Introduction

Dr Banks has written a compelling and cogent piece on the need to reclaim a progressive vision of ethics for social work. Particularly significant are her calls to broaden the definition of ethics by recognising relationships as the bedrock for ethical behaviour and politicising our understanding of ethics. She does an excellent job of linking the New Public Management (NPM) with contradictory trends in ethics that can have either liberatory or reactionary potentials. Her exhortation of the types of actions and qualities that can reclaim ethics as situated and political is a road map for an agenda aiming towards social justice.

The inadequacies of a principle-based codes approach to ethics

There are several amplifications and additions that I would like to provide. The first relates to Dr Banks’ point that one direction ethics has taken in social work has been a ‘conformity to prevailing social norms and regulations’ , usually bolstered by a reliance on principlebased codes of ethics. This canonical view of ethics focuses on the responsibility of the autonomous individual, in an impersonal and context-free way, assuming that a set of guidelines can be universally provided that will lead to right action. It has been suggested that the traditional orientation is problematic because it privileges sameness and repeatability (Walker, 1998, p 53) and eviscerates the very historical context, collaboration and relationality necessary to ethical functioning that Banks promotes. And, ‘code-oriented moralities tend to normalize principle because rather than continually questioning proper conduct they express a desire to find the true ground of our being’ (Orlie, 1997, p 195). I think what is meant by the ‘true ground of our being’ is the essence of who we ought to be as moral actors. Since that is not possible, a code of ethics based on a fixed list of principles can lead to dogma, coercion and the abdication of personal morality and responsibility (Asquith and Rice, 2005).

Ethical trespass

Furthermore, there are theorists who claim that no matter how good our intentions and actions, there will be ethical trespass. This term was coined by Hannah Arendt (1958) and has been expanded by Melissa Orlie (1997). These theorists are referring to the harm humans perpetrate, not from malevolent aims but due to ‘our participation in social processes and identities’ (Orlie, 1997, p 5).