Editorial

This third issue of the journal had been planned as a special issue, but due to unpropitious circumstances, the editors have postponed to Issue four what promises to be a fascinating collection of papers on ‘Ethical Relations to the Past’: highly relevant to human services at individual, institutional, and international levels. Instead we have another general issue of the journal – one which also brings together some equally interesting papers from different parts of the world, and with a range from the philosophical through to policy and practice.

It is a pleasure to introduce the paper by Pablo Aguayo Westwood from the University of Chile on ‘Self Respect and the Justification of Rawlsian Principles of Justice’. Human services have been able to draw on Kantian and Rawlsian traditions for a long time for support in their aims to treat others with respect, and towards achieving greater social justice. However this paper demonstrates that having respect for oneself is also of critical importance and closely linked to the concept of social justice in Rawls. Beginning with an apt quotation from Ken Loach's moving film: ‘I, Daniel Blake’, the paper seeks to show that, indeed: ‘ … when you lose your self-respect, you’re done for’, a sentiment that will be meaningful for service users and professionals alike. The impetus of Westwood's argument is that Rawl's ‘realistic utopia’ depends on social arrangements and policies that ensure the possibility of self-respect as well as respect for others: otherwise we ‘sink into apathy and cynicism’, a condition which some recent social and political developments have done little to prevent. Enabling individuals to feel valued and valuable is an aim worthy of serious thought – and not just at the macro-level of national and international arrangements: these arguments also apply at the level of the organisations within which professionals work and with which service users and carers interact.

The latter thought leads neatly into the topic of the second paper by Kathy Edwards and Anastasia Goussios: ‘Who is Responsible for Compassion Satisfaction? Shifting Ethical Responsibility for Compassion Fatigue from the Individual to the Ecological’. Their concern is to show that the arrangements for various human services in the neo-liberal environment of Australia have been developed in such a way as to neglect the social and political ecological aspects of self-respect that Westwood finds in Rawls. Their comparison of various codes of ethics (in youth work; social work, and health care) leads them to the conclusion that the effect of this specific type of social arrangement is to: ‘ …  place responsibility for self-care and  …  mitigating compassion fatigue, primarily on individuals’. ‘Responsibilisation’ placed on individuals lets off the hook any social or political consideration of the need to develop an enabling environment that would support self-care. Although they do not reference the Rawlsian argument about the importance of social arrangements that ensure the possibility of self-respect, they do develop a ‘ …  conceptual case for an ecological lens through which to understand ethical responsibility for self-care’ that appears related to the kind of thesis developed from Rawls by Westwood.

In the third paper in this issue, by Heidrun Wulfekühler and Margaret Rhodes, scholars based in Germany and the USA, the problems of self-care and flourishing in social service organisations arise yet again, but this time from an Aristotelian perspective. In reaction to an ethnographic study that emphasised the difficulties of working in bureaucracies – and the irrelevance of virtue ethics – they wish to assert the possibility of ‘Flourishing in Social Work Organisations’ by using ideas based on Aristotelian virtue ethics. They conclude in a very practical way with an exercise for professionals entitled: ‘Ethical analysis of your organisation’. Again, as with the previous paper, there is a connection with Westwood's discussion of self-care in Rawls, where the importance of the ‘Aristotelian principle’ is asserted as part of the responsibility, not just of individuals, but of the wider social environment to enable and support self-worth and self-respect. It will be interesting for readers to compare the implications of these three papers for social service organisations, and consider how well they cope with the existence of unyielding social divisions and neo-liberal expectations of personal responsibility.

Two Danish academics, Maria Nissen, and Mie Engen, have contributed the next paper on: ‘Power and care in statutory social work with vulnerable families’. This is a topic of very wide relevance, and one which raises perpetually difficult ethical considerations. The paper ‘ …  takes a starting point in the assumption that conflict  …  is an inevitable element of statutory social work, combined with the possibility of coercion and the asymmetry of the relation as an underlying issue’. They are particularly focused on the importance of care for both children and parents, in situations where ‘ …  power and the possibility of care in statutory social work is intertwined in complex processes of shifting relations’. They use a case study to illustrate themes drawn from Tronto and Young, especially about the ‘ethical relation of asymmetrical reciprocity’ in dialogue between service users and professionals, recognising the importance of being aware of the differentials in perspectives and power. This is an approach with a long and honourable feminist backstory, requiring an openness not just to what is said, but also to the radically different perspectives that lie behind the actual words, including what is often left unsaid, (e.g. Gluck and Patai 1991). The application of these concepts to statutory social work with families is well worth discussing.

This issue of the journal concludes with two Australian papers on the theme of displacement, originally written for Issue 1 of the journal. In view of the high level of good papers and lack of space, the guest editors asked if these two could be published later. It is excellent to see the quality and extent of interest in Australia on topics relating to the journal: – both readership and contributions run at higher rates than almost anywhere else. The problems arising from displacement have been particularly acute in Australia, where it has been a controversial political issue. Kim Robinson and Greer Lamaro Haintz's paper focuses on the issues of a specific community in: ‘Is Anyone Listening to us? ‘They’re Given Feedback and There's No Outcomes’ Settlement for Newly Arrived Syrians in Regional Australia’. However it is obviously not only a pressing issue in Australia, and the first paper by Rebecca Field, Donna Chung and Caroline Fleay, compares practice in two very different countries, discussing: ‘The Influence of Policy, Cultural and Historical Contexts on Social Work and Human Service Practice Responses with People Seeking Asylum in Germany and Australia’. One of the guest editors of the Special Issue on Displacement, Dorothee Holscher, writes about these papers:

'The question of (re-)settlement is at the heart of [these]  …  qualitative studies, both of which focus on the possibilities of ethical everyday practice. Robinson and Lamaro Haintz present key learnings from their work with Syrian and Syriac communities in regional Australia in relation to their concerns about a rapidly shifting funding and policy context. Field, Chung and Fleay compare social work and human service practice with asylum seekers in Germany and Australia, both of which they characterise as contexts that are antithetical to established social work and human services values. Against the background of systematic discrimination and restriction on the one hand and a continued dominance of individually-focused interventions on the other, the authors encourage social work and human services practitioners to work across the entire personal-political continuum – in spite (or maybe precisely because) of the existing challenges to ethical practice within this field.

The two papers thus offer empirical evidence of the problems facing people displaced from an originating country to a place where they often struggle to survive. The ethics of professionals dealing with them on behalf of local and national authorities demand such evidence and debate.

Finally, but not least, the Ethics in Practice section in this issue provides two interesting and topical examples of ethical issues arising in practice in Germany and the UK, where dealing with Covid has challenged practitioners and researchers. The ethical issues are expertly drawn out in commentaries by Sarah Banks to whom thanks is due for collating and writing this paper with very little notice. Thanks also to the anonymous UK social worker and to Marilena von Köppen for their contributions.