A Moral Basis for the Helping Professions Essay -- Employment Careers

Our consideration of moral issues in the helping professions should go beyond decision-making in particular cases. We need a more basic set of moral attitudes that can provide the context for making these decisions, and which describe the sort of person the helping professional needs to be. The helping professional needs to be able to perform a large number of supererogatory actions. We can compare helping professionals to both saints and good parents. The work of Sarah Ruddick on the virtues that inform maternal practice can be of great help to us here. She characterizes the kind of emotional and moral attitudes that exemplify good mothers as preservative love. The attitudes that make up preservative love-humility, attentive love, holding and humor-share some common ground with the qualities of saints. The helping professional is in an unusual position in the sense that who he/she is has a strong influence on the efficacy of treatment. Morality in the helping professions needs to ta ke this into account. To be a good helping professional involves a commitment to develop into the right sort of person. The issue of morality in the helping professions is much discussed at present. Most recently, it has come up in connection with issues involving the abuse of trust in relationships of unequal psychological and emotional power. It is a good thing to raise these issues. From the clergy accused of abusing young people to therapists taking advantage of their positions to sexually or emotionally abuse their clients, actions which were formerly concealed through the vulnerability of the client and the authority of the professional need no longer be kept secret. However, this, along with issues such as involuntary incarceration and the u... ...ehavior are not immediately accessible to the will. To become a person capable of preservative love requires a strong desire to do so and a willingness to do what is necessary to develop into the sort of person who can manifest preservative love. We cannot become unselfish, humble and attentive in the same way that we can decide to follow a moral rule. We require both education in virtue and transforming self-knowledge. Notes (1) Sarah Ruddick, "Maternal Thinking" in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot ( Rowan and Allanheld, Totowa, New Jersey, 1983) p. 240. (2) Ruddick, op.cit., p.213 (3) Ruddick, op.cit., p. 217 (4) Ruddick, op.cit., p. 223 (5) See Bonnelle Strickling, "Self-Abnegation" in Feminist Perspectives: Philosopohical Essays on Method and Morals, ed. L. Code, S. Mullet and C. Overall (University of Toronto, 1983).