Examining Ethical Dilemmas in Legal and Professional Contexts

This essay will focus on values and ethical issues, it will identify and critically explore the legal context and the ethical dilemmas arising in practice for the worker in case study. The essay will define ethics, how we get ethics, the reason we have code of ethics and why it is important to social work practice. The essay will give a brief summary of case study. The essay will define what a dilemma is, and will use theoretical concept and the arguments contained within the case study, debates and arguments.

Mr and Mrs Finch, aged 91 and 86, were admitted to residential care by the night duty team, on by the referral of warden of the sheltered accommodation where they live. The couple were reported as being unable to cope with every day life. There was pressure from the family, the warden, and senior social worker colleagues, for them to be admitted permanently to residential care. When the trainee social worker visited them.

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The couple were suffering from impaired memory function.

They could not (comprehend) Understand why they had been admitted to residential care, but were categorical that they wanted to return home. The trainee social worker felt the couple should be allowed to return home on the basis of their individual right to choose. In the reality of significant changes that have taken place in the practice of social work throughout its history, social workers have continued to embrace a set of values central to the profession. There have been both challenges to and constructive changes in the value base of the profession, but the key elements of this foundation have endured.

Although there has been considerable stability in the core values of the profession, it would be a mistake to conclude that the day-to-day ethical issues that social workers encounter have remained static. To the contrary applications of core values in social work have undergone substantial change over the years in response to social, political, and economic developments. The subject of ethics and values in social work is broad in scope. It encompasses three distinguishable and related sets of issues. The relevance of the profession's value base to its overall mission, goals, and priorities is the first concern.

Second concern would be the ethical decisions and dilemmas that the social workers encounter as they carry out their professional duties, and lastly, it relates to practitioner misconduct and the enforcement of ethical standards in the profession. Value of Social Work The profession of social work historically has been committed to enhancing the welfare of people who encounter problems related to poverty, mental health, health care, employment, shelter and housing, abuse, aging, childhood, hunger, and so on.

As the profession has evolved, it has continually stressed the need to attend both to the needs of individual clients and to the ways that the community and society respond to these needs. Thus, there has always been a simultaneous concern in social work for individual well being and the environmental factors that affect it. According to Pumphrey, individuals' values are "formulations of preferred behavior held by individuals or social groups. They imply a usual preference for certain means, ends and conditions of life, often being accompanied by strong feeling" (Pumphrey, 1959).

Rokeach offered what has become a classic definition of value in The Nature of Human Values: "an enduring belief that a specific mode or end state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode or end state of existence" (Rokeach, 1973). From this point of view, one must distinguish among ultimate, proximate, and instrumental values. Ultimate values are broadly conceived and provide general guidance to a group's long-term aims. In social work, values such as respect for people, equality, and non-discrimination might constitute ultimate values.

Proximate values are more specific and suggest shorter-term goals. In social work they might take the form of policies related to welfare clients' right to health care or affordable housing, or psychiatric patients' right to refuse certain types of treatment. Finally, instrumental values specify desirable means to desirable ends. In social work respecting clients' right to confidentiality, self-determination, and informed consent might be considered instrumental values. ( Banks 2001:p 57) Common Base

Pumphrey offered a comprehensive typology of social work values, placing them into three categories of value-based objectives. The first focuses on the relationship between social work values and values operating in the culture at large with respect to, for example, social justice, social change, and basic human needs. The second category focuses on internal relationships within the professional membership, for example, the ways in which the profession interprets and implements its values and encourages ethical behavior.

The final category focuses on social workers' attempts to understand and respond to clients' values (Pumphrey, 1959). Levy on the other hand, also provided an important classification of the profession's values. The first of Levy's three groups includes "preferred conceptions of people" such as the belief in individuals' inherent worth and dignity, capacity and drive toward constructive change, mutual responsibility, need to belong, uniqueness, and common human needs.

The second group includes "preferred outcomes for people" such as the belief in society's obligation to provide opportunities for individual growth and development; to provide resources and services to help people meet their needs and to avoid such problems as hunger, inadequate education or housing, illness, and discrimination; and to provide equal opportunity to participate in molding the society.

Levy's third group includes "preferred instrumentalities for dealing with people" such as the belief that people should be treated with respect and dignity, have the right to self-determination, be encouraged to participate in social change, and be recognized as unique individuals (Levy, 1973). Personal Values A significant portion of social work literature focuses on the need for social workers to clarify their own personal values. Practitioners' personal values influence their views of clients, intervention frameworks and strategies, and definitions of successful and unsuccessful outcomes.

Workers' personal values also affect their willingness to endorse and act on the profession's value base. For example, a worker's personal views about the ethics of abortion are likely to have a significant bearing on the worker's response to a pregnant adolescent who is considering abortion. Also, willingness to comply with relevant statutes and agency policy and support of for their position on abortion would be affected by the worker's personal views. The emphasis placed on specific core values has varied considerably throughout social work's history.

For example, around the beginning of the 20th century, the emphasis was on ways clients create and contribute to their own problems. Social workers of that era, influenced in part by the methods of the charity organization societies, frequently viewed clients' problems as evidence of character defects rather than as evidence of flawed communities or social policies that did not respond adequately to human needs (Davis, 1967). Thus, the values of concern to social workers at the turn of the century often centred on a client's morality or lack of virtue.