With this issue, our journal enters its second decade. It has come to occupy a distinctive niche. At the outset, there seemed huge promise in the idea of bringing together a tight focus on the current priorities and challenges of social welfare practice and policy with critical attention to relevant resources in ethical, social and political theory. And so it has proved. In 10 years, we have covered a wider terrain than could have been anticipated, with articles consistently generating fresh insight in exploring different facets of ethics and social welfare. The world itself has moved on – and the political shifts of 2016 have, among all their other effects, served as a reminder of the risks of assuming that familiar ways of doing things will stick. The next interruption of established assumptions may not be far away. So it seems fitting that the range of themes, challenges and critical angles in our current issue is so diverse. It echoes many previous issues, in that respect. But the particular combination of concerns raised here is both unique, and very much about the world of 2017.
The personalisation agenda has grown in international prominence during the journal’s lifespan, informing many of the key developments in social and public service provision in that time. Our first article, by John Owens, Teodor Mladenov and Alan Cribb, presents it in terms of ‘the principle that services ought to become more personalised and sensitive to the demands of individual service users’. The ethical implications of this are complex, and can seem double-edged. For many, it works to further social justice, particularly by promoting service users’ autonomy. Looking particularly at the way the idea has been invoked in the reform of health and social care services in the UK, the authors show the problematic nature of that assumption. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser and on relational theories of autonomy, they show how the promotion of consumer choice may serve to undermine autonomy, rather than bolstering it. In ethical terms, personalisation holds both progressive and negative potential. A focus on the social conditions under which choices are exercised can help us distinguish between the two.
Susan Evans’ article ‘What Should Social Welfare Seek to Achieve’ considers the capability approach as a resource for social welfare practice. Originally growing out of debates on equality in the early 1980s, this approach too has gained much wider resonance in the past decade, as an alternative ‘take’ to well-established orthodoxies in economics, development studies and the philosophical understanding of well-being and freedom. For Evans, it has clear potential relevance to the field of social welfare. She emphasises three areas where its insights will be beneficial. The first is social welfare education, where it can aid in reflection on normative goals (as an alternative to the radical social work tradition, and the postmodern turn), and help sharpen and refine what exactly we mean by social justice. The second is in the challenging of preference-based welfare provision, and the support for stronger, more critical understandings of the conditions of empowerment. And the third is as a vehicle for achieving greater unity between the evaluation of different social welfare programmes – a shared language, as it were, in which to assess how well-being is being promoted.
Something which joins the first two articles with the third is a concern with how autonomy and choice relate to other values with which they may seem to be at odds. Our third article, by Kathryn Mackay, focuses right in on one example of this tension. She addresses the ways in which adult safeguarding involves an uneasy relationship between two responsibilities: the promotion of autonomy, and the prevention of harm. For some adults may choose to live with harm. To what extent should we let them? What might motivate those individuals, and those who care for them, in placing either autonomy or protection above the other? Drawing on a qualitative study of adult safeguarding in Scotland in light of the literature on the ethics of care, Mackay shows how the evidence points towards the interconnected nature of autonomy, choice and capacity – and the range of personal, relational and environmental factors which might impede them. Mackay’s work is part of that growing body of ethical analysis which draws critically on available empirical evidence, to join up conceptual discussions with ground-level lived experience. As she shows, this reveals extra levels of complexity – but also gives us highly valuable basis from which to weigh up the scope both for further research, and to refine existing practice.
The role of faith in society, and in relation to ethics, remains stubbornly up for discussion. For some, religion and morality are inseparable. For others, they should be placed at a clear distance. Sometimes, this shifts from being a conceptual debate to a practical challenge. Such a case is presented by the merger of a public psychiatric institution with a Catholic rehabilitative hospital in Ontario, Canada. In his article, Joseph A. Fardella discusses this case against the background of a 2004 exchange between the philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was later to become Pope. The debate itself helps illustrate what is at stake when we seek to find the appropriate place for religiously motivated ethical initiatives in an officially secular society. Fardella argues in favour of what Habermas calls a ‘post-secular’ perspective, and for the avoidance of formally identifying the ethical priorities of a publicly funded healthcare institution with any one set of religious beliefs. In the case discussed, this approach would facilitate the Catholic aim of realising common goods, and advocating for the poor and vulnerable.
Our final main article is also, alas, very strongly topical – particularly so in the UK context. Historical child abuse – a phrase not widely known until relatively recently – has now become an everyday term. A series of major allegations of abuse have been made concerning figures in positions of power and often fame, in various kinds of organisations, often referring to events taking place decades previously. This has raised a series of pressing and disturbing questions, concerning the way institutions work, the complicity of bystanders and how such allegations should be investigated. Mark Smith approaches this last question by way of a case study. An emerging default position, he notes, is that we should believe those making the allegations. He looks at the case of James, who grew up in a series of residential care settings and wishes to tell a story of his own experiences. As he does so, the respective roles of fact, fiction and the influence of various devices of storytelling are particularly difficult to disentangle. This highlights the problems involved in believing first-hand stories, given the complex relationship between the present and the past, and the ways in which current agendas can shape how we interpret our own ‘back stories’. The politics of voice, and of listening, demands that we are critical and careful about how we listen to those who claim abuse – for their own sake, as much as for that of establishing what happened.