
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E-ISBN: 978-0-231-53534-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reamer, Frederic G., 1953
Social work values and ethics / Frederic G. Reamer4th ed.
p. cm.(Foundations of social work knowledge)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-16188-6 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-16189-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-53534-2 (e-book)
1. Social servicemoral and ethical aspects 2. Social workersProfessional ethics
3. Social serviceUnited States I. Title.
HV10.5.R427 2013
361.3'2dc23
2012035320
A Columbia University Press E-book.
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For Deborah, Emma, and Leah
SOCIAL WORKERS understanding of professional values and ethics has matured considerably in recent years. During the earliest years of the professions history, social workers attention was focused primarily on cultivating a set of values upon which the mission of social work could be based. Over time the profession has nurtured and refined a set of values that has given tremendous meaning and purpose to the careers of generations of social workers. Social works enduring commitment to vulnerable and oppressed populations, and its simultaneous preoccupation with individual well-being and social justice, are rooted in the professions rich value base.
But the lens through which social workers view values and ethics has changed dramatically over time. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that social workers now look at these issues through several lenses, not just one, and that the angles of these lenses periodically shift in response to cultural developments and trends. Todays social workers face issues involving values and ethics that their predecessors in the profession could not possibly have imagined. What social worker, in the early twentieth century, could have anticipated the magnitude of the debates about the ethical issues for social workers that have emerged from the AIDS crisis or the complex privacy and confidentiality issues facing social workers who use e-mail, Facebook, and other Internet tools to serve clients? What social worker in the 1930s could have forecast the ethics debate about social workers role in the use of animal or artificial organs to save a dying clients life or ethical problems created by cutting-edge psychopharmacology and electronic monitoring of certain clients?
Especially since the late 1970s, a growing number of social work scholars and practitioners have been studying, exploring, and debating issues involving values and ethics in the profession. Literature on social work values and ethics, presentations at professional conferences, and instruction on the subject in undergraduate and graduate social work programs have increased dramatically. Todays students and practitioners have access to vastly more knowledge and education related to social work values and ethics than did their predecessors. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that social works exploration of these issues has increased exponentially.
The same is true in other professions. In professions as diverse as journalism, medicine, engineering, accounting, business, law, psychology, and nursing, practitioners and scholars have devoted increasing amounts of attention to the subjects of values and ethics. For a variety of reasons, which I shall explore shortly, members of these professions have come to recognize the critical importance of these issues and their immediate relevance to practitioners work.
The wide variety of complicated issues involving values and ethics in social work and other professions has emerged along with the invention of an entire field of study whose purpose is to help identify, explore, and address the kinds of problems professionals encounter in these areas. Applied and professional ethics (also known as practical ethics) began to take shape in the early 1970s, primarily as a result of the explosion of ethical issues in medicine and health care. Since that time scores of scholars and practitioners have studied the relevance of values and ethics to the professions, debated ethical problems in the professions, explored the relevance of ethical concepts and theories to the kinds of ethical dilemmas that arise in professional practice, and improved education and training in these areas.
