Ethical Evaluation of Social Services and the Need for Ethics Committees

Abstract

The central ethical problem: we propose to treat the importance of establishing committees of ethics (of research) in social work organizations. We refer here to the ethical analysis of individualized service plans and intervention strategies that case managers apply to beneficiaries, the central ethical problem being represented by the analysis of conditions of ethical acceptability of social intervention. Argumentative structure: the ethical evaluation of services should consider the principles of beneficence, autonomy, non-maleficence and justice, as treated by Beauchamp and Childress (2001), as a variant of the principles stipulated in the Belmont report (1979). We will treat tangentially the need for ethical supervision, which refers to the effective supervision of the organization's ethical practices. The paper has an argumentative character, the central premise being that intervention in social work is a form of action research and thus it should be based on the same rules of research on human subjects. The second premise is that according to which as medical assistance, social intervention changes the quality of life of the beneficiary, and this change requires ethical evaluation in order to analyze the conditions in which ethics is perceived and accepted as defining part of the social intervention.

Conclusions: Both theoretical and practical arguments, presented in the paper, in favour of the establishment of committees of ethics, are acceptable and we could not find counterarguments to invalidate them.

Keywords: committees of ethics, ethical principles, informed consent, autonomy, supervision of ethics

JEL Classification: I1