Solicitude and Solitude: Care, Ethics, and the Vulnerability of Front-Line Social Work in the US

The moral terrain of caring in a social work context is often treacherous. During ethnographic fieldwork with front-line workers at an organization providing services for unhoused individuals in a U.S. city, respondents articulated a relational intimacy required in client care. However, they also recognized the limits of their endurance and their need for distance from others. In this article, we suggest that Paul Ricoeur's "little ethics," in contrast to first-person or poststructuralist approaches to ethics, captures these workers' experience more fully and allows us to see the forging and negotiation of moral relationships of care and shared vulnerability more clearly.