Ethical principles for community social work practice
Abstract
The complexity of intervention contexts means that the professional practice of social work faces new challenges and ethical problems requiring something beyond the application of methods or techniques. A specific ethical framework is necessary to guide social workers in community projects: it should be constructed through interdisciplinary dialogue between social work and philosophy.
Three ethical theories were selected for examination in this article due to their significant contributions to community social work: a) deontological ethics; b) teleological ethics; and c) ethics of care. These theories were used as a basis for proposing four ethical principles that are useful in community intervention contexts: respect, commitment, empowerment and social justice.
The proposal presented in this article hence comprises two interrelated elements: the theoretical framework, made up of three ethical theories that contribute to an understanding of the situations that people go through and how they experience them; and a principlism-based approach that involves combining the four ethical principles to respond to the particular features of the contexts where they are going to be applied.
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