Hoefer-7-8-25-2

Social Work Ethics, Values, and Advocacy Practice } 23

The Code of Ethics states, “Social workers challenge social injustice” (NASW, 2017, Ethical Principles). The code elaborates on what this principle means by declaring, Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people. Social workers’ social change efforts are focused primarily on issues of pov erty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice. These activities seek to promote sensitivity to and knowledge about op pression and cultural and ethnic diversity. Social workers strive to ensure access to needed information, services, and resources; equality of oppor tunity, and meaningful participation in decision making for all people. The NASW code explicitly mentions some of the main, concrete issues for social workers who want to work for greater social justice. The concept of “social justice” is difficult to define definitively, however, because it means different things to different people. Making matters difficult for social workers who want to follow the Code of Ethics’ call to work for social justice is that the code does not define the term. Other references are available, however, and step in to help us understand the term more fully. The Social Work Dictionary (Barker, 2014), for example, defines social justice as “an ideal condition in which all members of a society have the same basic rights, protections, opportunities, obligations, and social benefits” (pp. 404– 405). Finn and Jacobson (2008), in The Encyclopedia of Social Work, give a wide range of perspectives on social justice. They provide a capsule review of utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, racial contract, human rights, processual, and capabilities perspectives. Van Soest (1995) discusses three views of social justice: Legal justice, the first view, is concerned with what a person owes society; commutative justice, the second view, is concerned with what people owe each other; and distributive justice, the third view, is concerned with what society owes its members. The third view is the type of social justice most often discussed in a social work context. The relative importance of these three types of justice fuels many policy debates.

Distributive Justice

One of the most important elements of the struggle over social welfare policy is the difference in interpretation of the term “distributive justice.” Distributive justice “concerns the justified distribution of benefits and burdens in society. . . . The distribution of benefits and burdens is a cooperative social process structured by various moral, legal, ideological, and cultural principles” (Iatridis, 1993, p. 62). Thus, politics, “the process of distributing stuff,” is the way that distributive justice either is or is not made a reality; therefore, the