Ethics & Work Practices: Human Services

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OTA 105878
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Defining Ethics & Human Services

Ethics or moral philosophy defends, systemizes & presents concepts of right & wrong. A major branch of philosophy, its main aim is to ascertain the right conduct necessary to what is considered a good life. Socrates taught that the life worth living is guided by ethics, a set of moral conducts where knowledge & virtue equate to true happiness. Ethical theories are generally divided into 3 categories - normative, applied & meta-ethics. Normative ethics are seen as a set of moral theories that study what makes an action right or wrong. Utilitarianism is a form of normative theory and so is contractarianism. Normative ethics are usually used by institutions to guide their policies and procedures to clear out the desired ethos, say for example, in a working environment. Applied ethics is sometimes seen as a branch of normative ethics that seeks to apply itself to real-life situations particularly because applied ethics uses utilitarianism in seeking to solve ethical & moral dilemmas in real life situations together with case-based reasoning or Kantianism, a form of ethical theory developed by Sociologist Emmanuel Kant that reasons that the right or the good action is what a virtuous person or social agent will choose at any given situation; the right action of course is based on the person's sense of right & wrong and understanding of morality. At times applied ethics gets a healthy influence from religion-based morality system like Christianity especially in the US. US History for example showed that Christianity influenced the early American ideals of freedom, nation & independence as well as equality. Meta-Ethics on the other hand is concerned more on 'meanings', 'narratives' of what makes an ethical judgement right or wrong - in short meta-ethics seeks to explain the verisimilitude of an ethical or moral system as to what it means more than its practical applications. Meta-ethics looks at the semantics, epistemology & ontology of an ethical system and looks at it critically to discern its varied properties & ascertain its relevance.

Human Services is usually a set of social services provided to society or a community by its elected government as part of the social contract between the government & the people."Human service workers shoulder the responsibility of assessing and managing client risk, safety and autonomy," (CPCS 2002).While some members of the community can choose to hire private practitioners for certain 'Human Services' just because they feel that seeking in the private sector & paying more equates to better services or quality of work (i.e. healthcare, dental care, mental health services), Human Services in most civilized countries of the world form a part of a government's social responsibility to its people & is backed as a natural right almost always in a state or nation's constitution. So what constitutes Human Service? In the United States, the Department of Health & Human Services is a government agency that operates both at a federal & a state level to "serve the most vulnerable ...