Ethics of responsibility

One of the characteristics of modernity is the dominance of binary divisions. This applies not only to our ways of categorizing the world, but also to the way in which we characterize ourselves and our relationships with others. This creates a boundary, a barrier, between our self and the other. We are separate, isolated individuals, living in different worlds of constructed ‘identities’, and to cross that barrier, to inhabit the world of the other, becomes problematic, rather than natural. By creating this self/other binary, by emphasizing individual identity, and because we tend to see binary categories as necessarily in opposition, we have, in turn, created a certain kind of ethics, deeply rooted in Western modernity. Ethical responsibility, in this description of the world, is difficult other than to those who exist on our side of the ocean or fence. This chapter takes up and discusses this very notion of ethical responsibility and the ways in which it has been traditionally conceived and applied in social work, and then considers (an)other way that might extend the current discourse of ethics within social work towards one that can encompass those beyond that boundary.