Editorial

Abstract

Just before this final issue of the year was being collated we were able to welcome a new addition to the editorial team. Our new colleague is Heidrun Wulfekühler, professor of ethics in social work at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hannover, Germany. Heidrun has published widely in German and English, including valuable contributions to this journal in the last few years. She has held numerous academic and research positions at the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück, Faculty of Social Work and at the Wilhelms-Universität Münster Faculty of Philosophy. She also has experience of social work in Germany and the USA, working with a variety of service users. The editorial team are looking forward to working with her, and further developing our plans for the future of the journal. This final general issue of the journal contains some stimulating practice papers as well as thought-provoking academic papers. It is unusual but of interest that four papers (two academic papers and two practice papers) all originate in Aotearoa New Zealand – a country that has made headlines for good practice during the pandemic. However, the first paper in this issue by Merlinda Weinberg The Supremacy of Whiteness in Social Work Ethics is a careful but powerful examination of a topic to which both academics and practitioners need to pay close attention. The paper explores the minimisation of racism as an ethical issue in the field of social work (a topic also evident in the Aotearoa New Zealand papers), and is illustrated by two research studies with racialized practitioners. Weinberg also explores the influence of Kant on traditional approaches to ethics in social work, arguing that there is a difficulty with universal principles as interpreted in social work ethics in the Global North, with potentially harmful consequences. The paper offers a more focused and specific study, complementing an earlier paper in this journal on a similar topic – ‘decolonizing white care’ – by Shona Hunter, (Hunter, 2021). Kathryn Muyskens, a US political philosopher with special interests in the politics of health and has contributed the second paper entitled A Human Right to What Kind of Health? She offers a link to the first paper insofar as it is also critical of assumptions about the universality of universal rights to health, contending that an explicitly political and pluralistic account would more appropriately help guide international and cross-cultural interventions on behalf of health. She concedes the importance of an enforceable minimum standard of health, but asserts that it also needs to admit a large degree of cultural flexibility. Muyskens aims to clarify what makes up that minimum standard in a way that avoids unjustified parochial bias, while avoiding the danger of undermining the force of a widely accepted universal human right. In their paper, Koen Gevaert, Sabrina Keinemans & Rudi Roose examine the problem of prioritising in youth care in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The article’s analysis of Prioritising Cases in Youth Care: An Empirical Study of Professionals’ Approaches to Argumentation, shows that workers take a personal stance on the criteria for assigning priority where there are scarce resources. The authors’main conclusion is that the prioritisation process illustrates the moral-political core of decision-making practice, even (perhaps especially) when it appears to be just a technical issue. It raises the issue of whether professionals are as aware as they might be of their own processes of argument and interpretation.