Ethics, Dilemmas and Strategies for Social Work Practice

Ethics is an important issue of social work. Guiding principles for practitioners which base on the ethics are applied to solve many problems, but they might lead to some ethical dilemmas or conflicts such as clients' freedom and their welfare, clients' rights and practitioners' rights, general identities and professional identities of practitioners, ethics of social work and them of other systems. Practitioners must find the best strategy from some ‘good’s or ‘bad’s to solve the ethical dilemmas. Chinese social workers have the obligation to insight the traditional Chinese culture, to integrate individualism and collectivism, to comprehend traditional culture, foreign ethics and principal ideologies of contemporary China from the eclecticism perspective. In all, eclecticism of the helping ideas of traditional culture and the ethics of professional social work is the base of success of social work in China.