Social Work, Morals, and Social Ethics seminar paper Research Seminar: Precarisation, Social Work and Ethics by J

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Social Work, Morals, and Social Ethicsseminar
paperResearch Seminar Precarisation, Social
Work and EthicsbyJörg Zeller
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Precarisation and social ethics
If I understand the concept of precarisation
rightly then it designates a societal changes
that deteriorate the life conditions of an
increasing number of society members. Precarisati
on can perhaps have accidental causes but it has
obviously also systematic reasons in social
systems that exist and develop by periodic
precarisation of work and life conditions for the
socially weakest part of the population. This
will be social systems that operate with an
integrated precarisation logic. If there exist
such society forms working on the basis of
periodic precarisation I will call them
unethical or more precise societies with an
unethical moral or mentality.
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Conceptualizing social work as practice field
I understand social work as a profession in which
a social community practices its ethics. By
social ethics I understand the ethics of a
social community. I presuppose a community can
be understood as an agent, i.e. a subject of
action/practice. By ethics I understand the
way of thinking (logic) of an agent to base
actions/practices on intentions. I call it also
practice logics. Intentions are wishes to
realize desirable/valuable ends. Intentions are
conceptually connected to values. They are
members of the same concept-family (Wittgenstein
1963).
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Action

• Actions are constituted by
• Agents or subjects of action a subject is a
  conscious human being
• Conscious human beings are able to experience,
  feel, imagine, remember, percept, conceptualize,
  predicate, infer, and act
• Action organs an agents body and optionally
  objective action instruments
• An agent acts by activating or forbear to
  activate sensorimotor organs of his/her body an
  agents body is according to Merleau-Ponty
  1945/2006 to be understood as living body, i.e.
  an incorporated mind
• Performance the agents realizing of
  his/her/their intention
• Result of the action the by the action realized
  state, event or process
• Consequences of the action effects of the
  action on the agent and/or other agents or living
  beings

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Practice and its logic
By practice I understand a spatio-temporal
extended system of actions, performed in order to
reach a manifold of mutually connected
ends. Practices can be professional or leisure
activities to cure sick people, to teach
students, to sell or repair cars, to breed
pigeons, to play football Practices can be
executed by a system of actions of single agents
or by a system of interactions of a plurality of
different agents. Interactions of human agents
are steered by the different intentions of the
interacting agents. By socially interacting
humans realize their intentions make the world
meaningful or construct (Nørreklit 2006) a
meaningful and valuable reality. The way how a
community of agents construct a meaningful and
valuable reality I call logic of practice or
ethics of this community. I understand meaning
and value realizing social interactions on the
basis of Wittgensteins 1963 concept of language
games as practice games. Practice games are on
the background of my above considerations ethic
games a dynamic logic of practice.
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Practice field

• A practice field is a dynamic system of different
  practices, consisting in
• Subjective action potentials, i.e. habitus forms
  (Bourdieu)
• An agents habitus consists in his/her bodily
  and mental abilities to act in different ways,
  i.e. in his/her experiential, theoretical, and
  practical knowledge
• Objective action potentials, i.e. capital forms
  (Bourdieu)
• An agents different forms of capital consist in
  all those objective or institutional instruments
  and resources, he/she disposes of in trying to
  realize his/her intentions

Thus practice fields consist (normally) of a
plurality of agents, instruments and resources
interacting with each other and thereby changing
the quality and quantity of those habitus and
capital forms, which make up the power structure
of the field.
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Ethics and morals
The function of ethics is to find out how an
agent has to act to reach desirable ends (realize
something valuable). Thus it is a way of
practical thinking, a logic (or grammar,
Wittgenstein) of practice. By morals I
understand the realized semantics of an ethics
i.e. the way an (individual or social) agent
connects (maps) his/her/their way of thinking
with a system of different types
values. Morality is thus the realized ethics
(way of practical thinking) of en agent. I call
it also the mentality of this agent. The
mentality of agents consists in their attitudes,
customs, conventions, world views, etiquettes,
etc., i.e. how they in customary circumstances
react on, understand, evaluate, and judge what
they experience. The difference between ethics
and morals can be described as the difference
between how an agent thinks he/she should act
under certain circumstances and how he/she
actually does act. Ethics and morals are,
however, members of the same conceptual family.
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Social Work as charity practice
SW as a profession and practice field is ruled by
a social communitys intention to help citizens
in social need. Thus SW realizes the social
ethics of a community assessing it as a desirable
good to help people being in need. You could say
SW is a communitys political and legal
expression of a principle of charity. The
principle could be formulated as follows Help
people in need to empower them to realize a good
life. It could be based on a backing
good-community principle helping people in need
to become able to realize a good life contributes
to realizing a good community (good conditions
for realizing a good life for all community
members).
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Basis of ethics

• Ethics is based on two conceptual pillars of
  practical wisdom
• Free will of the agent
• The agents valuation ability to discover
  values among what there is and takes place
• to motivate an agent to act presupposes, that
  he/she is able to differentiate between good and
  bad things/states/events , and to desire the good
  ones and to decline the bad ones

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Rationality and desire
The free will of an agent is a consequence of
his/her ability to reason, i.e. to think and
behave as a rational being. Free will presupposes
experience, emotionality (ability to become
motivated), imagination, and rationality (ability
to form concepts and propositions and to infer
conclusions from premises). It would notably be
impossible voluntarily to choose between
different possibilities to act without being able
to imagine possible states, events or processes
that actually dont exist or take place but can
(by action) be made to exist or take place. An
agent losing his/her ability to appreciate being
alive, i.e. a person or community restricted,
hurt or bereft of his/ her optative abilities
(desiring, wanting, wishing, intending), will be
heavily be handicapped in his/her abilities to
realize a good life. There exists overwhelming
evidence that this not least holds for the
victims of precarious work and life conditions.
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The agents of SW

• Social Work (SW) as professional activity takes
  place as an interaction between two social agents
• social worker a person professionally trained
  to help people in social need in this function
  the social worker acts as a individual
  representative (civil servant) of the social
  ethics of her society
• person in social need a person not being able
  autonomously to create the basics of a liveable
  or much less a good life he can in physical,
  mental and/or social respect be needy because of
• either by birth or by accident being physically
  or mentally handicapped
• or made redundant because of working place
  economisation (being fired)
• or depression because of death of or separation
  from a loved
• etc.

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Ethical reductionism

• The bipedal basis of ethical thinking can give
  reason to two forms of ethical reductionism, i.e.
  two ways to amputate ethics either
• to liberalism (will to power, power is law) all
  human beings are free by nature and can get what
  they want by really willing it everyone is
  responsible of his own prosperity or breakdown
  a person in social need is an agent with reduced
  will power and for this reason rightly a Social
  Work client or
• to economism - reduction of value-diversity to
  economic values (all capital is based on economic
  capital, all goods are commodities, the utmost
  end of human practice is to get rich)

a client is according its Latin etymology a
socially weak person seeking protection of a
socially powerful patron. In countries with a
weak state and a powerful mafia it is usually the
mafia with its patronage system that takes over
SW functions.
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SW in ethically reductionist societies
Present day western style societies try to
combine a freedom-welfare based ethics with a
liberalist-economistic reduced moral. The ethics
of this kind of society requests that the
community helps people in social need. Social
work is in charge to do this to help people
with reduced action power (habitus) to
(re)constitute their will power. However,
because of the reduced moral of this kind of
society, SW gains paradoxical traits.
Liberalist minded politicians usually believe
that people in social need just lack will power
to turn their need into prosperity. Therefore
their eagerness for shortening unemployment aid
and forced activation arrangements for unemployed
persons.
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The paradox of social work
Reducing the agent-side of ethics to free
(pure) will power and the value-side to economy
SW shall free the social client a person
handicapped in the execution of his/her will by
economistically reducing his/her social dignity
to a minimum income needed to exist. A human
person gets reduced to a economic quantity
(economic man).
In consequence, SW is in charge to free a social
client, i.e. a person dependent of social mercy,
by holding him economically imprisoned in a mere
subsistence capital, i.e. in that form of
society that has made him a person in social
need.
The liberalist freedom concept is abstract
insofar as it assumes a human being itself (by
nature) free i.e. free from all qualifying
(subjective and objective) conditions enabling a
person to choose between different action
possibilities. The liberalist concept of freedom
reduces Bourdieuan habitus to pure (unpersonal)
agency, and Bourdieuan capital to pure economic
action means. A concept of real freedom should
instead define freedom by the subjective
(habitus) and objective (capital) conditions
(potentials) for intentional acting/practicing.

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Conclusion sketching a possible solution of the
SW paradox
If social ethics is about how a human community
enables its members to realize a good life then
it seems impossible to help people in social need
without changing the social conditions making
people socially needy. Helping people to realize
a good social life requests a good society
i.e. a society that doesnt enable the good life
of some citizens at the cost of the needy life of
other citizens.