Essential Ethics for Social Work Practice

Recipient of Significant Lifetime Achievement in Social Work Education Award 2025 by The Council on Social Work Education

Essential Ethics for Social Work Practice is designed to empower social work students with the foundational knowledge, skills, critical thinking, affective self-awareness, and responsiveness that they will need to “Demonstrate Ethical and Professional Behavior,” the first competency in the Council on Social Work Education’s Educational Policies and Academic Standards. Students will not only learn how to apply the National Association of Social Work’s Code of Ethics, but also how to use a range of ethical theories and approaches to critical thinking to identify and manage challenging social work issues.

When social work students begin their professional education, it is important to understand how to put social work values and ethics into practice. This textbook provides students with guidance on how to implement core ethical duties including promoting social justice, practicing in a competent manner, fostering human relationships, ensuring clients have access to services, and maintaining high standards of honesty and integrity. Students will also learn how to engage with supervisors, coworkers, clients, attorneys, and others to discuss conflicting obligations and manage ethical dilemmas.

This textbook includes rich case illustrations and examples of critical thinking using a range of practice situations. In particular, students will learn how to apply deontology (duty-based ethics), teleology (consequence-based ethics), virtue ethics, and narrative ethics to explore ethical issues and determine appropriate solutions. Students will also learn how to strengthen their moral fortitude, the strength to do what is right even when pressure or constraints from others are making it difficult to act in an ethical manner.