Chapter 2

Each student will select one question to answer. You must include the page number in the book which assisted you with your answer. Each student will comment on two of their peers responses. No two students may answer the same question.


1. Discuss the assertion: social workers who focus on their clinical work “ought not be expected to do more,” since they are attending to their client’s well-being (or beneficence).

2. Discuss the ethical rationale for the argument that direct-service work should include policy-sensitive and policy-related activities and dimensions? Enumerate specific sensitivities or actions that fall under each of these categories.

3. Discuss the merits of Rawls’ central argument that the “rational person” would likely choose to live in a society like Sweden rather than the United States when operating under the "veil of ignorance."

4. Review Policy Advocacy Challenge 2.1. Can social workers sometimes help their clients participate in the social-policy process?

5. How do deontologists and utilitarians differ in their approach to ethical reasoning? Name one strength and one weakness of each approach.

6. A dilemma in ethical reasoning is that people often encounter two (or more) “partly-good options” so that choices are often not clear cut. Discuss this reality with respect to the merits of active euthanasia or any other controversial policy issue.

7. Discuss some ethical dangers or pitfalls we might experience if we base our ethical choices entirely on consequences, such as funding only those medical procedures that have excellent chances of helping citizens become tax-paying citizens.

8. Compare and contrast the assumptions of radicals, liberals, and conservatives with regard to government involvement in the economic and social order.

9. With reference to Policy Advocacy Challenge 2.4, discuss some reasons why staff do not divulge to outside authorities the wrong doing of some tenet Healthcare psychiatrists.

10. Discuss the assertion that social workers do not act ethically when they seek to advance their own, or their profession’s self interest.

11. Discuss the assertion that social workers are more likely than other people to emphasize social justice, fairness, and honesty when they participate in policy practice.

12. Discuss how social and medical research has encouraged a revolution in policies dealing with people with schizophrenia during the past 40 years.

13. Discuss the divergent policy recommendations that Richard Hernstein and Claude Fischer would support as a result of their different findings in The Bell Curve and Inequality by Design.

14. Discuss why it is critical that social workers work to change the composition of government. Compare and contrast policies that emanated from a relatively conservative and a relatively liberal presidency or governorship to illustrate the importance of ballot-based advocacy.