Social Work Values and Ethics: A Futurist Approach for Faculty, Students, and Practitioners

Overview: Ethics courses often focus on current issues and concerns. This session introduces futurism, using foresight, imagination, and creativity to envision new possibilities for social work values and ethics. Participants will learn to employ futurist ethics by engaging in experiential exercises that they may use with students, academic colleagues, and practitioners.Proposal text: Futurism refers to studying the future in order to anticipate, analyze, and prepare for coming changes. Futurists do not make predictions about what will happen in the future, but rather, explore what might happen. They use foresight strategies to consider and describe how particular phenomena may change or evolve (Association of Futurist Professionals, n.d.). Within the profession of social work, futurist ethics means exploring how social work practice and ethics might evolve and perhaps, should evolve. Rather than assuming social work ethics will remain the same, futurism asks, “What do we want the future of social work ethics to be?” and “How can we move the theory and practice of social work forward with moral goodness?”

Futurist ethics can help social work practitioners, agencies, and associations to be proactive in promoting ethical visions and addressing ethical issues on the horizon. By engaging various stakeholders in explorations about the future of social work practice and ethics, we can envision preferred futures and develop ideas about how to bring such futures to fruition; we can also anticipate unwanted futures and imagine ways of preventing them (Nissen, 2020a). By using moral imagination, we lay the groundwork for a future that aspires to the highest values, virtues, and ethical principles of the profession.

One process for engaging in futurism is scanning the current situation and recent trends (Association of Futurist Professionals, n.d.). We can then extrapolate to consider various possibilities, opportunities, and challenges that we may encounter in future years. In terms of the future of social work ethics, consider the following trends:

• Greater use of technology in social work practice, including the use of social robots, chatbots, and artificial intelligence (AI) (NASW et al., 2017; Persson et al., 2021).

• Greater emphasis on interprofessional practice (Interprofessional Education Collaborative, 2016; Schot et al., 2020).

• Increased backlash and opposition to social justice and antioppressive education and practice (Patterson et al., 2021; Pettit, 2021).

• More opportunities for social work practice across state and national borders (Association of Social Work Boards, 2020).

This presentation will provide participants with a framework for engaging students, colleagues, and practitioners in constructive and aspirational discussions about social work value and ethics using the tenets of futurism.