Social Work and Morality

While we may assume that social work practitioners and researchers oppose policies that threaten civil rights and produce inequities among marginalized populations, we've done little to establish, using research, how the complex relationships to the facts of oppression and our sometimes-divergent values influence our work, our strategies and projects, our interventions, and our policy proposals. Everyday social workers confront human conduct in its ethical dimensions: the rightness and wrongness of our actions, our social responsibilities and obligations, the kind of persons we think we are (and our clients) or aspire to become. And still there are many researchers who insist on a separation between fact and value, even assigning their study to different disciplines. In recent years, many in the human sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology) have carefully explored the complex issues and sometimes-deep flaws in our reasoning about the fact/value distinction. And beyond these longstanding debates, there is resurgent (a torrent) interest in the study of morality among the human science disciplines.

And there can be no doubt that social workers and researchers must be acquainted with these recent and important debates; and not only about how our research is informed by our values (i.e., values-informed research) but also how facts, values, and strategies are continuously and recursively recombined, in theory and in practice. We are a value-thick field not only because we are in daily contact with practice realities beyond our capacities for value-neutrality; but also because we are driven by our own sometimes troubled and troubling values. Value choices are baked into the very questions we ask, the problems we prioritize, the funding streams that differentially valorize what matters most to researchers; and not often to those we serve.

It is less clear how to subject the ‘normative' and ‘evaluative' to research, that is, what might be call research-informed values. In short, how do we produce knowledge that is fully informed by our values and values that are fully informed by our knowledge? This might be described as a social work of morality. In this roundtable, presenters will consider: 1) why social work needs to be concerned about the morality/values debate; 2) recent debates in the human sciences and morality; 3) how social work has taken up varied positions on morality; 4) what critical realism has to offer to the values/morality debate; and 5) why social work must consider how human flourishing relates to moral questions. In our current political climate, here and abroad, we face complex and troubling value conflicts, even over the relevance of science, and widely divergent value positions, all related to the themes of this conference: indigenous rights, environmental justice, race, gender and sexual oppression. Roundtable presenters and discussant will engage participants to imagine what a social work of morality would look like and how such a project could be realized.