Category: Ethics, Social Work Category: Ethics, Social Work (show less) Other: Virginia Other: Virginia (show less)

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (HON) framework (Maslow, 1943) arranges human functional life areas (needs) into a five-level pyramid, where our most basic needs (i.e., physical and security needs) lying at the foundation, would have to be met first before we could be sufficiently prepared to manage our “higher-level” needs (i.e., social and ego needs). Over time, HON has become social work’s primary theoretical lens for engaging in motivation-based behavior change counseling as well as for providing a starting point for client intervention but his theory can also useful as an ethical approach to social work practice because Maslow viewed psychoeducation itself as an effort to “produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society” (Maslow, 1964).  We believe that HON can be used as a tool to inform and guide our own ethical decision-making in situations when our social work values come into conflict – both with those of other professionals we work with and within our own NASW code – so the our actions can advance Maslow’s ideal of the “good society” by guiding us to the ethical choice that meets the client’s most basic needs rather than fulfills a purposefully pursued or implicit ideological agenda.

We posit that by laying out the competing values and interests of all of the involved parties in an ethical dilemma, a social worker using the HON tool would be best positioned to identify the most basic functional life area among those priorities, thereby determining the most ethical course of action to take that upholds our own NASW code of ethics. Using case studies focusing on current major controversies in the social contract here in the United States, we will walk participants through a process where issues such as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and undocumented immigration can be considered through an ethics-based HON lens where meeting basic needs becomes the prioritizing guide for determining which course of action to take and then discuss its potential merits for application in real world social work settings...