Virtue ethics and social Work 1019 of an ethical perspective, but inasmuch as this goes against an important strand within the history of olation of th question how ought one to live?', then we should be concerned with bringing our encultured self into a right relation with the social whole. This calls for a genuine ecolo gical perspective that examines the richness of play between the micro-, the meso-and the macro-levels of society. In regard of this, it is a pity that government and educators in the last few years have been so keen on reducing the broader social science elements of vocational training at the same time as there has been talk of reviving"civics'in schools. It was perhaps no accident that the eighteenth-century political economy of Ferguson, Hume and Smith linked an uncertain universe to an analysis of the interac- tion between the political, the economic, the social, the moral and the cultivation of manners (Winch, 1978). The recognition that human behaviour was not causally abso- lute, obliged an emphasis upon evolving the best way of doing things likely to lead to outcomes conducive to the public good. Once more we are led to recognize the signi cance of an analysis in terms of emergent cultural-moral patterns over that of scient ific prediction Everitt and Hardiker (1996) noted that, in the middle 1980s one or two writers in social work began to consider whether an Aristotelian notion of the good, defined in terms of the virtues, might be helpful as a source of ethics in social work. How- ever, such attempts fell stillborn from the presses. None the less these few writers vere to be congratulated for their prescience inasmuch as they were trying to intro- duce a moral theory which was only just being revived by professional philosophers such as Alisdair MacIntyre who saw that his'communitarian political theory was underpinned by virtue theory(MacIntyre, 1981). By the middle 1990s there were still only one or two who were considering virtue as a component of social work ethics, notably Richard Hugman and David Smith(1995), and Sarah Banks(1997/ 2001). That an 'Aristotelian perspective in social work ethics was not taken up was perhaps testimony to the persistent drone of Kantianism and utilitarianism or, out of the depths of the 1970s, a mix of the two(cf CCETSW, 1976)and to the ubiquity of an'ethicsof anti-discrimination which, though pitched at a low level of critical analysis, none the less was given equal status to a higher order moral thinking inspired by Aristotle, Kant and Mill. The easily bought discussion of an ethics of anti-discrimination reduced humanity to narrow sociologically-driven categories of race, gender and disability. What looked like a way into ethical analysis was actually a closing off of discussion as most social workers and students saw the moral obliga tions towards these groups as self-evident and therefore they largely wanted to engage in considerations of practice instead of developing the virtue of providing philosophically informed reasons for action. Social work traditions themselves have dictated the relevance of some ethical bases and not others, and the absence of virtue theory from any of social works history or cognate disciplines in part explains its' continuing absence. The weakness of a rationale for developing a virtue perspective in a discipline other than philo- sophy--and even there it was lacking until the 1980s--has quickly extinguished its first glimmerings. However, in the last few years a virtue literature has been circulat- (Crisp and Slote, 1997; Statman, 1997a)as has a post-Thatcherite political larVirtue Ethics and Social Work 1019 of an ethical perspective, but inasmuch as this goes against an important strand within the history of humanity, that is a practical as well as theoretical contemplation of the question ‘how ought one to live?’, then we should be concerned with bringing our encultured self into a right relation with the social whole. This calls for a genuine ecolo￾gical perspective that examines the richness of play between the micro-, the meso- and the macro-levels of society. In regard of this, it is a pity that government and educators in the last few years have been so keen on reducing the broader social science elements of vocational training at the same time as there has been talk of reviving ‘civics’ in schools. It was perhaps no accident that the eighteenth-century political economy of Ferguson, Hume and Smith linked an uncertain universe to an analysis of the interac￾tion between the political, the economic, the social, the moral and the cultivation of manners (Winch, 1978). The recognition that human behaviour was not causally abso￾lute, obliged an emphasis upon evolving the best way of doing things likely to lead to outcomes conducive to the public good. Once more we are led to recognize the signi- ficance of an analysis in terms of emergent cultural-moral patterns over that of scient￾ific prediction. Everitt and Hardiker (1996) noted that, in the middle 1980s one or two writers in social work began to consider whether an Aristotelian notion of the good, defined in terms of the virtues, might be helpful as a source of ethics in social work. How￾ever, such attempts fell stillborn from the presses. None the less these few writers were to be congratulated for their prescience inasmuch as they were trying to intro￾duce a moral theory which was only just being revived by professional philosophers such as Alisdair MacIntyre who saw that his ‘communitarian’ political theory was underpinned by virtue theory (MacIntyre, 1981). By the middle 1990s there were still only one or two who were considering virtue as a component of social work ethics, notably Richard Hugman and David Smith (1995), and Sarah Banks (1997/ 2001). That an ‘Aristotelian’ perspective in social work ethics was not taken up was perhaps testimony to the persistent drone of Kantianism and utilitarianism or, out of the depths of the 1970s, a mix of the two (cf. CCETSW, 1976) and to the ubiquity of an ‘ethics’ of anti-discrimination which, though pitched at a low level of critical analysis, none the less was given equal status to a higher order moral thinking inspired by Aristotle, Kant and Mill. The easily bought discussion of an ethics of anti-discrimination reduced humanity to narrow sociologically-driven categories of race, gender and disability. What looked like a way into ethical analysis was actually a closing off of discussion as most social workers and students saw the moral obliga￾tions towards these groups as self-evident and therefore they largely wanted to engage in considerations of practice instead of developing the virtue of providing philosophically informed reasons for action. Social work traditions themselves have dictated the relevance of some ethical bases and not others, and the absence of virtue theory fromany of social works’ history or cognate disciplines in part explains its’ continuing absence. The weakness of a rationale for developing a virtue perspective in a discipline other than philo￾sophy—and even there it was lacking until the 1980s—has quickly extinguished its first glimmerings. However, in the last few years a virtue literature has been circulat￾ing (Crisp and Slote, 1997; Statman, 1997a) as has a post-Thatcherite political lan-