SWK278 THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL
WORKER LOVE ETHIC COMPANION
Love Ethic Informed Resources
- All theories and legislation have at least implicit ethical dimensions.
- Personal and professional values are the building blocks of ethical practice. Theories are
sophisticated statements about values and principles. The revolutionary social worker
fosters professional integrity in all their actions. To achieve this they need to be skilled in
aligning their values with relevant theories to guide their practice. It is really important
that you reflect upon your actions to understand what is influencing you to act as you do.
The point of being reflective is to then be willing to change or adjust your actions to be
congruent with your values. If your values have been compromised, the first step to
understand why to ensure you are working non-reactively with harmful power dynamics
involved. Realising the rights and wellbeing of a person, animal or ecosystem could
depend on your reflective and self-adjusting capacities. Self-reflective work needs to be
paralleled with a critical and loving understanding of the contextual and political
influences on your practice. The outcome of this parallel contextualised reflective
thinking can be a more nuanced, strategic, and if necessary, resistive response.
- Accountability is a key dimension of professional integrity and refers to the use of
professional authority to uphold ethical responsibilities. This can be experienced as
divided loyalties that the practitioner needs to navigate, where workplaces will have
strong norms that typically reinforce the status quo of power relations. These norms may
be in tension with the agency’s professed mission of service to people who access the
agency. Further, loyalty to service users can be in tension with loyalty to work colleagues,
managers and the profession. An implication of the love ethic is that practitioners are to
be accountable to the least powerful individual or group in any particular situation.
- An aspect of ethical practice involves recognising other peoples’ values and ethics may
be different and even incompatible or in conflict with your own. The idea of ethical
pluralism tries to grapple with this complexity by acknowledging that “there may be
plausible cultural differences in values” (Hugman, 2013, p. 76), including how values are
interpreted and enacted.
- The love ethic model is premised on a willingness to recognise and respect all parties’
ethics in a contested situation. This is provided the consequence of those ethics do not
harm or compromise the rights and interest of others (including nonhuman others). As a
result, ethical pluralism and the related idea of ethical relativism need to be subjected to
context-sensitive and power-sensitive analysis of the specific ethics involved. In turn,
ethical absolution is the other end of the continuum where there are certain ethical
principles which are not tolerated. In situations of violence and injustice, the
revolutionary social worker may, at the very least, have to resort to nonviolent direct
actions, non-cooperation and appeals to legal sanctions.
- The context of practice are so complex that no one ethical theory will be sufficient to
guide you in how to influence and challenge the status quo to achieve loving,
anti-oppressive goals. The adoption of a love ethic informed interpretation of ethical
, theories and principles will assist the revolutionary to social worker in utilising all the
theories with some caution and refinements. It can be discouraging that the efficacy of
love ethic orientated theories are not appreciated due to the difficulty of achieving
anti-oppressive practice goals. This view is yet another opportunity to resist what Freire
(1970) calls fatalism, where the status quo is accepted due to the belief something better
is not possible. In the 2010 version of the code of ethics, the AASW have watered down
an earlier statement supporting a professional obligation to resist unfair laws and policies.
It explains that: “Tensions may occasionally arise between observing the code and
complying with legal organisational requirements (p. 14)”. Given social works social
justice mission, it could be expected that this would be followed with imploring the
practitioner to resist and stand with the oppressed if those requirements are unfair.
Instead, the statement continues: “Social workers must act in accordance with the law and
with organisational directives (p. 14). There is an implicit subtext that laws and directives
are fair and ethical. The opportunity to promote informed activism is side-stepped with
the concluding point: “If the law or organisational directives conflict with perceived
moral obligations, a social worker should seek guidance from a senior colleague (p. 14).
Individualist and professionally sanitised notions of ethical practice and accountability
need unsettling and augmenting with power sensitive communitarian ethics. Further, a
critical understanding is needed of how dominant ideas and people are located at the top
of power hierarchies with a range of mechanisms of power to avoid accountability.
Synopsis of Ethical Theories
- Deontology and consequentialism have been so influential in Western thinking and
governance of nation states.
Deontology or Duty Based
Deontology assumptions (key beliefs)
- Individuals are rational beings.
- Individuals are moral beings.
- Individuals should accept the rule of law.
- The rule of law represents societal good.
- There is a right response.
- Ethics are absolutist - there is no need to consider different views and values.
- Knowledge as objective facts.
Deontology claims
- Individuals are valued in their own right and not as a means to an end.
- Based on the concept of inalienable human rights.
- Obligations to rules, laws and agency policies.
- Some principles sit above others.
- The course of action is clear and absolute.
- Right action is more important than good outcomes.
- The exercise of power is legitimated by implementing the right response.
- Individual autonomy is valued above the responsibility to others.
- Service user self-determination, respect and acceptance are to be upheld.
- Justice as individual rights, e.g., to privacy, freedom and association.
, Deontology practice strategies and implications
- Always relate to individuals with respect and support their self-determination.
- Uphold the best intention of legislation and policies.
- Uphold agency procedures and workplace instructions for the good of service users.
- Be well-informed about the agency’s legal administrative policies and procedures.
- Follow and comply with the agency’s rules and requirements.
- Well-founded rules are important for consistency and accountability in practice.
- Seek legal and professional advice if an individual’s rights are transgressed.
Deontology limitations
- Presumes society can be made equal and fair through legislation and rules.
- The laws and rules may not be fair for some individuals.
- The right response is not necessarily clear or uncontested.
- Presumes human service organisations are benevolent providers of services.
- Onus is on service user to understand the system to make complaints without being
disadvantaged.
- Reinforces dominance of rationality and reason.
- Can reinforce dominant power groups’ views as truth.
- Human-centric bias not addressed.
- Duty to one individual may conflict with duty to another individual.
- May have conflicting duties towards an individual, e,g., where their right to freedom
conflicts with their right to protection.
- If someone is not considered rational (capable of rational thought), should they be treated
as without intrinsic worth?
- May be conflicting obligations that are not recognised or that are compromised.
- The theory is a-contextual, a-cultural and a-political.
- Minority groups or individuals may be silenced or sacrificed by the practitioner
upholding the law.
Love ethic informed guide to deontology
Some love ethic informed ideas and practice implications include:
- Extended ethical sphere of concern to nonhuman animals and the environment.
- Validate emotional, embodied and other ways of knowing, communicating and reasoning.
- Affirm collective rights and interest alongside individual rights and interests.
- Use professional discernment in the interpretation of laws and policies.
- Resist and challenge unfair agency rules and requirements.
- Lobby for legislation changes to unfair laws.
- Provide worker education on interpreting legislation and policy to uphold individual
rights of service users.
- Ensure service users are informed of their rights and give consent for any interventions.
- Enable individuals to access legal advice if rights are threatened.
- Support own profession’s lobbying and advocacy work.
- Undertake ongoing self-education to maximise own competencies and knowledge.
- Research new innovations and service user-led experiences and initiatives.
- Support minority group activism.
, - Document failures of agency to uphold the rights and interests of service users.
- Provide well documented evidence of discrimination to internal reviews, external
accreditation and public inquiries.
Consequentialism/Utilitarianism
Consequentialism assumptions (key beliefs)
The same assumptions as deontology ethical theory, and additionally:
- Ability of humans to feel joy and pain entitles them to moral status.
- People are rational beings
- The rule of law represents societal good.
- The good is reflected in the majority view or action.
- Morality is located in the consequences of decisions and actions.
Consequentialism claims
- The right thing to do is that which maximizes the good.
- Good outcomes are more important than how the outcome is achieved.
- Greatest good for the greatest number should be pursued.
- Weigh up the pros and cons of actions in terms of outcomes.
- General welfare of people valued rather than the individual's rights.
- Question asked is “what would serve the greatest good?”.
- Justice as equal opportunity and equal distribution of resources.
Consequentialism practice strategies and implications
Many of the practice strategies noted for deontology theory, and:
- All actions can and should be considered in terms of their likely outcome and benefit for
all involved.
- The goal of ethical practitioners is to have positive effects and outcomes.
- Develop and apply a public interest test.
For example, in the right to Information Act 2009 it relates to whether the release of information
being requested. To determine the balance of the public interest, you must follow the process:
1. Identify any relevant factors and disregard them.
2. Identify any relevant public interest factors favoring disclosure and non-disclosure; and
3. Balance the relevant factors favouring Disclosure and nondisclosure
4. Decide whether disclosure of the information would, on balance, be contrary to the public
interest.
Consequentialism limitations
All the limitations relevant to deontology theory, and:
- Minority groups or members may be silenced or sacrificed for the majority.
- Powerful individuals and groups can unfairly influence what is the public good.
- The public good will be contested and not necessarily clear.
- The public interest test, therefore, can be biased to serve political interests.
- Presumes the public will support promised outcomes with no regard for minority groups
and the environment.
WORKER LOVE ETHIC COMPANION
Love Ethic Informed Resources
- All theories and legislation have at least implicit ethical dimensions.
- Personal and professional values are the building blocks of ethical practice. Theories are
sophisticated statements about values and principles. The revolutionary social worker
fosters professional integrity in all their actions. To achieve this they need to be skilled in
aligning their values with relevant theories to guide their practice. It is really important
that you reflect upon your actions to understand what is influencing you to act as you do.
The point of being reflective is to then be willing to change or adjust your actions to be
congruent with your values. If your values have been compromised, the first step to
understand why to ensure you are working non-reactively with harmful power dynamics
involved. Realising the rights and wellbeing of a person, animal or ecosystem could
depend on your reflective and self-adjusting capacities. Self-reflective work needs to be
paralleled with a critical and loving understanding of the contextual and political
influences on your practice. The outcome of this parallel contextualised reflective
thinking can be a more nuanced, strategic, and if necessary, resistive response.
- Accountability is a key dimension of professional integrity and refers to the use of
professional authority to uphold ethical responsibilities. This can be experienced as
divided loyalties that the practitioner needs to navigate, where workplaces will have
strong norms that typically reinforce the status quo of power relations. These norms may
be in tension with the agency’s professed mission of service to people who access the
agency. Further, loyalty to service users can be in tension with loyalty to work colleagues,
managers and the profession. An implication of the love ethic is that practitioners are to
be accountable to the least powerful individual or group in any particular situation.
- An aspect of ethical practice involves recognising other peoples’ values and ethics may
be different and even incompatible or in conflict with your own. The idea of ethical
pluralism tries to grapple with this complexity by acknowledging that “there may be
plausible cultural differences in values” (Hugman, 2013, p. 76), including how values are
interpreted and enacted.
- The love ethic model is premised on a willingness to recognise and respect all parties’
ethics in a contested situation. This is provided the consequence of those ethics do not
harm or compromise the rights and interest of others (including nonhuman others). As a
result, ethical pluralism and the related idea of ethical relativism need to be subjected to
context-sensitive and power-sensitive analysis of the specific ethics involved. In turn,
ethical absolution is the other end of the continuum where there are certain ethical
principles which are not tolerated. In situations of violence and injustice, the
revolutionary social worker may, at the very least, have to resort to nonviolent direct
actions, non-cooperation and appeals to legal sanctions.
- The context of practice are so complex that no one ethical theory will be sufficient to
guide you in how to influence and challenge the status quo to achieve loving,
anti-oppressive goals. The adoption of a love ethic informed interpretation of ethical
, theories and principles will assist the revolutionary to social worker in utilising all the
theories with some caution and refinements. It can be discouraging that the efficacy of
love ethic orientated theories are not appreciated due to the difficulty of achieving
anti-oppressive practice goals. This view is yet another opportunity to resist what Freire
(1970) calls fatalism, where the status quo is accepted due to the belief something better
is not possible. In the 2010 version of the code of ethics, the AASW have watered down
an earlier statement supporting a professional obligation to resist unfair laws and policies.
It explains that: “Tensions may occasionally arise between observing the code and
complying with legal organisational requirements (p. 14)”. Given social works social
justice mission, it could be expected that this would be followed with imploring the
practitioner to resist and stand with the oppressed if those requirements are unfair.
Instead, the statement continues: “Social workers must act in accordance with the law and
with organisational directives (p. 14). There is an implicit subtext that laws and directives
are fair and ethical. The opportunity to promote informed activism is side-stepped with
the concluding point: “If the law or organisational directives conflict with perceived
moral obligations, a social worker should seek guidance from a senior colleague (p. 14).
Individualist and professionally sanitised notions of ethical practice and accountability
need unsettling and augmenting with power sensitive communitarian ethics. Further, a
critical understanding is needed of how dominant ideas and people are located at the top
of power hierarchies with a range of mechanisms of power to avoid accountability.
Synopsis of Ethical Theories
- Deontology and consequentialism have been so influential in Western thinking and
governance of nation states.
Deontology or Duty Based
Deontology assumptions (key beliefs)
- Individuals are rational beings.
- Individuals are moral beings.
- Individuals should accept the rule of law.
- The rule of law represents societal good.
- There is a right response.
- Ethics are absolutist - there is no need to consider different views and values.
- Knowledge as objective facts.
Deontology claims
- Individuals are valued in their own right and not as a means to an end.
- Based on the concept of inalienable human rights.
- Obligations to rules, laws and agency policies.
- Some principles sit above others.
- The course of action is clear and absolute.
- Right action is more important than good outcomes.
- The exercise of power is legitimated by implementing the right response.
- Individual autonomy is valued above the responsibility to others.
- Service user self-determination, respect and acceptance are to be upheld.
- Justice as individual rights, e.g., to privacy, freedom and association.
, Deontology practice strategies and implications
- Always relate to individuals with respect and support their self-determination.
- Uphold the best intention of legislation and policies.
- Uphold agency procedures and workplace instructions for the good of service users.
- Be well-informed about the agency’s legal administrative policies and procedures.
- Follow and comply with the agency’s rules and requirements.
- Well-founded rules are important for consistency and accountability in practice.
- Seek legal and professional advice if an individual’s rights are transgressed.
Deontology limitations
- Presumes society can be made equal and fair through legislation and rules.
- The laws and rules may not be fair for some individuals.
- The right response is not necessarily clear or uncontested.
- Presumes human service organisations are benevolent providers of services.
- Onus is on service user to understand the system to make complaints without being
disadvantaged.
- Reinforces dominance of rationality and reason.
- Can reinforce dominant power groups’ views as truth.
- Human-centric bias not addressed.
- Duty to one individual may conflict with duty to another individual.
- May have conflicting duties towards an individual, e,g., where their right to freedom
conflicts with their right to protection.
- If someone is not considered rational (capable of rational thought), should they be treated
as without intrinsic worth?
- May be conflicting obligations that are not recognised or that are compromised.
- The theory is a-contextual, a-cultural and a-political.
- Minority groups or individuals may be silenced or sacrificed by the practitioner
upholding the law.
Love ethic informed guide to deontology
Some love ethic informed ideas and practice implications include:
- Extended ethical sphere of concern to nonhuman animals and the environment.
- Validate emotional, embodied and other ways of knowing, communicating and reasoning.
- Affirm collective rights and interest alongside individual rights and interests.
- Use professional discernment in the interpretation of laws and policies.
- Resist and challenge unfair agency rules and requirements.
- Lobby for legislation changes to unfair laws.
- Provide worker education on interpreting legislation and policy to uphold individual
rights of service users.
- Ensure service users are informed of their rights and give consent for any interventions.
- Enable individuals to access legal advice if rights are threatened.
- Support own profession’s lobbying and advocacy work.
- Undertake ongoing self-education to maximise own competencies and knowledge.
- Research new innovations and service user-led experiences and initiatives.
- Support minority group activism.
, - Document failures of agency to uphold the rights and interests of service users.
- Provide well documented evidence of discrimination to internal reviews, external
accreditation and public inquiries.
Consequentialism/Utilitarianism
Consequentialism assumptions (key beliefs)
The same assumptions as deontology ethical theory, and additionally:
- Ability of humans to feel joy and pain entitles them to moral status.
- People are rational beings
- The rule of law represents societal good.
- The good is reflected in the majority view or action.
- Morality is located in the consequences of decisions and actions.
Consequentialism claims
- The right thing to do is that which maximizes the good.
- Good outcomes are more important than how the outcome is achieved.
- Greatest good for the greatest number should be pursued.
- Weigh up the pros and cons of actions in terms of outcomes.
- General welfare of people valued rather than the individual's rights.
- Question asked is “what would serve the greatest good?”.
- Justice as equal opportunity and equal distribution of resources.
Consequentialism practice strategies and implications
Many of the practice strategies noted for deontology theory, and:
- All actions can and should be considered in terms of their likely outcome and benefit for
all involved.
- The goal of ethical practitioners is to have positive effects and outcomes.
- Develop and apply a public interest test.
For example, in the right to Information Act 2009 it relates to whether the release of information
being requested. To determine the balance of the public interest, you must follow the process:
1. Identify any relevant factors and disregard them.
2. Identify any relevant public interest factors favoring disclosure and non-disclosure; and
3. Balance the relevant factors favouring Disclosure and nondisclosure
4. Decide whether disclosure of the information would, on balance, be contrary to the public
interest.
Consequentialism limitations
All the limitations relevant to deontology theory, and:
- Minority groups or members may be silenced or sacrificed for the majority.
- Powerful individuals and groups can unfairly influence what is the public good.
- The public good will be contested and not necessarily clear.
- The public interest test, therefore, can be biased to serve political interests.
- Presumes the public will support promised outcomes with no regard for minority groups
and the environment.
