From rules to encounters

• Summary: This article addresses what theories, methods and procedures practitioners ought to adopt in order to resolve ethical problems in service practice. Several approaches are identified from the literature but none are entirely credible in themselves or sufficient for reliably founded ethical decision-making. The article argues that addressing ethical issues should rather be understood as a hermeneutic process. Gadamer’s historically informed hermeneutics is appropriated to lend insight into this process.

• Findings: Approaches to ethical decision-making identified from the literature include: a) approaches based on induction from published ethical codes; b) decision-making algorithms; c) recourse to formal tribunals; d) implicitly following routine agency practices. The place of ‘reflection’ in decision-making is also considered. Taking inspiration from writers in medical ethics, it is proposed that resolving ethically problematic situations should be considered as a hermeneutic process demanding a repeated and progressive quest to reconcile the detailed particularities of the case with complex, competing and evolving moral imperatives. The hermeneutic process proceeds both in relation to the case and in relation to the constantly developing standards and expectations of the professional community and the wider society, and so may be understood as a form of double hermeneutic.

• Applications: Practitioners facing ethically difficult situations should envisage the issue as an incompatibility of frames of meaning, and apply a hermeneutic analysis in pursuit of a ‘merging of horizons’ to address conflicts of ethical views.