Moving from Professionally Specific Ideals to the Common Morality

Abstract

A framework for resolving social work's ethical problems must allow for explicit discussion and justification (Osmo and Landau 2001). As opposed to a preoccupation with what “ought to be,” it is argued that “what ought notbe” is the more useful question to ask when resolving a moral problem. The University of Kentucky's social work program has adapted an ethical decision-making model proposed by Bernard Gert (1997) that (1) identifies the common harms rational people wish to avoid, (2) specifies the general moral rules by which people abide in order to avoid these harms, (3) recognizes that rules violations do occur and can be justified in particular situations, and (4) provides an explicit justification procedure for violating the moral rules when rational, impartial people would publicly allow such a violation. How this decision-making process unfolds in the classroom and encourages students to develop critical reasoning capabilities is described herein.

Key Words:

• Social work ethics
• social work education
• ethics education
• common morality