Whilst ethics is a branch of moral philosophy it is also an everyday activity and many, if not most of our everyday decisions involve a degree of ethical assessment. The papers in this edition of Ethics and Social Welfare demonstrate the way that this may be experienced by those working in health and social care as well as those who are users of public services.
At Ethics and Social Welfare we are interested in papers which address everyday ethical practice as well as those that take a more philosophical or political approach the aim being to ‘encourage dialogue and debate across social, intercultural and international boundaries’. The papers presented in this issue are no exception and for the first time, alongside more traditional contributions, we have included a new ‘group review’ format, introduced in further detail below.
Ethical considerations and decision making impact all of those involved in social welfare, from the individuals who work in these organisations to those that use their services and the organisations that provide services. The papers in this issue demonstrate this: written from the perspective of students, practitioners and academics in a range of national contexts.
Stacy Clifford Simplican's article ‘Democratic Care and Intellectual Disability: More than Maintenance’, explores the contexts of inequality and domination within which care takes place with a particular focus on what this means for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Drawing on work around the Feminist Ethic of Care it is argued that a focus on Tronto's notion of ‘caring with’ should be expanded to include creativity, disruption and pleasure which she then illustrates drawing on work with people with Intellectual and developmental disabilities. Particularly interesting here is the way that the author considers the inequalities faced by those with IDD, and those who work in the sector to explore the complexity of undemocratic caring processes. The article concludes by drawing conclusions for a range of people – both theoretically and philosophically but also practically for politics and practice. This illustrates perhaps the central argument of care ethics, that care is everyone's business and that ethics is both a philosophical and a practical subject.
Rituparna Bhattacharyya and colleagues write from a Bangladeshi perspective about the experience of ‘Researching Domestic Violence in Bangladesh’ and consider what this means for researchers. The focus here is on ethical practice in sensitive research – in this case considering the use of semi-structured interviews in research on DVA in Bangladesh. The paper considers how research is conducted and negotiated with participants and the way that this is managed by the researchers in the context of their own positionality and subjectivity. They also consider the way that researchers need to manage their own emotional responses to hearing what can be extremely traumatic accounts from the participants in research and how this may generate feelings of guilt in the researcher.
Heidrun Wulfekuhler and Margaret Rhodes’ article ‘Meticulous Thoughtfulness’ focuses on the social work profession. Wulfekuhler and Rhodes argue that practical wisdom is a necessary virtue for social workers and consider how this might be developed amongst social work students. Drawing on an Aristotelian perspective which sees the aim of all action as human flourishing, the authors argue that practical wisdom is a central virtue as it ‘enables one to reflect critically, to read a situation well for its ethical content … in order to decide how one should act’. The authors construct a detailed argument for the importance of developing practical wisdom in practice, and for the complexities of this including the potential for it to be a difficult and painful process for individuals. They then provide a potential model, based on 8 stages, drawing from their own teaching experience. The central argument is that if this aspect of critical thinking and reflection is to develop appropriately then the process needs to be ongoing and cannot be successfully used by employing it just once: ‘time and repeated practice are key factors’.
Cairns et al also focus on social work, in this case health care social workers in New Zealand. They consider the decision making process of social workers when they are deciding what to record in shared health records. This article considers the tensions presented to different professional groups by shared health records, exploring the way that whilst enhancing the capacity for inter professional communication they can also present ethical tensions around privacy, particularly within social work encounters. The article is based on findings from qualitative research with social workers which explored these ethical tensions, and examined how health social workers sought to overcome them. The authors identify three core principles which influence recording practice: necessity, accuracy and neutrality which they suggest, draw from ethical principles of utility and fairness. In concluding the authors consider the uncertainties that persist around deciding what is neutral, necessary and accurate. In this way the issues identified have much in common with Wulfekuhler and Rhodes arguments about the need for social workers to develop the skills associated with meticulous thoughtfulness.
In their article ‘Doing “ethics work” together: Negotiating service users’ independence in community mental health meetings’ Saario et al consider the messiness of ethical decision making in the context of community practice, particularly with those whose independence may at times be constrained. By studying the practice of ethics work in review meetings the authors seek to identify how people make sense of and negotiate ethical issues, including the way they negotiate the tensions presented by supporting autonomy versus protecting from harm. The data extracts provided and the close analysis demonstrates again the importance of ethics in day-to-day working practices and the way that these can be influenced by power.
Like Bhatacharryyia et al, this year's Jo Campling Prize postgraduate essay winner – Ashlee Christoffersen – writes about the ethics of research in her paper ‘Researching intersectionality’. Here positionality and reflexivity are again key issues to be considered around ethical practice. The argument here is that considering insider/outsider status of the researcher can be understood through an intersectional lens, which in turn develops ethical practice, which understands and renders transparent the power relationships in research.
Despite their very different geographic locations and the different foci of these articles the recurrent themes around the importance of everyday ethical practice, and within this the need for critical reflexivity and engagement with issues of power persist.
Last year, the Editorial Board of this journal discussed introducing a group review. The idea was that we would place a key text on the table, and invite commentary on it from an array of different academic disciplines, practice perspectives, and geographical points of view. This issue sees that idea bear fruit. In the first of an occasional series, we feature four pieces on the 2017 expanded edition of Amartya Sen's groundbreaking and widely influential Collective Choice and Social Welfare, originally published in 1970 in the early stages of the Nobel Prizewinning economist's career. The new edition includes the full text of the original, along with eleven new chapters. As its title suggests, it's a book about how we can work from individuals’ value commitments to values covering society as a whole – and also about the measurement of social welfare, across societies. It is a classic of social choice theory, though as we’ll see, also considerably more than that. As one review points out, Sen's theories ‘raise significant questions for social welfare practice and policy’, even if it is not always on the radar of those in the social professions. It is reviewed from different disciplinary directions, by commentators working in Japan, the UK, Australia and the USA.
Sen's work has travelled some way since 1970, revising his original stances, and taking up new positions on poverty, human rights and welfare economics – perhaps most prominently, in the development of a capabilities approach to development and social justice. Our view is that the whole of this body of work resonates with the concerns of this journal. One way to highlight why is to reflect on how Sen's thinking moves distinctively across boundaries. On the one hand, his writing is rare in dealing with ethics and social science – most prominently, economics – in equal depth and originality, and bringing each to bear on the other in ways which dislodge the assumptions of both. It also represents a kind of exemplar of fluent travel between the analysis of concepts and their application to the real world of social welfare: the lived experience of policy, and the tensions which arise when we seek to promote values such as equality, or freedom. And it is also distinctive in terms of the way the work is composed. Collective Choice and Social Welfare, like much of Sen's output, moves between relatively ‘straight’ prose, and more complex mathematical material. Unlike many economists’ theorising, it has always been designed to be picked up and deployed by non-specialists. Policymakers and practitioners can find clear ideas to work with, and strong reasons to rethink how they do things. So the appearance of a revised edition of this book after nearly 50 years is a significant event. We felt it an ideal first port of call for our inaugural group review.
Sen himself bills Collective Choice as a book about ‘the relation between the objectives of social policy and the preferences and aspirations of a society’. What happens to needs in this picture, as distinct from ‘preferences’? From a snapshot, it may sound as if, like much of mainstream economics, Sen is happy to accept subjective preferences – based on the idealised, one-dimensional and altogether unlikely figure of the purely utility-maxmising actor – as the arbiter of need. On this score, our best indicator of what a population ‘needs’ would be the tracking of consumer or voter choices: the aggregation of their preferences through the mechanism of the market, or the ballot. This picture is individualistic: it assumes the existence of homo economicus, the instrumentally rational actor conceived as operating as an independent, atomised agent. It is also inherently subjective: because it equates the meeting of needs with preference satisfaction, it rules out the conceivability of ‘objective’ needs separate from that process. It lacks a sense of depth: an ability to distinguish between what we fundamentally need, and what are more shallow or contingent aspects of welfare. But across Sen's work, a far more complex and nuanced ontological account is given. Addressing ‘The Concept of Need in Amartya Sen’, Toru Yamamori, the post-colonial economist and well-known proponent of a universal basic income, uses insights from later stages in the evolution of Sen's writing to read the distinctiveness of his early work on collective choice and social welfare. If we understand needs in terms of the notion of ‘basic capabilities’ (‘a person being able to do certain basic things’), we find ourselves pointed towards an account which is neither individualistic nor subjectivist, but definitively intersubjective.
‘Needs, in their interpretation as basic capabilities, are to be included in the informational basis of social choice … Some preferences are objective, and the rest are intersubjective. These latter are dependent on interaction with others, and with others’ needs (and preferences)’.
The economist and social theorist Ben Fine focuses in further on the story of social choice theory – and the way it has been tied up, through its history, with the understanding of economics as mathematical modelling, which many of us who have studied the subject will have grown familiar. To do economics as if it were maths, Fine argues – with human beings reduced to the one-dimensional utility maximisers we met earlier – requires ‘casting aside the social, the historical, complex motivations of the individual and the nature of goods, even externalities and interdependencies at the individual level’. As maths, done in a rigidly individualistic way, all of this generates purity and elegance. As social science, it's conspicuously poor. And yet mathematical modelling imperialised economics through the twentieth century. Even social choice theory can be done – as it is in the work of Kenneth Arrow – in this vein, constructing abstractions which are deductively sound but bear no relation to the circumstances of lived existence. Indeed done in this vein, it provides a way for economists to push their own methods across the boundaries with other disciplines. Sen's take on social choice resists this formalising, one size fits all tendency. Mathematics is necessary, but not sufficient. Fine uses the example of cognitive disability to show the crucial role played by factoring in interpersonal factors. The first example shows us the inherent limitations of reducing ‘complex disabilities to an index without regard to multiple contexts and meanings’. If adult services departments were to gauge individuals’ situations in this way, they would (obviously) make poor, limited assessments – and in quite basic ways, miss what it is like to be a person. It is at such points, though, that social choice theory in the Sen mould begins to shift away from what is acceptable within mainstream economics – precisely because of its lack of interest in what sits outside the realm of the mathematical model. It may be, as Fine suggests in concluding, that what makes this version of social choice theory most valuable is the incorporation of elements of philosophy and political theory which are furthest removed from Arrow's original conception. Maybe it's Sen's work itself, rather than social choice theory, that's likely to carry resonance for readers of Ethics and Social Welfare.
Susan Green works at the intersection between Aboriginal and Australian history, and the contours of current social work and welfare policy. Richard Hugman has published as much as anyone in recent years, on the ethics of social work and the caring professions. Their shared piece on Collective Choice approaches it ‘from the position of concrete practices and policies’ – and in particular, in terms of its implications vis-à-vis the lives and well-being of indigenous Australians. The latter make up 3% of the Australian population, and occupy low rungs of the ladder in terms both of socio-economic status and health outcomes. Thus there is a gap of up to 20 years in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. There are government initiatives to reduce this gap. But because those initiatives are primarily individualistic in method and assumptions, they are limited as responses to the causes and effects of poverty. Sen's work is helpful in considering the nature of those limits. As it evolves from Collective Choice into the later articulations of the capabilities approach, it builds a picture of how different aspects of the interplay between individuals, their environments and the availability of ‘social goods’ (such as education and healthcare) can enhance or hinder their capabilities to function. The gap is a social justice problem. ‘Social choice’ means something different in the neoliberalised early twenty-first century than it did when Sen was first conceiving his approach. But it still has a good deal to say about how we might balance different interests, preferences and influencing factors in working with communities to address the most urgent matters of social welfare – which as Green and Hugman show, are especially, pressingly urgent in the case of indigenous Australians.
In the fourth part of the group review Cheryl A. Hyde, prominent in the fields of community organisation, capacity building and organisational change, comes at Sen's work from another angle again. The backdrop is explaining Trump's ascension to the presidency: how it came to happen, what it tells us about contemporary social trends, divisions and inequalities, and how might it be responded to? Sen's work is not, of course, about Trump or the immediate circumstances which gave rise to him. But it contains lessons, in terms of how we, and social work in particular, might respond to it. Firstly, it presses home the need to reconsider how we gauge inequality, in light of economic populism. Working-class and low-income Americans have indeed been left behind, in just the ways which Trump's rhetoric was working at. But the crisis is not the one he describes. Understanding poverty as capability deprivation, as ‘the lack of opportunity to lead a minimally acceptable life’, illuminates the legitimate grievances of the ‘left-behind’ in a more coherent way. Secondly: ‘to survive, democracy needs active, vigilant participation’. The distribution of resources is not the only factor behind people's sense of disenfranchisement, and the decline in their sense of the power of the vote only one of its symptoms. The lack of their involvement in what Sen calls ‘public reasoning’ is as crucial. And thirdly: ethics needs to connect up with movements for justice and human rights. Social workers have a privileged position in this respect, their practice can have the effect of reinforcing the status quo, rather than pushing for higher, more emancipatory aims. Sen provides tools for that work, while couching it in terms not of achieving the optimal outcome, but of a ‘maximal’ alternative – seeking the least unjust society we can manage, rather than perfect justice. Writing at a time when Trump's government was sanctioning the separation of asylum-seeking children from their parents, Hyde suggests that Sen's work can help us appreciate how a regime can have travelled so far, in its bearings, from placing priority on the counteraction of injustice.
What Hyde identifies is a realism about Sen's thinking which anchors it in the circumstances we encounter in the contexts in which we think, act and work. This mirrors his dissatisfaction with the abstractions of economics as mathematical modelling. Others, of course, make similar moves: much of progressive, radical and humanitarian thought since the Enlightenment has sought to ground ethical critique in the frontline of human lived experience, rather than in abstract algorithms. But there are particularly rich resources in Sen's work, early and later, for the theory and practice of social welfare. From their different perspectives, the reviewers have made that case.