the delivery of services? If this were achieved it would perhaps chime well with the Major-Blair citizenship ethos that wants to see public servants doing acts not merely by simple rule-following, but because they are persons disposed to do acts well towards others(Major, 1999, ch. 23). Kantian and utilitarian ethics to a degree rely, respectively, upon the mechanical application of rights-claims and adherence to duties, or upon the comparison of nticipated outcomes. Virtue ethics makes foundational the qualities of ones charac- ter which are manifest in ones actions. Taking this along with a claim that virtue is a cultural product, we may see that a virtue-based ethics cultivates through experience, reflection, understanding and judgement a way of "living a good lifein plural social domains. Such an account is clearly within striking distance of an existential pheno- menological approach, but because of the very strong link with Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy it does not quite connect to the ideas of Sartre or Heidegger(cf Each of us is a citizen who ought to practise good conduct in regard of others as an aspect of being human, and not as a function of ethical or organizational imperat- ives. However, we do not believe that social workers possess some prior unitary concept of the good that they purposefully pursue en bloc each day they go into work. A little ethnography would probably bear this out. A generalized, if somewhat temporary, notion of the good acceptable to the community may result across time from the totality of activities by the SSD--it may make a positive contribution to the social welfare function. The idea, though, that workers have a rational plan for doing good which fits with an established and distinct notion of a common good rather than doing a job consisting of various kinds of actions, many of which are reactions to changing circumstances, invites the comment that this would be a case of the triumph of hope over experience. The pressing question becomes: what account of morality can be given if the link between means and ends is often weak precisely because social work is a contingent non-linear task? How can a worker do good if their world is inconsistent? What price universalizability'of morality under the complex indeterminate world of social work? To reiterate, it is our view that virtue ethics enables us to characterize what it is to be moral in a world subject to frequent revision. To connect a virtue ethics to social wor ne n question thus: what is the relation of morality to experience? Could the latter, in some way, produce the former? To fashion an answer to these questions will involve exploring the links between virtues, their cultivation, judgement and community. Some accounts of virtue ethics make virtues, as intrinsic qualities, logically prior to moral outcomes. Having already argued that the field of social work is complex and variable, we shall try to give being pointless without a prior determination of the goals of human flourishing, aTg g n account of virtue ethics applied to social work which resists the claim of virtu which needs prior value of the poses of action may work inside a discrete social system, for example social services, but this tends to make workers''virtues' functional imperatives of the routines of the organization independent of the broader human question of the good life, and how parts of its development relate to the whole. It may be that social work actually has no need1018 Graham McBeath and Stephen A. Webb the delivery of services? If this were achieved it would perhaps chime well with the Major-Blair citizenship ethos that wants to see public servants doing acts not merely by simple rule-following, but because they are persons disposed to do acts well towards others (Major, 1999, ch. 23). Kantian and utilitarian ethics to a degree rely, respectively, upon the mechanical application of rights-claims and adherence to duties, or upon the comparison of anticipated outcomes. Virtue ethics makes foundational the qualities of ones charac￾ter which are manifest in ones actions. Taking this along with a claim that virtue is a cultural product, we may see that a virtue-based ethics cultivates through experience, reflection, understanding and judgement a way of ‘living a good life’ in plural social domains. Such an account is clearly within striking distance of an existential pheno￾menological approach, but because of the very strong link with Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy it does not quite connect to the ideas of Sartre or Heidegger (cf. Hodge, 1995). Each of us is a citizen who ought to practise good conduct in regard of others as an aspect of being human, and not as a function of ethical or organizational imperat￾ives. However, we do not believe that social workers possess some prior unitary concept of the good that they purposefully pursue en bloc each day they go into work. A little ethnography would probably bear this out. A generalized, if somewhat temporary, notion of the good acceptable to the community may result across time from the totality of activities by the SSD—it may make a positive contribution to the social welfare function. The idea, though, that workers have a rational plan for doing good which fits with an established and distinct notion of a common good rather than doing a job consisting of various kinds of actions, many of which are reactions to changing circumstances, invites the comment that this would be a case of the triumph of hope over experience. The pressing question becomes: what account of morality can be given if the link between means and ends is often weak precisely because social work is a contingent non-linear task? How can a worker do ‘good’ if their world is inconsistent? What price ‘universalizability’ of morality under the complex indeterminate world of social work? To reiterate, it is our view that virtue ethics enables us to characterize what it is to be moral in a world subject to frequent revision. To connect a virtue ethics to social work one might put the question thus: what is the relation of morality to experience? Could the latter, in some way, produce the former? To fashion an answer to these questions will involve exploring the links between virtues, their cultivation, judgement and community. Some accounts of virtue ethics make virtues, as intrinsic qualities, logically prior to moral outcomes. Having already argued that the field of social work is complex and variable, we shall try to give an account of virtue ethics applied to social work which resists the claimof virtues being pointless without a prior determination of the goals of human flourishing, that is which needs prior value commitments. The point here is that a pre-setting of the pur￾poses of action may work inside a discrete social system, for example social services, but this tends to make workers’ ‘virtues’ functional imperatives of the routines of the organization independent of the broader human question of the good life, and how parts of its development relate to the whole. It may be that social work actually has no need