Recognition and Social Justice: A Roman Catholic View of Christian Bioethics of Long-Term Care and Community Service

Abstract

Contemporary Christian ethics encounters the challenge to communicate genuinely Christian normative orientations within the scientific debate in such a way as to render these orientations comprehensible, and to maintain or enhance their plausibility even for non-Christians. This essay, therefore, proceeds from a biblical motif, takes up certain themes from the Christian tradition (in particular the idea of social justice), and connects both with a compelling contemporary approach to ethics by secular moral philosophy, i.e. with Axel Honneth's reception of Hegel, as based on Hegel's theory of recognition. As a first step, elements of an ethics of recognition are developed on the basis of an anthropological recourse to the conditions of intersubjective encounters. These conditions are then brought to bear on the idea of social justice, as developed in the social-Catholic tradition, and as systematically explored in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All (1986). Proceeding from this basis, aspects of a Christian ethics of community service with regard to long-term care can be defined.

Keywords:

• Christian social service
• community service
• long-term care
• (ethics of) recognition
• social justice

I. INTRODUCTION

A characteristic theme recurs throughout the New Testament Gospel stories: Jesus encounters a blind man, a dumb man, a paralyzed man; he feels compassion, has mercy on such patients, turns toward them and heals them. A certain impulse thus seems to emanate from the needy person, implying a request to be healed. This leitmotif of a Jesuanic way of acting and of Christian care for one's fellow beings can also serve as the leitmotif for a Christian ethic of long-term care. Yet in this essay I shall not be arguing biblically. Instead, I shall try to reconstruct this motive empirically and systematically: Humans always encounter each other with certain expectations, the fulfilment or nonfulfilment of which becomes a normative, an ethical, criterion. While intending to offer a systematic account later, I want to begin with some historical explanations that serve as a basis on which to relate an anthropology of intersubjectivity to aspects of an ethical concept of recognition. The combination of both, of an anthropology of intersubjectivity and of an ethics of recognition, offers, in my opinion, a helpful paradigm for translating the aforementioned biblical leitmotif of concern for ones fellow being as a response to his specific needs into an ethically systematic account. The question of how these considerations can be brought to bear on the political level will subsequently be addressed. Here I shall follow the idea of (social) justice, as developed in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All, and the principle of subsidiarity which was defined mainly in the papal encyclica Quadragesimo Anno.

Within the context of a Christian ethics of community service, devout members of the church, parishes, and church-related welfare institutions acquire a special role, special importance, and an ensemble of special task. On the basis of the first two—complementary—sections of my essay, I shall summarize these tasks against the background of the diaconical mission of the churches.

II. ANTHROPOLOGY OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY—ETHICS OF RECOGNITION

Early modern social philosophy reflects on man's emergence from the ties imposed by the social structure of his political community. This community in turn had formerly been perceived as a (quasi self-evidently) moral community, in which the bonum commune and the bonum proprium were intertwined. Prior to this emergence, political science had been understood as engaged in defining the moral order that would ensure that any person's life would take a good course. Based on a strong conception of the good life, fitting laws and institutions had to be developed. The legal system was to be oriented toward the common good and had to be promulgated accordingly by the political authorities: “omnis lex ad bonum commune ordinatur” (Aquinas, 1901, I–II q. 90 art. 2); the law is “rationis ordinatio ad bonum commune, ab eo qui curam communitatis habet, promulgate” (Aquinas, 1904, I–II q. 90 art. 4). Thus politics enabled the zoon politikon/animal sociale [et politicum], who was thought to depend on the moral order of the polis or civitas, to develop the social vocation implied in his human nature.

This Aristotelian conception became the subject of doubt mainly due to economic structural changes, which at the same time initiated the disintegration of traditional structures and moral ties. In socio-philosophical accounts, man was now increasingly conceived as individual or as subject. Machiavelli portrayed man as a self-centered being, bent upon strategies for profit maximizing, engaged in permanent competition, and living under conditions of pervasive mutual mistrust (see. Machiavelli, 1992).

This new paradigm of a struggle for self-preservation also provided the basis of Thomas Hobbes' contract theory (see. Hobbes, 1996). For Hobbes, man distinguishes himself first of all through his capacity for foresight. Yet provision for oneself becomes necessarily precarious once one encounters others who are intent upon securing their own well-being. Everybody is compelled to enlarge his own power resources in order to be able to resist possible future attacks by others. As is well known, the consequence is the bellum omnium contra omnes as characteristic of the state of nature in Hobbes' theory of social contract. After Hobbes, the idea of such a contract, conceived as a (hypothetical) agreement among self-interested state-of-nature agents, and as presenting an escape strategy against the destructive implications of the general struggle of all against all, developed into a dominant philosophical paradigm.

As a result, what was previously a “state community” is no longer a moral community; instead it degenerates into a cooperative network for mutual profit maximizing. Competing socio-philosophical accounts subsequently questioned the concept of man as a merely self-interested individual and instead emphasized man's embeddedness into social contexts. To be sure, these new approaches could also welcome the changes introduced by modernity—individualization, growing functional differentiation of subsystems, de-traditionalization of the conduct of life. Yet they all, in addition, highlighted man's social nature. They thus endorsed man's dependence on the community. This view was developed most persuasively by Fichte. In his view, humans can become “human only amongst humans.” The very term man “does not refer to any single individual but to the genus” (Fichte, 1966, p. 347).

For G. W. F. Hegel, a central philosophical problem was how to relate individuality to communality (as point of departure), individuation to association (as process), and individual freedom to social integration (as goal), and how to render each of these compatible with their respective counterparts. In his view, society as the goal of the individual's development involves an organic whole, which implies the mutual recognition of each individual's specificity. Obviously—not least from our contemporary perspective—that goal faces a number of major difficulties. It is with a view to solving those difficulties that Hegel develops his theory of recognition (Hegel, 1967a; 1967b; 1969; 1986a; cf. 1986b). This development integrates the background situation of the dawn of modernity (as invoked above) with Hegel's analysis of his own time, which discounted the Hobbesian theory of natural man as involved in a struggle for self-preservation as dramatically misleading. Instead, Hegel returns to topoi from the classical understanding of man as integrated into a social framework of shared moral assumptions. Hegel aims at establishing a vital unity of general and individual freedom, which is realized in society or in the state (Hegel, 1986b, p. 471). According to this account, public life does not result from a mutual limitation of the scope of private liberties but—on the contrary—it offers the very chance for realizing, rather, for fulfilling individual freedom (compare Honneth, 2003a, p. 24). Very much in contrast to the concept of a primary struggle for self-preservation, Hegel concentrates on intersubjective recognition and the social integration of individuals.

Clearly, Hobbes's and Hegel's theoretical approaches rest on contrary anthropological assumptions. In his Leviathan (1996), for example, Hobbes describes man as a self-moving automaton. Endowed with the capacity for foresight, man uses his dealings with other men for increasing the scope of his own power. Those fellow men remain strangers, constituting a potential threat to his welfare. Hegel, by contrast, follows Aristotle's concept of human nature as endowed with a social predisposition that fully realizes itself in the political community of the polis (Aristotle, Politeia, I 2 [1252a24–1253a40]). Starting from this conception, Hegel develops his political philosophy as a system encompassing the preconditions for individual self-realization. Here individual freedom and social obligations are not opposed to one another. Instead, they are integral constituents of one and the same process, which results in the intersubjective recognition of each subject's individual characteristics within the moral community of the state: “The state is the reality of concrete freedom,” as Hegel later puts it in his Philosophy of Law (Hegel, 1986c, p. 406). To be sure, a long process must take place in order to get from each individual's dependency on intersubjective recognition to the realization of that recognition within a political community. Yet in the present context, this process does not have to be delineated in detail. What interests us here is only the possible contribution of community service, or of Christian social service, to the achievement of that goal. How could religious communities, parishes, and welfare associations contribute to the recognition of the single individual, thus alleviating the modern and postmodern “pathologies of individual freedom” (Honneth, 2001, p. 49) and the “malaise of modernity” (Taylor, 1998)? For it seems as though the historical development just described is mirrored within our contemporary political and social situation. On the one hand, we welcome individualization, ongoing differentiation, and man's accelerated detachment from the restrictive influence of social obligations. Yet, on the other hand, we are uneasy when we realize that there are losers in this process and that it gives rise to social pathologies. If indeed the underlying problem arises from moral injuries, which are caused by refused intersubjective or social recognition, then, on the systematic level, we need an ethics of recognition, and, on the practical level of community service, we need sophisticated strategies of recognition (cf. Spiess, 2005). The position these remedies could take within an elaborated concept of a general subsidiary social policy, as integrated into an ethics of social justice, must now be specified.

Anthropology of Intersubjectivity

Our starting point for an ethics of recognition is, first of all, a careful anthropological recourse to the conditions for the possibility of a person developing his own self-image, self-confidence, and personal integrity (cf. Honneth, 2003a, p. 310; cf. Trevarthen, 1998, pp. 35–46). Such an ethics must, second, consider the practical conditions for such positive regard for oneself (cf. Dornes, 2005). The human conduct of life is generally characterized by the fact that individuals can attain a positive relationship to themselves only via mutual recognition (cf. ibid., pp. 26–27; cf. Honneth, 1990).

This can be verified especially well—positively as well as negatively—in view of humans' neonatal development (cf. Dornes, 2005, pp. 5–19; cf. Meltzoff & Moore, 1998). Ever since the famous empirical investigations by Meltzoff and Moore (1977), the complex interaction between infant and attachment figure has been explored with growing intensity (Honneth, 2003c, p. 16; cf. Meltzoff & Moore, 1999, pp. 9–12; cf. Hobson, 2003, p. 126). It is this interaction through which the infant is constituted as a social being. Already shortly after birth the infant establishes communicative contact to the attachment figure, a contact that is characterized by imitation (Honneth, 2003c, p. 16; cf. Meltzoff & Moore, 1999, pp. 9–12; cf. Hobson, 2003, p. 126). In doing so, the infant doesn't merely imitate mimicked or gestured acts that are directly provided, such as sticking out of tongue, pinching of eyes, or certain shapings of mouth (cf. Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). The infant also uses that reservoir of already appropriated mimicked and gestured acts in order to create his own gestures, which it expects the attachment figure to imitate (Trevarthen, 1998, p. 30). The infant expects other persons to respond to its utterances, i.e. gestures, mimics, and vocalizations, in a way that expresses favorable recognition. Even if the interaction fails, the infant feels only misunderstood, not ignored (see Dornes, 2005, p. 8). It derives the fundamental experience of being directly recognized by its attachment figure as needy, lovable and precious creature. It experiences immediate intersubjective appreciation.

It is not altogether far-fetched to transfer the anthropology of intersubjectivity verified in the special case of neonatal socialization to the social world in general (cf. Honneth, 2003c, pp. 10–27). Humans encounter each other in the context of specific, ever presupposed expectations of recognition. These expectations of intersubjective recognition offer the possibility of reassurance through the other as a condition for the possibility of developing a positive relationship to oneself. Yet these expectations also always present the danger of moral injury: the possible experience of disrespect, which can destroy a person's identity completely (cf. Honneth, 1990, p. 1045). It is a characteristic feature of modernity that identity is no longer defined socially. Each individual is confronted with the task of “discovering” his identity for himself (Taylor, 1992, pp. 28; pp. 31f.), and to realize his respective authenticity, originality, self-fulfilment and self-optimization (cf. more in detail e.g. Taylor, 1989, pp. 3–107): “The genesis of the human mind is in this sense not monological, not something each person accomplishes on his or on her own, but dialogical” (Taylor, 1992, p. 32). Because “there is no such thing as inward generation, monologically understood,” we have to develop our identity on the basis of this “dialogical character” of human life in dialogue with “significant others” (Taylor, 1992, pp. 32f. with reference to Mead, 1934). Even the ‘languages,’ i.e. the devices for expression that we can use for the dialogue (language, gestures, art, love, etc.) are appropriated via interchange with others. The close link between identity and recognition is based on this prerequisite of intersubjective communication. We can only develop our individual identity if we experience recognition in the intersubjective dialogue.

Our project of developing an ethics of recognition makes it advisable to start with refused recognition. Here we use expressions like mortification, violation, disrespect, and humiliation. These forms of refused recognition can be qualified as moral injuries—they damage the intersubjective conditions of a subject's possible relating to himself, thus unhinging a person's identity. Following Axel Honneth (cf. 1990, pp. 1044–48; cf. Honneth, 2000, pp. 183f), three types of such moral injuries can be distinguished:

1. Fundamental moral injuries are those in which expectations of the recognition of bodily integrity are disregarded. The injured person is denied the security of being able to determine its physical welfare. At issue here is not the physical pain as such, since that does not differ much from the pain after an accident. The point is the humiliating destruction of a person's trust in the value of its neediness, when he feels “subjected to another person's will without protection, and this to the extent of a sensual deprivation of reality” (torture, rape, physical violence in general'). (Honneth, 1990, p. 1046).

2. A second kind of moral injury result from disregard of a person's moral accountability. Here the moral injury results from the compromising or destruction of his self-esteem, insofar as that self-esteem is contingent on the recognition of the value of our judgements by other persons (delusion, fraud, legal discrimination).

3. The third type of moral injury is even more diverse. It results from others' disregard of a person's expectation that he is socially relevant for a given community. Social humiliation and disrespect signal that a person's abilities and achievements are not deemed a valuable contribution to the community (ridicule and dismissive behavior in the presence of others, exclusion from a group's common interests, social stigmatization). This type of moral injury recalls cases in which members of certain social milieus are refused chances of social participation, ranging from handicaps in the private realm to decreased chances of entering the educational system and the job market. Similarly, unemployment, and especially permanent unemployment with its attendant speedy dequalification and social exclusion, all of which tend to further distance the persons concerned from the job market and from “social normality,” can be recognized as indisputably morally relevant. “A man who has lost his job has lost his passport to society . . . What hurts most is the knowledge that his service is not wanted. His work is rejected, and that means that he himself is rejected, as a man and a citizen” (Marshall, 1977, p. 234). One could further adduce economic disrespect in the sense of tolerated relative material poverty (cf. Sen, 1981) or cultural disrespect as arising from discrimination of specific minority lifestyles (cf. Fraser, 1995; 2003, pp. 27–35; cf. Fraser & Honneth, 2003).

Our use of metaphors invoking physical suffering and death (mental death, social death, humiliation, injury) linguistically betrays our awareness of the fact that the different forms of disrespect play a similar role for persons' psychic integrity as organic illnesses do for the body (not even to speak of interactions between these forms of compromised integrity). The experience of social degradation and humiliation poses an equal threat to a humans' integrity as does the incidence of illnesses to man's physical welfare (Honneth, 1990, p. 1048). Because the different forms of disrespect, for the reasons adduced above, constitute moral injuries, it follows that a special moral authority emanates from the persons affected—an authority that demands from others the inter-subjective recognition without which they are unable to develop a positive relationship to themselves.

Ethics of Recognition

Let us distinguish three levels of recognition, which form, as it were, three positive counterparts to the various forms of disrespect described above.

1. On the first level, a person is recognized as an individual whose needs and wishes are of unique value to another person (Honneth, 2000, p. 187). As the basis of such recognition, one finds an emotional and emotion-dependent (and in that sense conditional) dedication to another, which is offered for the sake of that person himself. This is the level on which love and friendship, partnership, marriage, and family offer loving care.

2. On the second level a person is recognized as a subject of law, and as endowed with moral accountability. This legal level is of crucial importance for an ethics of recognition. The categorical and universal obligation to respect persons' moral autonomy is central here. We have to recognize all men as morally autonomous subjects and, therefore, as subjects of law. This is why intersubjective relations of recognition ultimately press for legal sanctions. Even marriage as epitome of affective (self-) attachment for love gains legal status.

3. On the third level, a person is recognized as an individual whose abilities are of constitutive value to a certain community. This kind of recognition implies a particular esteem. It combines a cognitive with an affective moment. The philosophical tradition does not provide any corresponding term; one could therefore try “solidarity” (cf. Honneth, 2003b, pp. 162–177). It presupposes the experience of shared burdens and responsibilities and is, therefore, also contingent on the existence of such shared experiences.

A special kind of moral authority emanates from disadvantaged persons and from members of underprivileged social strata. This authority plays on all three levels of recognition and recalls all three forms of possible moral injury distinguished above. Undoubtedly those in need of long-term care belong to these strata. On the other hand, it is obvious that in modern liberal constitutional states and their societies different persons and institutions are subjected to the moral authority of those in need in different ways. The gist of a Christian ethics of long-term care, as based on an ethics of recognition, can be summarized by the following imperative: The expectations of recognition by those who are in need of long-term care, as well as existing violations of these expectations, must be detected and, as far as possible, fulfilled or, respectively, remedied. This has to be achieved on all three levels of recognition (love, law, and solidarity). This requires that precise proposals for a definition of “responsibilities,” as borne by different federal and social institutions, respectively, need to be elaborated. I shall undertake this task after clarifying the idea of social justice and the principle of subsidiarity, as these concepts were formulated and differentiated within Catholic social teaching.

III. SOCIAL JUSTICE, SUBSIDIARITY, AND MANDATE OBLIGATION (MANDATSPFLICHT)

Reflections on the idea of justice are usually based on the famous fifth chapter of Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea and Thomas Aquinas' reception thereof in the “Secunda Secundae” of the Summa Theologiae (Aquinas, II–II qq. 57–61). Both authors, of course, take as self-evident that questions concerning the good life and questions concerning justice are intertwined. Political justice is defined as what serves the good life. The idea of political justice thus presupposes a relatively clear, substantial idea of the good, which provides the telos for political action. (see Krebs, 2002, pp. 167–181). Yet contemporary positions more or less distance themselves from this classical understanding of justice. This is motivated especially in view of the separation of questions regarding justice, or law, from questions regarding the good life, a separation that has become characteristic of modern times (cf. Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten [Metaphysics of Morals]). In the present context, a deeper account of contemporary discussions concerning justice as “equality-of-what?” (cf. Cohen, 1993, p. 9; cf. Dworkin, 1981), as initiated by John Rawls's Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1971) and critically pursued by Robert Nozick (1974), cannot be offered. Against those who would prefer to altogether dispose of the term justice, I prefer to follow the majority of political philosophers who still endorse its meaning and engage in lively arguments about it (cf. Roemer, 1996; cf. Miller & Walzer, 1995; cf. Miller, 1999; cf. Krebs, 2000, pp. 7–37). After all, even most of those theorists who raise difficulties in view of the concept of equality as implied within given portrayals of justice (cf. Anderson, 1999; cf. Margalit, 1996, 1997; cf. Raz, 1986, pp. 217–244) endeavor to account for the possibility of justice, rather than wanting to dispose of the term altogether.

This is why I still consider the Pastoral Letter of the United States Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1986), an excellent contribution to the discussion. In what follows, I shall refer to the idea of justice as it has been analyzed in that document, even though I shall of course modify it slightly.

From the very start, one needs to differentiate between justice as a virtue, on the one hand and justice as a structural principle of society and state, on the other. In this essay, I am concerned with justice as a structural principle exclusively, or in John Rawls's (seemingly paradox) words, with “the virtue of social institutions” (Rawls, 1971, p. 3). The term “social justice” was introduced in the context of Catholic social teaching (cf. Girnth, 2001, pp. 196f.; cf. Taparelli, 1949) and was substantially developed there as well. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—claiming to speak in the tradition of Catholic social teaching—distinguishes “three dimensions of basic justice: commutative justice, distributive justice, and social justice” (USCCB, 1986, no. 68). Social justice can also be called contributive justice (ibid., no. 71). Yet I would prefer to distinguish at least four dimensions of justice and to summarize them systematically under the term “social justice.” Thus social justice can be differentiated into (1) commutative justice—as in the demand for “fundamental fairness in all agreements and exchanges between individuals or private social groups” including respect for all persons' equal human dignity (ibid., no. 69); (2) distributive justice—emphasizing that “the allocation of income, wealth, and power in society” has to be “evaluated in the light of its effects on persons whose basic material needs are unmet” (ibid., no. 70), including relative equality (or minimal inequality) of income and consumption (ibid., no. 74); (3) contributive justice—representing, on the one hand, the obligation of all persons “to be active and productive participants in the life of society,” and, on the other hand, society's duty “to enable them to participate in this way” (ibid., no. 71), including the demand “that social institutions be ordered in a way that guarantees all persons the ability to participate actively in the economic, political, and cultural life of society” (ibid., no. 78); and (4) legal justice—as the guarantee of fair proceedings in judgement regardless of “race,” gender, social, denominational or any other differences. In addition to those four dimensions, one could refer to (5) the justice of achievement—as the obligation to consider individual achievement when allocating any of the goods mentioned above, both in order to recompense efforts by high-capacity people and in order to compensate for the lower activity of low-capacity people, e.g. people in need of care; and finally (6) the justice of chances—as the demand that all persons should be guaranteed a real prospect of “participation in the life of the human community” (ibid., no. 77), which evidently refers to distributive and contributive justice.

In my opinion, the Christian ethics of community service with regard to long-term care should be based on both the idea of justice of the social catholic tradition, on the one hand, and on elements from an ethics of recognition as outlined above, on the other hand. While these latter elements, in defining the anthropological point of reference, provide the foundation for such an ethics, the former idea offers guidance for the realization of that ethics within social-political and social-solidaric institutions as well as volunteer support. The resulting caring action can then be addressed on various levels. In the first instance, obligations and responsibilities arise within the close personal context of persons in need of care, as for example family and friends. Second, such obligations and responsibilities arise for social institutions like parishes and welfare organizations, and, third, they fall under the competence of the state. On each level, this allocation of obligations must proceed, on the one hand, according to the principle of subsidiarity and, on the other hand, according to mandate. As is widely known, the principle of subsidiarity is once again subdivided into different dimensions. It firstly concerns individuals whose welfare must be the central focus of community service in general and of long-term care in particular (cf. Quadragesimo Anno, nn. 79f.). Second, subsidiarity concerns the way in which, depending on the resources provided on different levels of societal and social-political cooperation, responsibilities are allocated to these different levels. In each case, the smaller units have priority over the larger ones; i.e. what a person in need of care can accomplish without external support should not be taken out of his hands; what the family can do should be left with the family; self-help groups ought to have priority over welfare organizations. Only when individuals, families, volunteer groups, parishes, and welfare organization are overtaxed may the responsibility be transferred to federal institutions, and lastly to the state.

According to the social-catholic, tradition which grounds its notion of justice in the ethos of human rights (cf. e.g. USCCB, 1986, nn. 79–84), the welfare state is the final resort, when it comes to satisfying fundamental claims to recognition and to realizing justice in the differentiated sense outlined above. Within the systematic framework of the principle of subsidiarity, two aspects are distinguished. One concerns proscription to assume competence: It forbids the respectively larger unit to take competences away from the respectively smaller unit (e.g. the single person), as long as the latter can cope by itself. In this regard the principle of subsidiarity implies a strong endorsement of responsibility for oneself. The other aspect of the subsidiarity principle concerns the imperative of support. It requires the respectively larger and superior unit to help the respectively smaller unit (e.g. the single person) wherever the latter cannot cope by itself. In such cases responsibility passes to that respectively higher unit that is able to offer the needed support. Ultimately the state, as welfare state, is required to step in. But of course even then the state is not authorized to take over the respective tasks completely. Instead, the state is required to take efforts towards enabling people to help themselves. Such efforts, for example, can take the form of financially and structurally supporting parishes or welfare institutions. A social politics of long-term care, which is guided by the principles of recognition, of justice, and of subsidiarity, will focus on precisely such support of community service.

My own modification of these principles concerns the need to complement the principle of subsidiarity by a regard for the underlying mandate. The respective service provider, before even being allowed to intervene in what he perceives as a helpful manner, should be required to seek a special commission by the person in need of care. Such an obligation to legitimize one's helping efforts via mandate could protect persons in need of care from unwelcome and intrusive actions, which might result from religiously motivated service providers with a heightened sense of their mission. This obligation of mandate is on no account opposed to the principle of subsidiarity; on the contrary, it improves the latter's efficacy: Quadragesimo Anno always stresses the pre-eminence of the single individual's welfare (Quadragesimo Anno, n. 79).

IV. COMMUNITY SERVICE AND LONG-TERM CARE: THE PARTICULAR FUNCTIONS OF CHRISTIAN SOCIAL SERVICE

On the basis of what has been argued so far, particular functions of Christian social service with regard to long-term care can now be defined. According to the social-catholic perspective, everything turns on realizing expectations of recognition in a just society. Professional, as well as voluntary, providers of social services, therefore confront two tasks. As social service providers they support persons in need of care, and as champions of the disadvantaged they engage in political discourse in order to secure just social structures and to advocate just socio-political institutions.

At least in the historical context of Western societies, which are characterized by the division of society and state, welfare institutions and their facilities occupy an intermediary position between the individual and family level and the level of the state. It is this intermediate level on which Christian social services are provided.

In this essay, my intention has been to reconstruct the proprium of such Christian services, as discussed in view of the example of long-term care, in terms of a combination of a secular ethics of recognition with the way in which Catholic social teaching conceives of social justice and endorses the principle of subsidiarity. I have emphasized that there exists no incompatibility between concepts and ethical guidelines developed from such different (secular and Catholic) backgrounds. Instead, their common features, possible connections and, as in the present case, often extraordinarily evident mutual points of reference could be exposed. As a result, the two-fold task derived from this account for secular social service providers can be established as equally valid for Christian providers. In both cases, the first task imposes services that, in a therapeutic sense, offer immediate support, or else the provision of advice, as in situations where expectations of recognition (in all their variants developed above) have been disappointed, whether in families, or because persons were denied their rights, or because of social discrimination. Complementary to such in an immediate sense of caring services, the social service providers' mandate extends to efforts to establish that ensemble of formal frameworks in which intersubjective relations of recognition can be successfully realized. In this second respect, the social service providers' mandate focuses mainly on politics. It requires efforts at transforming clients' demands for recognition into laws, administrative policies, or institutional rules. Whether in a Christian or in a secular setting, social services, in realizing their twofold mandate, are therefore doubly legitimized. They at the same time care for actual persons whose rights are injured, or who are otherwise in need, and promote the general cause of universal basic rights and social integration. Or, conversely, Christian just as non-Christian social service providers, on the one hand, contribute to bringing about conditions in which the expectations of recognition inherent in any social interaction can be fulfilled, and, on the other hand, offer a curative compensation wherever such expectations of recognition are not fulfilled. It is in terms of this twofold legitimacy that the solidaric practice of loving care that the Christian ethics of community service imposes can be secularly understood, and thus understood in a way that a fortiori transcends denominational affiliations.