Ethics and ethical care

In his classic work The Language of Morals, the philosopher R.M. Hare (1952) argued that a ‘moral statement’ is one that prescribes a course of action – it is recommending that something should be done rather than just expressing the feelings of the speaker. Ethics is therefore about how human beings should treat each other, and it covers matters of rights, responsibilities and well-being. However, ethics is not only about finding the right response to a given dilemma; it is also about justifying the decisions and choices made. According to well-established theories, actions can be judged as right or wrong according to either their consequences (as in utilitarian theories) or according to conformity to ethical rules or duties (as in deontological theory). A further position is ‘virtue ethics’, which holds that it is the character of the moral agent that matters – a good person performs good actions, which have been learned and acquired through experience, practice, role models and good examples (Rachels and Rachels, 2015).

Regardless of the theoretical stance, ethics has to be capable of application to practical situations. This was the Victorian tradition, for example, with Bentham's concern with prison reform and J.S. Mill's campaign for women's suffrage. More recently, the interest has focused on defining the place of ethical behaviour in professional responsibilities – about how people in professional roles ought to behave. Banks (2012), for example, identifies three clusters of complex values that should guide professional behaviour, all of them germane to adult social care:

• • respect for the dignity and worth of all human beings – respect each human being as an individual, treat all people as equally valuable and respect the right to self-determination;

• • promotion of welfare or well-being – the obligation to bring about benefits for service users and for society more generally; and

• • promotion of social justice – the obligation to remove damaging inequalities.

The literature on the ‘ethics of care’ focuses on the responsibilities inherent in situations where individuals are defined in terms of their relationships with others. For Held (2006), this involves valuing rather than rejecting emotion – sympathy, empathy, sensitivity and responsiveness are the sorts of emotions that need to be cultivated.