Engaging with the Crooked Timber of Humanity: Value Pluralism and Social Work

The field of social work ethics is changing. While more established positions, such as utilitarianism and deontology, continue to influence social work thinking and practice, emergent approaches are taking hold, leading to a radical examination of social work as an ethical discipline. To contribute to this unfolding debate, this article examines Isaiah Berlins notion of value pluralism and its contribution to social work. The argument proceeds by summarising and categorising some of the traditional and emergent theories shaping social work according to metaphors of the ohead' (the justice-oriented, rational approaches) and the oheart' (the grounded, particularistic and care-focused approaches). Berlins value pluralism is then adopted to contend that social work needs to hold both ohead' and oheart' ethics in a vital equilibrium to generate the ethics of the ohand' (i.e. the practical response to contested areas of need) and the ofeet' (the commitment to change and well-being). These metaphors are then mapped on to a decision-making process and applied to the fraught area of adoption without parental consent.