Key Values, Ethics, and Skills for Working with People ● 51Human service work involves all three types of ethical thinking. Meta-ethical
thinking deals with big questions; it underpins the development of guidelines
for ethical decision making. For example, whether we believe values to be uni-
versal or relative will determine the importance we are likely to place on inquiring
into multiple perspectives. In practice, however, human service workers tend
to be more closely concerned with normative and descriptive ethics. They
engage in normative ethics when they explore how ethical questions can be
resolved to arrive at appropriate courses of action. They engage in descriptive
ethics when they seek to understand the values of service users and other
groups. Unless they are undertaking pure research, however, they are likely to
undertake descriptive study as a data-gathering step toward resolving a problem
or dilemma or toward gaining understanding of service users’ perspectives in
order to more accurately represent them.
The second use of the term ethics—and the one most familiar to many
practitioners—relates to ethics as rules of moral conduct and standards of moral
behavior (Banks 2006). Codes of ethics attempt to collect these rules or standards
together into consistent frameworks; these can function as (limited) tools for
decision making, depending on how clearly they are set out. Codes of ethics are
social constructs, but they have usually gone through much development, and
long-standing codes have been well tested in practice. In chapter 1, we introduce
Jane Addams, a social worker and public sociologist who argued in the early
twentieth century that practice amended and honed ethical theories, making
them more applicable to real life (Seigfried 2013). Addams was a pragmatic
ethicist, and in claiming this, she was well ahead of many of her contemporaries.
When practitioners, educators, and professional bodies have honed professional
codes over time, those codes are usually reasonably robust. For everyday practi-
cal purposes, they are unlikely to contain major internal contradictions, and
they normally cover all of the important relationships that a professional worker
might have, with clients, colleagues, self, agency, and profession.
Nonetheless, codes of ethics are lists of rules that arise within a historical
and political context. They might be well suited to standard practices, but
when workers are suddenly required to work in a different context, the codes
may prove to be less comprehensive than they had previously appeared. Their
applicability also varies between cultures, even within one country. This has
become increasingly clear as communities have become more multicultural
and as awareness of cultural diversity has increased. For example, there are
large differences between individualistic and communitarian cultures around
beliefs in the importance of confidentiality and privacy, self-determination,
and filial obligations (Reamer 2006).
Ideally, such lack of fit becomes evident over time, and codes develop to
keep pace. In reality, however, workers usually do not refer to codes in their