Changes in the role of an educator and of a social worker; new social, ethical, moral and religious

challenges for social workers nowadays

The reflection on the place of ethics in social work and social aid may be reduced to three groups of problems:

1) first, we mean to expose the meanings of the values basic for the implementation of the general mission, aims, and priorities in social work and social aid. In his social work the social worker encounters various problems related to misery, hunger, orphanage, loneliness, and harm. Among the basic values we may list: dignity of the person and his or her right to respect, the basic needs of all citizens, and their equal chances to satisfy those needs;

2) another group of ethical issues is the introduction of ethical standards to the profession of social worker. The mere standards connected with the instruction of social workers are insufficient.

We need also ethical standards for the profession of social worker.

This can make a foundation on which to construct the ethos of a professional group and determines its place and essence among the remaining professions;

3) eventually, ethical reflection deals with the dilemmas which social workers face in their work. This sphere refers especially to the practice of social work, as it is always necessary to make ethical choices.

Now in our considerations on the ethics of a social worker we may take into account two basic dimensions of his professional activity:

– on the one hand a social worker is a representative of an institution which in practice is supposed to implement the postulates of equality and social justice, responsibility and obligation that a democratic state has towards its citizens;

– on the other his or her daily professional activity is to work with the other person, weak, hopeless, poor, sick, lonely, and to respect his rights to dignity, freedom, and self-government.

Professional support is, in other words, to enter the circle of postulated values and realised values. The postulated aims of social aid are in themselves values which may be analysed on the theleological and axiological levels. The practice in which the social worker is involved and the decisions he or she makes have an ethical

character because they deal with values connected with the aims of social institutions and the aims of social work. This kind of decisions calls for responsibility, therefore one may say that responsibility is an immanent feature of the social worker’s job – a professional helper. We can say then the thesis, that: Responsible helping is ethical helping, and ethical helping is responsible helping.

Simply speaking, responsibility is answerability. The responsibility seems inseparable from human existence. This is very important in a democratic society. And for that reason responsibility in a democratic society, now in an age of transition, is complicated.

Education in democracy must be concerned with developing in man a quality of responsibility characterized by a personal inner control (Romein, 1955, p.XI).

Scientific and technical progress have entirely changed our relationship to the world of nature. Scientific discoveries and their limits are not only able to support the human beings, but they also carry threats for their life and for life in general. The person becomes a threat to himself. The traditional ethics of responsibility is based on the idea of human solidarity that enables people to give in their consciences a response representative of mankind (I. Kant) (Paturet, 2003, 110-111).

The current status of technology seems to pose a requirement that we may find in I. Kant as a “personalistic norm”: “The human person should never be a means of this action, but always its goal.”

Thus contemporary ethics has a duty to predict possible threats.

Culture becomes more and more virtual and artificial. It becomes a territory of manipulation, including the sphere genetics.

Inasmuch as traditional responsibility focused more on what has been done, educational responsibility should – like contemporary responsibility that we need – concentrate more on the future.

Therefore the human beings would be responsible for the past, and in relation to the past they would become responsible for the future.

This unfolds for us the context of educational responsibility. The educator is not only responsible for his student, but his responsibility reaches forward to the future. The teacher does not only provide most recent knowledge on particular subjects, but also tends to show their possibilities and threats. The responsibility turned to the

future should mean that life truly human in this world is possible.

In educational practice this does not mean only teaching, but entails the requirement to be committed on behalf of the future (Paturet, 2003, 112-114).

Ethics was often conceived as normative ethics and dealt with what is morally good and what is morally evil, and what we should do. At the moment there is a certain novelty that can be found in the approaches of, among others, Emanuel Levinas or Roman Ingarden.

They show ethics as a science about responsibility. Responsibility is understood as the central ethical human experience. It is also worth going in this direction in our constructing of the ethics of a social worker.

Responsibility is a concept difficult to define. Here I rely on the writings of E. Levinas and R. Ingarden.

For Levinas responsibility is and “essential, basic, and fundamental structure of subjectivity”(Levinas, 1991, 55).

Responsibility determines the essence of manhood, it is the phenomenon of man-person. The task of developing responsible persons is presented, therefore, as one of the basic problems of twentieth and twenty first century education in Europe (Romein, 1955, p.XII).

According to Levinas, responsibility is irremovable and it is an inalienable right and duty of man, his destiny: “Responsibility is what falls only on me and which, as a man, I cannot reject” (Levinas, 1991, 57).

Now Roman Ingarden distinguishes types of responsibility, treating moral responsibility as only one of its dimensions. Its other dimensions, among others, are the following: metaphysical responsibility (bearing responsibility), psychological responsibility (taking responsibility), moral responsibility (taking someone into account), moral responsibility (responsible action). In relation with this Ingarden writes as follows: “One must above all distinguish four different situations in which the phenomenon of responsibility occurs:

1. Someone bears responsibility for something, or in other words is responsible for something. 2. Someone takes on responsibility for something. 3. Someone is taken into account. 4. Someone is acting with responsibility” (Ingarden, 1987, 73-74).

One may therefore ask as Tischner asked and sought to answer:

Why does R. Ingarden make responsibility a “key to the interior of the human being”? The answer that he gives is the following: “The human being is a creature directed to values. If that is the case, we must say that it is in the sense of responsibility that the truth of man is most essential. It distinguishes man and binds him with the world. It testifies to his freedom and his direction towards values, and it is in responsibility that man expresses most fully his trust to his own existence which does not let him ‘lose his time’” (Tischner, 1981, 49).

3. Ethics and the responsibility of the role of social