Anarchy, state, and utopia

Conclusions and Recommendations, are particularly interesting in view of the controversies aroused by the Warnock Report. Many of the recommendations contained here are similar to Warnock's (for example, concerning the legitimacy of AID children, the need for a licensing authority to supervise the work ofAID and IVF centres, etc), but others are at odds with the corresponding Warnock recommendations. In general, the authors place higher value on the family as an institution than did the Warnock Committee and display a much livelier awareness of the possible social dangers of the new techniques. One weakness of the book is that since its authors are approaching these topics from the standpoint of social scientists, their recommendations for legislative action which surely must be based on properly ethical considerations, not merely sociological ones seem devoid of any satisfactory rational support. For example, they concede that experimentation on human embryos is an objectionable practice, since 'the material acting as the subject of the experimentation is a human being at the beginning of its individual development' (p 178); but the practical recommendation which they make concerning this practice is disappointingly feeble:

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/12/3/165.full.pdf

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Summary This paper considers the validity of evidence-based practice in social work. It critically examines various underlying presuppositions and assumptions entailed in evidence based practice and draws out their implications for social work. The paper is divided into three main parts. Following a consideration of the background to the develop ment of evidence-based practice and a discussion of its key organizing concepts, the paper goes on to examine its underlying scientific assumptions. It shows that evidence based practice proposes a particular deterministic version of rationality which is unsatis factory. Evidence-based practice is derived from ideas based on optimal behaviour in a planned and systematically organized environment. By concentrating on 'epistemic processes' involved in planning and psychological inference it is claimed that cognitive heuristic devices are the determinants of decision making and not evidence. The heur istic model suggests that decision making is indeterminate, reflexive, locally optimal at best and based on a limited rationality. It is argued that social workers engage in a reflexive understanding and not a determinate or certainty based decision-making pro cess based on objective evidence. Complex phenomena such as decision making are not rationally determined or subject to 'control'. The paper goes on to suggest that the tendency to separate processes into 'facts' and 'values' implicit in evidence-based procedures undermines professional judgement and discretion in social work. The third part of the paper focuses on the connection between method and ideology in evid ence-based practice. It examines how the evidence-based preoccupation with positiv istic methods and determinate judgement entraps social workers within a mechanistic form of technical rationality. This framework restricts social work to a narrow ends means rationality such that only certain forms of action are considered legitimate. This feeds into the rhetoric of new managerialist strategies aimed at developing a perform

Some considerations on the validity of evidence-based practice in social work

The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age

This chapter begins by helping the reader to grasp the comprehensive nature of Nathaniel Berman's work, and the subtle perspective that he brings to the legal world when it is confronted by the passions to which nationalism and colonialism give rise. In his work, cultural Modernism interacts with the international law of Danzig; the fantasies surrounding Jerusalem with the concrete political and legal projects for that city; internationalist dreams with the institutional programs for Bosnia and Palestine; and the most industrious international bureaucracy with the most creative and audacious legal imagination. Berman makes use of all of the notions in the course of his work on "imperial ambivalences". His goal is to show that we cannot interpret the international law of the interwar period without understanding it as a site of Modernist cultural construction and contestation - rather than as a mere adjunct to, or reflection of, cultural developments external to it. Keywords:colonialism; cultural Modernism; imperial ambivalences; international law; Nathaniel Berman; nationalism

A Critical Introduction

Summary This article argues that in a complex socio-political world, social work ethics needs to re-cast the moral identity of the social worker in terms of virtue ethics. We review virtue theory’s Aristotelian foundations and criticisms of Kantian and utilitarian theory and show how they apply to social work. Subsequently we offer an account of a virtuebased social work that questions the validity of several models of practice currently fashionable. Virtue theory emphasizes the priority of the individual moral agent who has acquired virtues commensurate with the pursuit of a revisable conception of the good life—the well-being of all in a defined community. The virtues are the acquired inner qualities of humans—character—the possession of which, if applied in due measure, will typically contribute to the realization of the good life or ‘eudaimonia’. The role of the virtuous social worker is shown to be one that necessitates appropriate application of intellectual and practical virtues such as justice, reflection, perception, judgement, bravery, prudence, liberality and temperance. This ‘self-flourishing’ worker,

Virtue Ethics and Social Work: Being Lucky, Realistic, and not Doing ones Duty

In this article we argue that current reform proposals coming from Robert Pinker and others are challenging the universalist premises of generic social work. Pinker et al. argue that social work should, for the sake of efficiency and performance, be a connected set of specialist activities. This ‘determinate dispersal’ which we recognise as falling within the remit of postmodern strategies, we contrast with the far more libertarian ideas of the noted post-modern theorist J.F. Lyotard. Thus we site the political and cultural meanings of Pinker's ideas between generic social work which upholds ideas of universal ethical values and universal provision, and those of Lyotard whose anti-foundationalism proposes a radically heterogeneous society with no central value-structure.



We express our concern that the ‘new specialist’ remit may allow too much power to the social worker. Thus we have considerable sympathy for Lyotard's call for a radical anonistics – a field wherein the inequalities of power between say, a worker and her client, to some extent can be redressed.

Social work, modernity and post modernity

SUMMARY This paper addresses the Kantian theory of the subject which is found in contemporary social work discourse on ethics and values. It is argued here that the Kantian idea of persons as (i) rational, (ii) autonomous, and (iii) ends-in-themselves is wholly inadequate to the social work doctrine of 'respect for persons'. To show this, we counterpose a Foucauldian view of history, moral codes and theory of the person, and the meaning this can have in the social worker-client relation. This alternative reading claims that social work is essentially a political practice which is constructed by various discursive and institutional strategies of power. Therefore, it is suggested that social work needs a political reading of its own discourse. To this end we outline a Foucauldian micro-political analysis of the social work 'subject' or person as a point within a field of discursive-knowledge based strategies. Though many social work training courses involve some study of moral or social philosophy one may doubt whether students, on what is a highly

Graham B. Mcbeath

Papers

Virtue Ethics and Social Work: Being Lucky, Realistic, and not Doing ones Duty

Social work, modernity and post modernity

A Political Critique of Kantian Ethics in Social Work

Post-critical social work analytics

Cities, Subjectivity and Cyberspace