Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
4.2 Justice as Care
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understanding of social justice and the responsibility they might hold in relation to it.
Secondly, it is significant that Young (1990) uses the expression ‘being just’ rather than ‘acting justly’, for it implies that being, relating and interacting are interlinked indeed, and that just practice must also entail critically reflexive considerations of the social positions people hold in relation to one another, and the impact thereof upon their relationships and possibilities for action.
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they could now arise out of interactions and processes spanning considerable social and geographical distances and periods of time, they began to regard moral obligations as rooted in the notion of a common humanity (Tronto 1993). Yet, Tronto (1993) observes that the Scottish Enlightenment theorists had few qualms about disregarding important moral challenges arising from the growing reach and complexities of modern economic, political and social life, including its colonial enterprise and consequent subjugation of the colonised.
Conceiving of the latter as less developed, they ultimately contributed to the exclusion of Others from the realm of those who were seen as deserving full moral consideration. Since then, the question of Otherness has remained a conundrum for modern ethical thought (Tronto 1993). Citing Hannah Arendt, Tronto (1993:58) suggests that ‘the problems of tribalism, of racism, and of conceiving of the Other with hatred’ might be interpreted, at least in part, as a ‘response to the tremendous moral burden placed upon people by the claims that all share in the “rights of man”’ (highlights added), asserting that,
At the heart of contemporary moral theory … must be … the question of … whether we can conceive of a way to think of morality that extends some form of sympathy further than our own group … [and] how the concern for universal rights and equality is to be made part of people’s every day moral lives (Tronto 1993: 58-59).
It is, among other things, her engagement with this question that led Tronto together with Berenice Fisher to formulate the idea of care as a moral practice, describing it as inclusive of
‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (cited in Tronto 1993:103). Thus, care is a goal-directed practice in which a principled orientation, thought and action are intertwined, involving five interconnected phases (Tronto 1993, 2013). To achieve its ends, care requires firstly that particular needs for care are recognised, secondly that someone takes the responsibility to ensure that these needs are met in particular ways, thirdly that there is direct engagement with the recipients of care, including the physical work required to provide the care, fourthly that care recipients respond to indicate the extent to which their needs have actually been met, and finally, that over time, such ‘habits and patterns of care emerge’ as are required for ‘trust and solidarity’
to develop (Zembylas, Bozalek and Shefer 2014:5-6).
According to Tronto (1993, 2013), many contemporary forms of injustice can be directly attributed to the reality that the different phases of care are not integrated in practice. For instance, the people in charge of identifying needs for care and thereafter taking care of a
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particular problem are often not the same as those who are actually providing the care, and the persons providing care might not regard it as their responsibility to listen to what the care receivers have to say. As a result, both are sheltered, for example, from feedback and important opportunities for critical reflection. This then can lead to the root causes of caring needs being overlooked, a serious lack of resources remaining unaddressed, unfair divisions of labour staying unchanged, or needs being defined in ways that seem irrelevant to those who actually experience them. And if caring practices are not sustained long enough for trust and solidarity to emerge across the differences dividing the different actors involved, then the positive changes that may have been attained through intermittent acts of care are likely to remain unsustainable.
While the ideal of a fully integrated provision of care may be impossible to attain in practice, it still provides a standard against which to assess caring practices, including social work. Only to the extent that all phases of care are integrated, reflection and dialogue are enabled which ultimately force participants to ‘think concretely about people’s needs and about ... how these … will be met’ (Tronto 1993:124). In this way,
The vocabulary of care offers the greatest possibility for transforming social and political thinking, especially in the treatment of Others … It introduces questions about what we value into everyday life: Should society be organised in a way that helps to maintain some form of privilege before the more basic needs of Others are met? Those kinds of questions, posed in stark form, help us get closer to resolving fundamental questions of justice … than continued abstract discussions about the meaning of justice (Tronto 1993:124; highlights added).
If however, care’s strength lies in its focus on the concrete and the particular, then the question arises as to whether an ethics of care is therefore necessarily parochial and constitutes an outlook that would ultimately contribute to, rather than overcome, a lack of regard for broader, structural injustices and for more distant Others, that is, those who are framed as residing outside the moral ambit of a given community or nation. Tronto (1993, 2014) acknowledges this challenge, picking it up, among other places, in her paper, ‘Thinking about Global Responsibilities’ (Tronto 2011). Care ethicists such as Christine Koggel, Virginia Held, Joan Orme and Fiona Robinson, have also engaged with this question, and a selection of their writings on the issue is considered here. Koggel and Orme (2010:109-110) observe that,
The ethic of care has developed over the past few decades to become a body of theory that
… has [generated] … complex accounts of … multiple and intersecting kinds of relationships …
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[in] a variety of domains … and contexts. Its application now extends from the moral to the political realm, from personal to public relationships, [and] from the local to the global.
Held (2010) emphasises that because the experience of requiring and providing care is a universal one, the ethics of care has the potential to inform and impact spheres of social and political life that are not traditionally associated with caring work. She asserts that ‘the ethics of care … is increasingly appropriate for the wide but shallow human relations of global interaction’ (Held 2010:117). However, Tronto (2011) cautions that an argument for the relevance of an ethics of care cannot be grounded sufficiently in a claim to care’s universality.
She argues that such an approach would only appeal to ‘those who are already committed to expanding their relations of care’ (Tronto 2011:4) but remain meaningless to those who happened to find other considerations more relevant. In other words, an approach that stresses care’s universal relevance achieves little more than other appeals and aspirational statements that are too general and abstract to provide meaningful guidance in relation to concrete ethical challenges such as those with which this thesis is concerned.
Robinson begins her argument about what she terms ‘a critical ethics of care’ (2010:140) with a critique of the extent to which contemporary international relations resemble the atomistic view of the independent, self-reliant individual who gained prominence in liberal philosophical and political thought. Comparing the United Nations Charter (UN 1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (OHCHR 1948), she detects a resemblance between the normative ideas of ‘soverign equality’, ‘territorial integrity’ and ‘political autonomy’
contained in the Charter and the notions of ‘equality of all persons’, ‘human dignity’ and
‘individual autonomy’ as appear in the Declaration (Robinson 2010:133). Finding the two sets of ideas to be ‘mutually constitutive and reinforcing’, Robinson (2010:133) performs the conceptual leap from care’s focus on the concrete Other and particular human relationships, to being able to insert the notion of care into the normative analysis of overarching political constructs such as states, and into the debate around how to respond justly to the socially distant Other. The relevance of this exercise becomes clear as Robinson (2010:134) articulates the binary opposites of these ideas, namely, ‘intervention’ as signifier for a loss of sovereignty and equality; the notion of ‘imperialism’ which appears as the negation of self-determination and dignity; and the idea of ‘dependence’ which signifies the absence of autonomy. In attaching a positive value to such human attributes as autonomy and self-reliance, these
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dichotomies render any apparent need for support, or signs of dependency, as an inadequate state of being that ought to be overcome. Robinson claims that in this way, liberal thought and the contemporary economic, political, social, and cultural ordering of the world ‘limit our vision in the search for solutions to endemic suffering and violence around the globe’
(Robinson 2010:134) and systematically obscure the fact that –
Relationality and interdependence, and the responsibilities for and practices of care that arise therewith, are fundamental aspects of moral life and sites of political contestation (Robinson 2010:132).
Conversely, an ethics of care perspective highlights the centrality of relational responsibilities and caring practices, thereby directing attention to the importance of sustaining ‘not just
“bare life” but all social life, from nuclear and extended families to local, national and transnational communities’ (Robinson 2010:132). As such, an ethics of care emphasizes –
An ontology … that accepts the existence of vulnerability without reifying particular individuals, groups or states as ‘victims’ or ‘guardians’. Through this lens, equality does not mean ‘sameness’ or ‘equal opportunity’; rather, the focus is on ensuring that all people are able to give and receive care that is adequate to their needs as defined in the context of particular relationships and communities (Robinson 2010:132).
Tronto (2011) shares Robinson’s (2010) view that interdependence and relationality are key to extending the ethics of care perspective into the realms of cross-border responsibilities and practices. Unlike an approach that draws on the universal aspects of care, Tronto (2011:4) claims that, ‘it is out of … partial yet strong, not “wide but shallow” relationships that an ethics of care holds the most promise for overcoming the reluctance of people to recognise their responsibility to Others in a global setting’ (highlights added). Citing Soran Reader, Tronto (2011) explains that while relationships constitute obligations and while the extent of the latter varies in accordance with the quality of its constituent relationship, the deciding factors are not bonds of proximity, membership in a community or shared nationality:
Strangers may obligate us morally … [but they do so] not … simply by sharing with us the substantive property of being human. Some form of relation – either presence, biological, historical [or] institutional … ties, or some other form of “interaction” – occurred to create a responsibility (Tronto 2011:6).
However, because human beings exist in a myriad of competing relationships that vary in intensity and kind and thus create competing demands, people are unlikely to do justice to all, or even most of their moral obligations. This is what places ‘conflicts about the nature of
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responsibility at the heart of the political, social, epistemological, bearings of each and every individual’ (Tronto 2011:11). Growing awareness regarding the impossibility of reconciling close and distant, immediate and longer-term, concrete and generalised responsibilities in relation to other individuals, groups, institutions and causes, allows us to re-direct concerns around the question of how to balance, calibrate and ‘re-calibrate our moral responses to the world’ (Tronto 2011:16). An ethical approach that is expected to provide any guidance in this context will have to assist people in deepening ‘their moral understandings’:
People who are used to recognising the complexity and tragedy of their conflicting moral responsibilities might be willing to entertain the claims of forgotten or abandoned responsibilities more seriously. Invoking the everyday complexity of moral life, rather than blaming people for their failure to be more moral, might be a better way to proceed in trying to persuade people to care more for those around the world … Humans are not faced with a choice between accepting all … and rejecting all responsibility. What people need to know is that … as they begin to reassess and rebalance their responsibilities, something they value, their capacities to care and be cared for, will also be honoured and protected (Tronto 2011:16- 17).
This then is the contribution of a political ethics of care to guiding the interpretation of the empirical material collected in this study. In pursuing the question of the implications of displacement and cross-border migration for social work’s commitment to social justice, the focus is directed, firstly, to the question of how social workers, other practitioners of care and members of the receiving community interpreted and negotiated their responsibilities to those Others who articulated, in whichever manner, a call upon them ‘to be just’. Secondly, attention is directed to the question of what factors impacted, mediated and conditioned the responses thus evoked. What is required then is not an approach that simply assesses the responses of social workers, other practitioners of care and members of the receiving community along a scale ranging, for example, from ‘most just’ to ‘most unjust’, or from ‘most moral’ to ‘most immoral’ – even if ultimately there will have to be some kind of qualification.
Required instead is an approach that asks what kinds of responses emerged in relation to what kind of plight and what kind of call, as well as how particular responses came to pass.
Thereafter, it may be possible to work back to some cautious conclusions as to what is needed in the face of structural injustice that would enable people to care most, and to care best.
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