Virtues and the Ethical Social Worker less,unfaithful, arrogant, unjust, and so on(Anscombe, Hursthouse, 2003) It is thus false to claim that virtue ethics does not provide any rules for action. It supplies a great many. As Hursthouse (1999)says, Not only does each virtue generate a prescrip tion-do what is honest, charitable, generous-but each vice a prohibition-do not do what is dishonest, uncharitable, mean (P.16) Even in a pluralist and culturally divided society like ours where there is wide disagreement about the application and force of moral judgments, the situation may be less desperate in the professions. Thus, Pellegrino(2008 )argues, a higher level of consensus, a more widely shared moral tradition, is avail- able to the professions and professional ethics than in society at large and this makes the virtues both possible and necessary to them Medicine and social work today may lack the classi cal and medieval understanding of the virtues as grounded in a philosophical anthropology based in natural law. But, as the NASW Code of Ethics(1999)puts it, "Professional ethics are at the core of social work. "Social work as a profession has a telos in that it serves primarily the good and well-being of the client, as the good of the patient is agreed to be the primary end and he importance of de gc professions--where the duties of practitioners are spelled out as part of the professions self-definition, and enforced by the profession on its members--reflects, among other things, the need for a common understanding within a profession of its agreed purpose and mission. Notwithstanding the limitations of such codes of duties and the deontological theory underlying them-if indeed it can be called a theory at all since the force of its moral"must"is unexplained( Coope, 2006)the common sense of purpose they reflect suggests that integration of the virtues has a better chance of success in professional than in general ethics. At the same time the collapse in the twentieth century of the most widely used and longest lasting virtue- based approach to professional ethics, that of Hippocrates, suggests both the difficulty of the task and the need to rebuild the moral philosophy of the professions on a different basisVirtues and the Ethical Social Worker 91 reckless, unfaithful, arrogant, unjust, and so on (Anscombe, 1958; Hursthouse, 2003). It is thus false to claim that virtue ethics does not provide any rules for action. It supplies a great many. As Hursthouse (1999) says, "Not only does each virtue generate a prescrip￾tion—do what is honest, charitable, generous—^but each vice a prohibition—do not do what is dishonest, uncharitable, mean" (p. 16). Even in a pluralist and culturally divided society like ours where there is wide disagreement about the application and force of moral judgments, the situation may be less desperate in the professions. Thus, Pellegrino (2008) argues, a higher level of consensus, a more widely shared moral tradition, is avail￾able to the professions and professional ethics than in society at large, and this makes the virtues both possible and necessary to them. Medicine and social work today may lack the classi￾cal and medieval understanding of the virtues as groxmded in a philosophical anthropology based in natural law. But, as the NASW Code of Ethics (1999) puts it, "Professional ethics are at the core of social work." Social work as a profession has a telos in that it serves primarily the good and well-being of the client, as the good of the patient is agreed to be the primary end and telos of medicine. The importance of deontological codes to all professions—where the duties of practitioners are spelled out as part of the profession's self-definition, and enforced by the profession on its members—reflects, among other things, the need for a common understanding within a profession of its agreed purpose and mission. Notwithstanding the limitations of such codes of duties and the deontological theory imderlying them—if indeed it can be called a theory at all since the force of its moral "must" is unexplained (Coope, 2006)—the common sense of purpose they reflect suggests that integration of the virtues has a better chance of success in professional than in general ethics. At the same time the collapse in the twentieth century of the most widely used and longest lasting virtue￾based approach to professional ethics, that of Hippocrates, suggests both the difficulty of the task and the need to rebuild the moral philosophy of the professions on a different basis