© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of
The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.
British Journal of Social Work (2006) 36, 75–89
doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch364
Advance Access publication October 31, 2005
Moral Character in Social Work
Chris Clark
Dr Chris Clark is Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Dean of Postgraduate Studies in the College
of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh. His main current research
interest is in professional ethics.
Correspondence to Dr Chris Clark, School of Social and Political Studies, University of
Edinburgh, 31 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9JT, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
Summary
While the standard ethics of social work are derived from liberal individualism with its
minimal prescriptions for human welfare and neutral stance on the nature of a good
life, in practice social workers necessarily engage with the particular, idiosyncratic values
and choices of specific individuals and communities. The social work role, as in other
human service professions such as teaching and nursing, sometimes requires more than
the competent delivery of standardized service: it also involves modelling ways of life
and counselling over morally problematic issues. Value neutrality over many pressing
contemporary social issues is thus neither feasible nor desirable for human service professionals. The requirements of the role include demonstrating a virtuous character.
This has long been implicitly accepted in practice, if not always clearly acknowledged,
but is becoming more prominent with the new requirements of professional registration.
Keywords: professional ethics, values, virtue, character.
As a social service worker … you must not … behave in a way, in work or
outside work, which would call into question your suitability to work in
social services (Scottish Social Services Council, 2003, p. 3).
The leading idesa of social work embodied in the welfare agencies of Western
developed countries is the offspring of liberal individualism. This conceives of
individuals and families as the primary agents of their own social welfare. Support
from paid professionals working under the auspices of formal agencies is
understood as somewhat exceptional—a recourse to be sought when some special contingency perhaps temporarily overwhelms the capacity of the individual
to make shift for him or herself and family. It is not the role of the organs of the
state to shape the broad aspirations to ways of life; the job of social services is
limited to preventing gross impoverishment, infringements of basic human
rights and the flouting of fairly minimal standards of decency and public order.
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76 Chris Clark
This rather bare, or perhaps bleak, picture of the role of social work is not
the whole story, of course. In the situated reality of people’s lives, the thin
account of human well-being authorized by liberal individualism was always a
fictional representation of the goals of practice. Key values such as respect and
self-determination have to be actualized in practical contexts that inevitably
favour one credible interpretation over another; appeal to the canonical values
is scarcely ever sufficient by itself to settle such questions as how precisely
respect is to be shown to, for example, individuals with impaired mental competence or those who commit repellent crimes. Because social welfare practice
takes place in real communities, not on philosophers’ desert islands and never
behind veils of ignorance, the expression of key values cannot be independent
of personal sympathies. In their practical expression, the abstract values of liberal
individualism are necessarily coloured by local community and tradition, and
by the biography and character of their exponents.
The literature of professional ethics in all the human service professions
comprehensively illustrates that multiple and often practically inconsistent
readings may be given to abstract conventional values. Social work and like
professions are supported and legitimated by the state. Their conception of
welfare reflects the priorities and values of the host community. With this in
mind, I shall hold, with some modern virtue theorists, that there is no realizable
conception of welfare that is not rooted in the particularities, standards and
values of culturally and historically specific circumstances.
These features of welfare as a goal of politics and as a professional practice
have, I will argue, important consequences for the character of welfare professionals. For, if it is true that the welfare ends they pursue are profoundly conditioned by the social and cultural circumstances in which they practise, it must
follow that professionals themselves cannot be neutral in respect of the diverse
interpretations of freedom and justice that liberal individualism permits in the
abstract. It is, incidentally, the illusion that professionals can be so that lends to
conventional codes of ethics their characteristic aspect of abstracted unreality.
The upshot will be that welfare professionals have to be personal exponents of
the values they presume to trade in professionally; and, to do so, they have to
be personally committed to values and ways of life that extend well beyond the
scope of their contract of employment.
The moral theorizing of liberal individualism is ruled by the two feuding
families—duty-based and outcome-based theories. Their mixed progeny are
prolifically represented in the landmark achievements of formally recognized
human rights and the constitution of the modern liberal state. Similar principles animate social work, and other, codes of professional ethics. These theories aim for robust general principles of right conduct applicable to all moral
agents. A third family—virtue ethics—focuses instead on the character of the
agent rather than on whether an action conforms to abstract moral rules (Slote,
1997). The most famous exponent of this line of thought is Aristotle in the
Nicomachean Ethics. Having been largely neglected in the modern period, virtue
ethics is enjoying a significant revival of interest in academic philosophy. I will
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Moral Character in Social Work 77
adopt Slote’s characterization that ‘a view counts as a form of virtue ethics if
and only if it treats aretaic [i.e. pertaining to virtue] terms as fundamental …
and it focuses mainly on inner character and/or motive rather than on rules for
or consequences of actions’ (Slote, 2000, p. 325). Virtues in this context are
excellences of a person’s character; examples often cited include courage,
benevolence, compassion, loyalty or temperance (for further discussion, see
e.g. Rachels, 2002, Chapter 12). Banks (2004) offers a useful mapping of how
the various different kinds of ethical theory, including principle-based and
agent-based theories, can contribute to professional ethics in social work and
related fields.
Focusing on the professional’s character thus directs attention to virtue ethics
as an alternative to deontological and consequentialist theories. In making a
claim for the superiority of virtue ethics in social work, McBeath and Webb
correctly point out that ‘A virtue ethics for social work would bring back to the
centre of debate the importance of the individual worker, not in terms of his or
her role, but in terms of character, human being, of intellect, as an agent able to
make subtle discriminations’ (McBeath and Webb, 2002, p. 1033). However,
their argument for virtue ethics is weakened by relying on what is no better
than a caricature of Kantian and utilitarian theory. The suggestion that a professional ethics informed by the traditional theories leads to imposing an
‘abstract moral solution’ (p. 1027) or ‘automated response’ (p. 1031) to moral
dilemmas in practice entirely misrepresents the achievements of the traditional
theories in furnishing a language within which to conduct moral debate and in
providing a set of principles which in fact still command very widespread
acceptance. Houston’s response to McBeath and Webb (Houston, 2003) helpfully recovers the notion of morality being a matter of discourse rather than
prescriptive rules. Hugman (2004) takes a similar stance.
Focusing on the character of the agent very soon invites the question of
whether conceptions of the virtues are universal in all human societies or particular to context, time and place. I will say that clashes of community cultures
are virtually self-evident in large-scale, complex and diverse industrial societies; and I will adopt the communitarian outlook that the pursuit of a good life
is not a matter for individuals acting independently but can only be realized by
co-operative action relative to the culture and values of particular communities
(Tam, 1998).
The ends of social work and the practitioner’s neutrality
Social work has always been, first and foremost, an enterprise imbued with moral
purpose and values (Clark with Asquith, 1985; Rhodes, 1986; Banks, 1995;
Hugman and Smith, 1995; Reamer, 1999) and not merely a technical expertise.
Bisman suggests that historically, social work may have lost awareness of its
core values as it became preoccupied with a scientific approach; the work of
Mary Richmond may have been a forerunner to the ‘profession’s turn towards
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78 Chris Clark
knowledge development at the expense of a moral base’ (Bisman, 2004, p. 114).
Several contributors to Malin’s volume (Malin, 2000) on professionalism in
welfare occupations argue, by contrast, that the bureaucratic environment of
modern welfare practice undermines the pursuit of professional values.
I have proposed elsewhere (Clark, 2000) that the central aim of social work
should be understood as enabling users to achieve the conditions and attainments of an ordinary life by the standards of their own society. Like other
social services, social work is a political and practical commitment to a certain
minimum level of welfare and the prevention or mitigation of specific acknowledged harms. What is, or should be, distinctive about social work is that the
social worker’s concern for her client properly extends, on some occasions at
least, to the client’s life as a whole. And because there is no secure basis for
good health, or education, or inclusion in the productive work and cultural life
of the community without a basic level of personal functioning, social work
characteristically targets life skills, family functioning and personal relationships. Correspondingly, social work is perhaps best known for being the first
resort when children do not receive satisfactory parenting, when dependent
adults need help beyond what the family is able to offer, and when young
people or adults pursue activities that offend the legal and moral standards of
the community.
The dominant ethical discourse in social work derives from the liberal individualist tradition descended from Kant and Mill. Liberalism, however, is
intentionally silent on the specific content of the good life. Raymond Plant, a
leading philosopher of welfare who was also a key early contributor to the
modern literature on values in social work (Plant, 1970), opens his detailed
exposition of liberalism with the following synopsis:
During the past two centuries liberal political theorists have sought to
develop a theory of politics which accepts as fact and as a principle radical
and irresolvable differences over what the good for human beings is and
what their ultimate nature is thought to be. In view of these disagreements
there is no foundation to guide us to an understanding of the ultimate
nature of the good and the bad in politics; these are personal values which
cannot be objectively grounded (Plant, 1991, p. 74).
The neutrality of liberalism on the nature of the good life thus creates a paradox
for social work. On the one hand, social work appears in all its authoritative
self-definitions to be committed to a broadly liberal conception of rights, duties
and practical ethics. On the other hand, in their actual practice, social workers
must engage with people who have actual and specific values for the good life
and who have made their particular personal commitments and choices. The
life choices and values of clients may not seem good to their social workers, and
vice versa.
The standard answer to this problem says that it is not the social worker’s job
to impose his or her own views about, for example, the morality of drug use, or
personal lifestyle, or intimate relationships upon the client; rather, it is the
worker’s role to enable the client to realize their own choices so long as these
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Moral Character in Social Work 79
are not manifestly injurious to the rights of others or clearly beyond the pale of
law. ‘It is not the counselor’s function to persuade clients to accept a certain
value system’ (Corey et al., 1998, p. 68). Rhodes comments:
While therapists acknowledge that value considerations are always part of
their work, nonetheless they discuss therapy as if it were somehow politically
and ethically neutral. Goals, like autonomy, love, work and self-actualization,
are assumed to make ethical and political commitments which are universally accepted. They are distinguished from more specific and controversial
judgments on topics like abortion, nuclear war, or employment, about
which therapists are taught to remain neutral (Rhodes, 1986, p. 84 (emphasis
added)).
I will raise two prima facie objections to this conventional notion of the social
worker’s neutrality in relation to the client’s values and choices. (1) The claim
of social workers’ value neutrality is, in practice, a sham. It is not humanly possible to maintain a truthful engagement, expressed in an authentic interpersonal professional relationship, if the professional is at the same time holding in
abeyance personal feelings of dismay or censure of aspects of the client’s life
that are pertinent to the work in hand. For example, social workers who assess
potential foster or adoptive parents cannot truly set aside their own notions of
good or bad family life while they purport to put forward an objective assessment against formal bureaucratic criteria and procedures. The sham is maintained at the price of dishonesty and bad faith and, in the long run, this
becomes apparent to service users. (2) Even if it were possible to dissemble
value neutrality in service practice, this is not a desirable end for social work.
Social work is about helping people—as much as possible using their own
strengths and on their own terms—to achieve a realization of ordinary life in
particular personal, social and cultural circumstances that entail real and messy
choices between imperfect and mutually exclusive alternatives; it is not an
exercise in the articulation of rights and duties in the abstract. Social workers
and their agencies cannot in practice escape setting standards of the good or
adequate life, even if they wished to do so. Instead of shirking these choices,
they should make them positively and openly rather than implicitly and covertly.
Both objections to the idea of social workers as value neutral merit investigation.
The first is at least partly an empirical question about how social workers
encounter and resolve conflicts between their official value neutrality (the new
official codes speak of ‘Respecting diversity and different cultures and values’
(Scottish Social Services Council, 2003)) and their lived personal experience as
practitioners. It is obviously related to the question of how social workers
acquire and develop their values in their professional education and elsewhere.
These important and interesting empirical questions will not be pursued here.
In the remainder of this paper, I will aim to justify the more philosophical claim
that social workers ought not to pretend to be value neutral, and to pursue
some of its implications. The focus here is on the character of the professional
as a person rather than on the necessary capacity of professionals to make
informed moral judgements. While there is no disagreement with Hugman’s
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80 Chris Clark
claim that ‘it is necessary for each member of a caring profession to be actively
and reflexively engaged with the moral dimensions of their work’ (Hugman,
1998, p. 203), such a view of professionalism tends to foreground the declarative
ethics of the profession and to neglect the individual character of the professional.
The requirements of occupational roles
The claim that social workers ought not to pretend to be value neutral requires
some analysis of the kind of transactions that incumbents of occupational roles
can enter into with their clients or customers. These can be thought of as spanning a range from the simply instrumental to the morally significant. An instrumental relationship exists when both parties share a narrow view of the
business to be transacted—for example, when we buy or sell goods or services
in a market; when a civil servant determines a tax liability or pays out a social
security benefit; when a lawyer does a competent job of representing a client’s
interest or drawing up a legal document. In such cases, neither party is much
concerned about the moral personality of the other so long as the conventional
and contractual expectations are duly met. Pleasantries rooted in common
interests and outlooks may be an agreeable bonus, but their absence does not
vitiate the transaction. At the other end of the range are professional–client
relationships imbued with moral purpose. In the relation between the priest or
minister and the member of his church, the whole point is precisely the moral
quest that they are presumably endeavouring to share. The character, beliefs
and moral personality of both parties are fundamental.
Professional relationships in the human services comprise a mixture of the
instrumental and the moral. There is not so much a gradation across professions as a diversity of roles and occasions within the same occupation. Medical
professionals, for example, deal routinely with many everyday patient needs in
a manner that neither requires nor expects more than technically competent
intervention provided in a pleasant and helpful manner. On occasion, however,
the medical professional will engage with the patient or the patient’s relatives
over issues that are primarily matters of value, life choice and personal morality, such as whether to pursue invasive and life-threatening treatment or
whether to withhold part of the story from the person who is very sick. It is
when there are significant moral aspects to a professional relationship that the
question of whether professionals may legitimately adopt a different morality
in their professional role becomes particularly pressing. As Gibson puts it, the
issues arise when a professional, following her professional code, ‘feels compelled to behave at odds with the regular perceptions of reasonable people’
(Gibson, 2003, p. 23).
Failure to fulfil the proper expectations of an occupational role, whether
instrumental or moral, amounts to derelict or unethical practice. The requirements of professional roles can be usefully illuminated by considering the
attributes of a bad professional. The educational philosopher David Carr
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Moral Character in Social Work 81
(Carr, 2000) identifies the following ways of being a bad teacher: (1) technically
incompetent or inept; (2) violent or sexually abusive towards, or neglectful of
the health and safety of children; (3) more concerned with indoctrination than
education—the teacher imposing his own values and ideology as opposed to
helping children learn to think for themselves; (4) a bad moral example
because of personal lifestyle or values.
With minor modification, a similar list will serve very well for social work.
The first item in the list is analytically necessary: a good social worker (or
expert of any kind) cannot conceivably be technically incompetent in the particular knowledge and skills required for practice. The second item I will take to be
uncontroversially true in that it is based on such a broad and deep consensus
about human rights that the opposite viewpoint is simply unconscionable.
The third point in Carr’s list is not obviously centrally relevant to social
work, but there exists a close analogue in social work to the ideal of teaching as
education rather than indoctrination. It is the familiar value of self-determination.
Similarly derived from the core value of autonomy in liberal individualism
(Schneewind, 1993), it holds that the role of the professional is to help the user
make their own choices and decisions in a way informed by proper knowledge
and understanding. Where these may be lacking, it is the professional’s job to
promote autonomy by fostering and inculcating the ability, and promoting the
opportunities, to make informed choices, and to defend relatively powerless
individuals from the encroachment of stronger forces.
The professional as exponent of a virtuous life
It is the fourth of Carr’s attributes of a bad teacher that poses the most challenging
question. Should we expect teachers and social workers to demonstrate moral
virtues that go well beyond the purview of their acknowledged professional
role and expertise?
The practice of education interestingly combines both the instrumental
expectation of competent instruction and the moral expectation of modelling
and teaching standards of good conduct, social responsibility and community
values. Carr argues that a teacher who lives by immoral standards or leads
a highly questionable kind of life cannot set the example of a good life that
being a teacher essentially requires. From the standpoint that morality consists
in cultivating the virtues, Carr (Carr, 1991, p. 255) claims that:
Since the virtues are not innate but entail both proper habit-formation and the
development of reason, it is clear that it is squarely within the responsibility of
all concerned with the socialisation and education of children—parents, teachers and others—to ensure that such habituation and instruction takes place.
Carr goes on to emphasize that:
The crucial point is that a good teacher is not just the technical deliverer of
certain curricular goods—a good teacher is also a certain kind of person.
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82 Chris Clark
He or she is the kind of person who is to be looked up to by virtue of
possessing certain admirable qualities upon which it is appropriate to
model our own lives (p. 258).
In this respect, social work is closely analogous to teaching. Both bring
professional involvements falling right across the spectrum from the routine
and instrumental to the moral or life forming and changing. Many occasions in
social work parallel the routine, yet desirably competent and helpfully provided work of a teacher as ‘deliverer of certain curricular goods’. However,
routine occasions do not cover the whole of social work nor, for many of its
proponents, the most important part. In practice situations of high personal significance for the client, the social worker becomes not only a conduit of practical assistance but a personality who, by lived example, expressed precept and
practical action, inevitably models, transmits and teaches standards, values and
ways of living even if she does not deliberately set out to do so. This can happen,
for example, when arranging long-term support for individuals with mental
health problems or learning difficulties; or counselling individuals who are facing life-changing decisions such as the future of a partner relationship, or the
implications of drug dependency, or the consequences of permanent severe
illness or disability.
The professional relationship in social work thus becomes more than simply
instrumental to the delivery of practical services and acquires the inescapably
moral dimension analogous to that which Carr identifies in the totality of the
relationship of the teacher to her pupils. The standard of an ordinary life is
measured against the practices and values of a specific community. Social
workers in the more deeply implicated service relationships show their
approval, or otherwise, of mores in such home ground areas of everyone’s life
as how to live in family groups, keep house, raise children, pursue work, enjoy
recreational and cultural pursuits, support those with particular difficulties or
disadvantages, or challenge the oppressions associated with the categorizations
of class, gender, race, ability or sexuality.
The point here can be amplified by reference to a distinction between
conceptions of occupational roles respectively as ‘professions’ or ‘vocations’.
Mike Martin (Martin, 2000, p. 76) contrasts the instrumental attitude of ‘devotion
to professional standards defining competence’ with embracing ‘the [professional] role as a vocation, as a set of activities one is well suited to, strongly
identifies with, sees inherent value in, and affirms with commitment, enthusiasm and caring’. Carr (2000, p. 10) speaks of the ‘significant continuity between
occupational role and private values and concerns’ in the vocational attitude.
In nursing, Mackay (1998, p. 57) examines the ‘broad dichotomy … between
those who adopt a vocational view and those who adopt a professional view of
their occupation’, the vocational view being characterized by selfless devotion
to caring for the sick despite the low pay and status, and sometimes unattractive
aspects of nursing work.
The religious ministry, nursing and teaching are regularly cited as vocations.
According to this distinction, those who conceive of their occupational role as
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Moral Character in Social Work 83
(merely) professional do and should maintain a degree of interpersonal distance
from their clients; they should not become over-involved personally, in order
to maintain a professional objectivity and to avoid bias deriving from their own
needs and values rather than those of the client. It is also widely recommended
that such relative neutrality is important to protect the professional’s own self
from exhaustion. The attitude of vocation, on the other hand, entails a high
degree of personal identification by the professional with the needs, aspirations
and values of the client.
There is clearly a parallel here with the distinction, developed above,
between moral and instrumental relationships. Professional roles span a range
of responsibilities from the instrumental to the moral. Similarly, it is not that
social work, teaching or medicine belong to one or other of the exclusive categories
of profession or vocation but rather that they have the attributes of both. This
means that at least on some occasions, the moral personality of the professional
enters fundamentally into their role-required actions. Furthermore, since a
professional’s competence to carry out even the most instrumental tasks cannot
be conveniently excised from their moral capacity and personality as a whole, it
also means that criteria regarding the moral personality of the professional are
relevant to the processes of recruitment, training and certification of professional suitability and competence. The moral character of all professionals,
even those who only have to exercise a morally significant professional relationship rather rarely, is essential to their fitness for practice. Professionals are
not required to be saints but must be subjects of, at least, a moderately virtuous
life if they are to merit the responsibilities, and the trust (Koehn, 1994),
reposed in them.
Character and community
I have argued that social workers, like teachers and other professionals
in human services, cannot pretend to value–neutrality in their professional
relationships because the nature of the contact with clients on occasion
entails practically exemplifying ways of living and advising on life issues that
no mature person can be altogether indifferent about. This conclusion, however,
says little about what kinds of values and what type of moral personality we
should consider suitable—and unsuitable—for professional practice. May
one properly expect social workers to assimilate and demonstrate particular
sets of social values and moral opinions? Could there be particular tests
or criteria of moral standing, and moral understanding, against which we
should require licensed social workers to achieve, as it were, a passing
grade?
Requiring that social workers hold certain moral attitudes or character over
and above the ordinary standards of honesty, diligence and competence applicable
in any employer–employee relationship may initially seem either preposterous,
or at the very least intolerably discriminatory, in what claims to be a free and
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84 Chris Clark
pluralist society. In the world of employment, we do not usually presume to
rate job applicants according to their views about the moral standards and life
goals to be expected of ordinary members of the community. To raise such concerns in a job interview might well be considered irrelevant, impertinent and
prejudicial. Nevertheless, a moment’s inspection shows that some criteria of
moral character are in fact already well inscribed in the processes of deciding
who is, and who is not, fit to be a social worker.
First, there is no doubt that individuals with a history of grave offences
against the person will rightly be accepted as suitable for social work only
after the most serious and penetrating enquiry as to their present attitudes and
character. Second, it is standardly accepted that an individual with deepseated and irremediable racist, sexist or similar attitudes must be deemed
unfit. Third, serious deficiencies of sociability or seeming inability to form
constructive working relationships will normally be treated as contraindications. Beyond these minima, it is nearly certain that those who select candidates for education or jobs in social work possess mental images of the kind of
person they are seeking, or seeking to avoid, even if they would be hard put to
describe the profile or reluctant to admit that one existed. And almost everyone
with any substantial experience of selecting for professional education or
employment in social work seems to have at least one story of the apparently
bizarre individual who, though not obviously disqualifiable against the standard
selection criteria, nevertheless deeply impressed the selector as being just not
the right kind of person to admit to the profession.
The fact that standards of moral character are undoubtedly actively applied
in the selection of individuals for careers in social work does not, it may be
thought, of itself justify the existence or content of such standards. However, it
follows from the argument that social work, at least on some occasions, involves
moral relationships that selectors are right to be applying some standards of moral
character. What is really at issue is the content of such standards. What characteristics should we require, and what should we aim to exclude, in the moral
personalities of intending social workers?
The personal values and moral character to be required of social workers
can be grouped into two classes: the generic and the context-sensitive. This is
an analytical classification of personal attributes and principles of practical
morality—not a description of two different kinds of animal; each individual
will have their own particular range and fusion of attributes.
At the generic level, social workers should uphold the principles governing
relations between persons that are subsumed in the standard concepts, declarations and laws of human rights. Although liberal individualism may be criticized
for a view of human nature too abstracted and detached from the particularities
of real lives in real communities, against this must be set its enormous success
in freeing modernity from serfdom, slavery, the subjugation of women and the
incarceration of the disabled, to mention only a few. It is right to reject for
social work individuals who cannot adequately comprehend the practical significance of personal caring and justice (Lynn, 1999).
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Moral Character in Social Work 85
The second class of requisite attributes of moral character that the social
worker daily employs in her working contacts I have called context-sensitive. A
couple of illustrations may be useful at this point.
Residential workers with children and young people aim to provide a surrogate
parental relationship and a substitute home life for those in their care. They
model and prescribe the minutiae of daily life and communal living: what and
when to eat, how to dress, the ingenuity of kindly manners and modes of sharing space and time, valued recreations and responses to them (e.g. watching
television or supporting team sports, religious customs and usages), what is to
be forbidden and punished (e.g. the use of alcohol or drugs and some kinds of
sexual activity). None of these essential aspects of life is value free but is rooted
in the soil of its particular culture. Favoured foods and favoured games, language, manners and customs, valued skills, crafts and activities, disapproved
demeanours and behaviours are all artefacts of particular ways of life. There is
no neutrality for the professional immersed in this kind of situation; she, too,
must form, share or repudiate the values, tastes and practices of the social
microcosm in which her professional practice is submerged.
Social workers in the criminal justice field deal with individuals who have
formally offended the legal and moral standards of the community. Traditionally, probation officers self-consciously set a standard of morals for the reform
and rehabilitation of the offender. Contemporary practice doubtless aims to
avoid the appearance of moralizing, but is nonetheless equally implicated in
setting moral standards of right and wrong. Thus, for example, social workers
who try to address the problems of men who abuse their partners are agents of
quite specific values about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour between
partners. The workers’ project is to promote certain ways of life over others,
and the standards they promote are much more specific, detailed and laden
with cultural values than those specified in the written law.
It is surely much more problematic to specify what I have called the contextsensitive moral standards and cultural values than it is to require adherence to
the broad general principles of liberal rights. Liberal rights are supported by a
wide consensus and are largely embedded in the law. Context-sensitive moral
standards, by contrast, are characterized by a great deal of diversity within a
common sphere of citizenship, particularly in mobile and morally plural societies.
It might seem discordant that the very personal and cultural values that could
particularly suit a professional to work in one situation could particularly unsuit
them for another where the formal qualifications required are apparently equal.
It also appears to open the door to intolerably prejudicial attitudes; one would
not defend the selection of a social worker on the basis of the football team they
supported—even though the religious affiliations and community values associated with a football team could quite possibly be relevant in some job situations.
There is a perpetual tension between the abstract requirements of universal
liberal rights and the specific readings of them to be discovered and created in
particular contexts. This tension cannot be resolved by reading off from the
texts of professional ethics; it must be squarely faced in the everyday judgements
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86 Chris Clark
made by practising professionals. Social workers, like teachers and other
professionals, work in the middle ground between the abstract generalizations
of liberal rights and the sectional values of particular communities. Liberal
rights are too abstract to define the human service professional’s particular
moral character. On the other hand, particular communities, while asserting
the proper identity and interests of cultural and other minorities, must avoid
affronting the standards legitimated by the wider polity of which all are citizens.
This middle ground is bound to be uncertain, shifting and hazardous. Recognizing that professionals are obliged to inhabit it does make their position more
intelligible, if not more comfortable.
Social workers are necessarily practitioners of context-sensitive moral values
and bearers of particular moral character. Some such idea is at least implicitly
recognized when, for example, it is decided to seek the appointment of a native
speaker of a minority language to work with a particular community; or when a
professional with personal first-hand experience of disability issues is appointed
for their understanding and insight into this subject. But in the generality of
social work appointments, it is usually purported that the professional’s contextsensitive moral values are irrelevant. I am arguing that this is a double mistake.
In the first place, it is a delusion to suppose that the professional’s moral character is irrelevant to the specific qualities they will bring to their professional role.
On the contrary, their character and values will certainly be transmitted in the
services and relationships they offer to clients. It follows, therefore, that those
who appoint social workers ought to attend deliberately to the moral personality
of their appointees. The second mistake is to fail to identify, and seek out, those
particular context-sensitive moral values that will best promote the specific
objectives of a given practice context. In work with people with learning disabilities, for example, we require practitioners whose talents and enthusiasms comprise promoting the inclusion of clients in the everyday rhythms, rights and living
practices of the community in which they should both be rooted. We therefore
require professionals who not only have internalized the generic liberal rights but
also have learned how to actualize context-sensitive moral values apt for the middle
ground where they practise.
Professionalism, registration and virtuous character
At first glance, the new official standards for social service workers cited at the
opening of this paper (and replicated in the four countries of the UK) appear
to be merely the most recent expression of the familiar traditional values found
in the historical line of official and quasi-official codes of professional ethics or
conduct in social work. What has perhaps been less remarked is a subtle shift in
the linguistic register used to convey the expectations of professionals. For, in
the personal service professions, professional ethics have normally been formulated as broad principles and the professional duties that flow from them. The
current version of the British Association of Social Workers’ code of ethics, for
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Moral Character in Social Work 87
example, is framed in terms of five basic values and their derivative principles
and duties (British Association of Social Workers, 2002). The new official standards, however, contain references not only to the duties of professionals but
also to their character: workers are explicitly required to be honest, trustworthy,
reliable, dependable and (in the quotation given above) not ‘behave in a way,
in work or outside work, which would call into question your suitability to work
in social services’ (Scottish Social Services Council, 2003). There are numerous
other requirements within the standards that can equally be interpreted as
duties or attributes of character.
On a longer view, it would perhaps be more accurate to see the currently
re-emerging emphasis on character as a partial reference back to the early
concepts and ideals of personal social service that were lost sight of during the
ascendancy of ‘competence’ as the yardstick of professionalism. In his ‘Invitation to Social Work’, Jordan (1984) elegantly shows how the personal moral
outlook and social conscience of the Victorian social reformers animated their
helping efforts. Jordan goes on to illustrate how the strengths and weaknesses
of a practitioner’s response at the acute points of stress and crisis stem from her
personality rather than from the contemplation of codes of ethics or books of
procedure. It would be no bad thing to rediscover this submerged historical
perspective in order better to inform the debate about a new professionalism
suited to the present age.
The partial shift to a language of personal character rather than role-defined
duty should be related to the new professional registration of social workers
and social care workers which is the immediate reason for the issuing of the
new official standards. Professional registration is quintessentially a process of
identifying and certifying suitable persons to be employed as professionals,
while barring others. Registrants must meet certain requirements in terms of
academic qualifications and personal suitability; they must not have a criminal
record or personal history indicative of likely danger to clients; and they can be
disciplined or removed from the register for professional misconduct. I have
argued that there is nothing new in choosing individuals for social work according
to their moral character; but the new standards and processes of registration
have, in effect, sharpened the focus on character (as opposed to principle and
duty) in ways that have perhaps not been fully recognized.
Professionals in the human services indeed remain duty-bound to uphold the
familiar ethics of respect, justice, autonomy, beneficence and so forth. What
I have tried to show is that while these achievements of liberal individualism
have lost none of their potency, their application will not alone suffice to separate
suitable from unsuitable practitioners in the social professions. Human service
practitioners necessarily express their own personal character and dispositions
in their every act of professional service. This is not a weakness of training but
an essential feature of the proper practice of their profession; without it, what
should always be, in some measure, an interpersonal engagement becomes
merely a mechanical transaction that voids the core purposes of the profession.
It is right, therefore, to attend to the character, as well as the technical skill, of
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88 Chris Clark
individuals who wish to work as professionals in the human services. This is
something not yet widely recognized in the professional ethics literature,
although some tentative beginnings have been made (Davis, 1999). Meantime,
it is worth reasserting that good professional practice is not sufficiently
described either by technical competence or by grand ethical principle; it also
subsists essentially in the moral character of the practitioner.
Accepted: January 2005
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Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was carried out while the author was a Visiting Fellow
at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of
Melbourne in March-April 2004. The author wishes to thank colleagues at
CAPPE and the Department of Philosophy for their interest, support and facilities provided. Financial support from the Carnegie Fund for the Universities
of Scotland, and the Development Trust Research Fund of the University of
Edinburgh, is acknowledged with thanks.
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