How do you understand social work values?
We are deluged with claims in the news and in our political culture about facts, alternative facts, or fake news. Not just in our political culture, however; truth claims made by science are in doubt and sometimes for good reasons, as we discover that scientists have invented or fabricated findings. Truth is in doubt. How do we distinguish between Truth and Fact? For example, in September of 2017, Charles Blow reported on a Department of Justice finding that Trump’s tweet about President Obama’s wiretapping Trump Tower was, not surprising, a “total fabrication.” His provocative headline—In Defense of the Truth—focused attention on the relationship between truth and belief. We can assume that President Trump believed his assertion to be true. Harry Frankfurt, in his book on Bullshit, makes an important distinction between lying and bullshiting. He argues that they are similar in several ways. First, they both want you to believe they are telling the truth; both want to get away with something. Whereas liars engage in conscious acts of deception, spread untruths, know the truth and accept the distinction between what is truth and false, attempt to hide (that’s what they want to get away with), bullshitters do not consciously deceive; they don’t know or care about the truth and that’s what they want to get away with. They ignore or reject the distinction between truth and falsity altogether. For Trump it is clear that the distinction between lying and bullshitting has been altogether lost. He does not know when he’s bullshitting and when he’s lying.
He asserted his belief about Obama as fact. In this example, it is the conflation of truth and belief that is most troubling. We should be most anxious and lose sleep worrying about false beliefs that stand in for truth.
It is NOT troubling that we should question, doubt, or subject to reason the relationship of truth to belief. Assertions can be true but we need a means to know when they are and when they are not. Questioning is not the problem. It is conflation that simplifies and often deceives: belief = truth. Over the last 300 years the role of institutionalized science has been to make truth claims accountable to something other than mere assertion. The claim that the earth was flat did not make it true.
There is an equally troubling conflation between fact and value. Are values just beliefs? How are beliefs generated? Where do they come from? What makes our values ‘valuable’. Just because we value X does not make X an ought. For instance, we value nature because we need energy and nature is the primary source; we transform natural resources into valuable energy for our well being. Yet just because we value fossil fuels, does not mean that we ought to burn them. When we don’t pay attention to what climate science tells us about burning fossil fuels, then we have conflated value with fact; we value fossil fuels regardless of the negative factual effects on the physical environment. And sometimes, fact/value conflations hide a deeper, hidden value; in this case, profits made from burning fossil fuels are likely more valued than the planet. This is called fact/value conflation. The opposite, however, is equally troubling. To separate fact from value suggests that values are subjective, opinion, emotional, and not therefore accountable to facts. Objective facts can be scientifically studied while opinions, well, “need to be kept to ourselves. “
There have been many and complex debates in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology on fact/value separation. If you’re interested, you will find a summary of this debate in an article we published in 2014. Here we only want to make the claim that social work researchers often act like values “are for the ethicists and not the researcher.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
Indeed, we are a profession saturated with values and this has contributed to a long history of values-informed research. Our objects of study are clearly associated with professional values: for instance, vulnerable and suffering individuals ought not to be left suffering without transformative interventions. Social Work cut its teeth by associating values with its work. And though this may justify our existence (i.e., why social work matters, it does not justify what we do). The latter requires what we have called research-informed values. We see facts as rooted in but not reducible to values; and in using a critical realist science paradigm, we seek to avoid conflating the two, or separating them.
Why is it important that values be research-informed? It’s simple: ask yourself, “where do social work values come from, if not from a science?” Are they just asserted? Are they just believed? Or, are they simply scripted?: written into the story. One side is EVIL and the other is GOOD. For example, why value government or government service? Is it valued because government is necessary for social and individual flourishing and well-being? On what basis should we make a value claim for expanded government? Why have government? Is this just a belief and value assertion, or is it a fact?: a fact essential to living in communities and environments? Can we use science to show that government is a fact rooted in but not reducible to values? Do social workers value a government role in protecting its values? What do we mean?
For example, do we; 1) protect women and children from violence; 2) recognize, respect, and defend ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation, and; 3) address the inequities due to extreme economic inequality. How do we come to place a value on these? Or, are they the necessary and factual conditions for social justice?
It would seem that our 6 NASW core values suggest so: service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. Yet, why these 6? Why not 7 or 8? And even so, what makes the list more than just an assertion of value, as you see above for this religious organization? The Evangelical Alliance organization (in the image above) has justice and service as a core value.
Or, what about a corporation like the Wegman’s grocery. Wegman’s corporate website (https://www.wegmans.com/about-us/company-overview/store chain) highlights the chain’s core values: The Wegman Values
We care about the well-being and success of every person.
High standards are a way of life. We pursue excellence in everything we do.
We make a difference in every community we serve.
We respect and listen to our people.
We empower our people to make decisions that improve their work and benefit our customers and our company.
Photo by Oleg Magni, https://www.pexels.com/@oleg-magni
What makes social work different from these religious and business organizations? For the latter, values are mostly derivative, that is, they come from norms. It’s a simple and seductive logic: values derive from norms, norms derive from society or social situation, and value judgments are therefore relative to and rooted in the social environment. According to this reasoning, the researcher, the practitioner, the client, the dominant political group, or gender, can be heard saying emotionally charged statements like: “those are your values, not mine”; “that’s just a value judgment”; and, “don’t impose your values on me.”
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In short, things are never bad because they are. They are only bad because the NASW code of ethic says they are bad. Yet, in social work we see that in fact “bad things” happen to people, not because they are said to be bad—that is discursively produced—but because they are bad and while we cannot imagine our colleagues in social work using the logic outlined here, it is not all that uncommon. Moreover, the emotion behind these statements is highly charged. Emotions are so tied up with our values that to imagine fact/value separation, as if values are subjective and not rational, is a misrecognition. Values are motors of action. Normative value claims + emotional charge = Action. Thus, values can be causes. And if values can be causes, then we must study these causes and when we do, the origin of social work values would squarely land within the realm of science. For example, is government to be valued? What are the causal effects of limited government or expanded government? To answer these difficult questions requires research-informed values.
No doubt in social work the most important questions are normative. They are about the conditions necessary for human dignity, for flourishing, and for well-being (Nussbaum 2012, Sen, 1993). Indeed, it is in the nature of our social work practice that we ask what is GOOD or BAD about what is happening to our clients (and workers), how our clients suffer or flourish, how they are treated, and how we might act in their best interest to promote flourishing (see our blog post on passing a negative judgement). We can’t escape normative judgments. So what would a social work science of values look like? It has two key components: a critical social work science and a moral philosophy. In future posts we will look closely a these.
References
Longhofer, J., & Floersch, J. (2014). Values in a science of social work: Values-informed research and research-informed values. Research on Social Work Practice, 24(5), 527-534.