Moral Risks in Social Work

ABSTRACT Social workers must often decide whether a child, at possible risk from its parents, should be removed from home. Each year some children, left at home, are abused or killed. If the procedures have been duly followed, is a bad result to be put down to incompetence or to bad luck, and, if to the latter, does that cancel moral responsibility? We examine the claim that the case is one of ‘moral luck’ and argue that the system licences greater risk than is morally justified. This is because it embodies conflicting imperatives of welfare and justice. Anyone who becomes a social worker must face a constant risk to moral integrity [1].     

The Basic Goods Theory and Revisionism: A Methodological Comparison on the Use of Reason and Experience as Sources of Moral Knowledge

In Roman Catholic moral theology there is an ongoing debate between the proportionalist or revisionist school and the traditionalist school that has developed what is referred to as the ‘New Natural Law Theory’ or ‘Basic Goods Theory’ (BGT). The stakes in this debate have been raised with Pope John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor (1993) on fundamental moral theology that condemned ‘proportionalism’ or ‘teleologism’ as an ethical theory while utilizing many of the ideas, concepts, and terminology of the BGT, thereby implicitly endorsing that ethical theory. While absolute norms and intrinsically evil acts have frequently been the focus of debate between these two schools, what is it that divides them fundamentally, on the level of ethical method? It is the role and function of reason and experience as two sources of moral knowledge, in part, that distinguish these two versions of natural law on the most basic level. While the BGT has a strict hierarchy of the sources of moral knowledge that posits the hierarchical magisterium as the definitive interpreter of reason and experience, revisionists posit a more dialogical relationship between reason, experience, and the magisterium. On certain ethical issues (e.g., artificial birth control), the experience of the faithful as well as the rational arguments developed by revisionist Catholic moral theologians challenge some of the normative claims of the magisterium. This paper investigates the methodological use of reason and experience in each theory's interpretation of natural law and how and why these two sources of moral knowledge lead to fundamentally divergent normative claims on particular ethical issues.     

‘IP’ Moral Rights Breaches are Deception Offences,Not Property Offences: Correcting a Category Error

In March of 2014 Nature Publishing Group, responsible for the publication of journals such as Nature and Scientific American, was subject to criticism for its requirement that contributing authors waive their moral rights (a component of their copyright) in relation to their published articles. Some of the rights included under the umbrella term ‘moral rights’ are the right to have any copies of one’s work reproduced accurately and without alteration; the right to the accurate attribution of one’s work under one’s own name; and the right not to have the work of others falsely attributed to oneself. The Nature Publishing case, from the criticism it sparked to the group’s own response, highlights a category error that occurs when moral rights are conceived of as property rights. Rather, moral rights are natural, non-proprietary rights. In correcting this category error it becomes evident that moral rights offences are not property offences, such as theft, but fraud offences—like plagiarism and forgery. Subsequently, whereas property rights, by definition, are able to be transferred or waived, it can be shown that no justification can be made for treating moral rights as transferrable or able to be waived.     

“Caught in the Same Webs”<Emphasis Type="Italic">—</Emphasis>Service Providers’ Insights on Gender-Based and Structural Violence Among Female Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada

Drawing on the experiences of service providers supporting live-in caregivers and migrant agricultural workers in two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec), we explore how structural violence shapes the precarious conditions of female temporary foreign workers. Service providers emphasized how transnational social pressures on women to maintain employment, the captivity involved in women’s employment contracts, the limits on unionization, and women’s isolation and lack of privacy, act together to create an unbalanced relationship between the employer and female worker. In turn, this leads to precarious migration and work conditions that foster a vulnerability to violence and abuse while at the same time limiting access to and delivery of services and social support to female temporary foreign workers. Amid these restrictions, service providers focus on making a difference where they can through initiatives such as human rights education workshops, offering support, understanding Canadian regulation, and empowerment workshops. Greater Canadian national options for permanent residency status could provide a basis for adequate services to temporary foreign workers as part of their universal human rights. Temporary foreign workers contribute to Canadian society, making it encumbant upon the Canadian state to ensure the respect of their universal human rights.     

Moral Uncertainty and Distributive Sufficiency

According to the sufficiency principle, distributive justice requires that everyone have some sufficient level of resources or well-being, but inequalities above this threshold have no moral significance. This paper defends a version of the sufficiency principle as the appropriate response to moral uncertainty about distributive justice. Assuming that the appropriate response to moral uncertainty is to maximize expected choiceworthiness, and given a reasonable distribution of credence in some familiar views about distributive justice (including libertarianism, sufficientarianism, and egalitarianism), a version of the sufficiency principle strikes the optimal balance between the competing moral risks posed by implementing these views. In particular, it avoids the moral risk posed by views like Nozick’s libertarianism, which forbid redistributive taxation even for the sake of helping to provide for people’s basic needs: failing to do the latter, if it turns out that justice does require it, would be very morally wrong. This “uncertainty argument” has the advantage of minimizing reliance on controversial intuitions about distributive justice, helps to specifying a non-arbitrary threshold for sufficiency, and shows that the substantive moral implications of moral uncertainty are not limited to high-stakes applied ethics issues such as abortion and vegetarianism but instead extend to an issue at the heart of political philosophy.

     

Renegotiating Aquinas

While Roman Catholic feminist ethicists typically endorse moral realism and crosscultural standards of justice, they also have been influenced by the postmodern interrogation of abstract reason and moral universalism. As theologians writing after the Second Vatican Council, they are increasingly sensitive to the communal and ecclesial dimensions of morality and of Christian ethics, and to the integral relation of Christian faith and ethics. This essay will consider two approaches to Catholic feminist ethics that differ in the relative weight they give to constructive work for social justice (realist gender justice ethics), or to the grounding of ethics in prayer and mysticism (postmodern gendered faith ethics). Using critical feminist reappropriations of the theology and ethics of Aquinas as examples, this essay will argue that the two approaches are overlapping and interdependent.     

儿童道德义愤的发展及其对第三方公正行为的影响

为了探讨儿童道德义愤的发展及其对第三方公正行为的影响，实验1考察106名幼儿园大班、小学2年级和4年级儿童的道德义愤在年级以及数目和价值不公平分配上的差异；实验2考察57名小学儿童在有无代价条件下，其道德义愤对第三方公正行为的影响。结果表明：儿童的道德义愤呈现随年级增长而不断增强的趋势；儿童由数目不公平分配引发的道德义愤得分显著高于价值不公平分配；幼儿园大班和2年级儿童在数目不公平分配中的道德义愤得分均显著高于价值不公平分配，而4年级儿童在数目和价值不公平分配中的道德义愤得分不存在显著差异；诱发道德义愤的儿童更多地做出第三方公正行为，并且更愿意选择补偿受害者；在不同诱发道德义愤条件下，是否需要付出代价都不会影响儿童的第三方公正行为。研究说明儿童的道德义愤随年级增长而发展，并影响第三方公正行为。     

Higher Education as Moral Community: Institutional Influences on Religious Participation During College

Borrowing from the literature on religion and deviance, the concept of moral communities is applied to religious and secular postsecondary education to explain institutional influences on student religious participation. Results from nationally representative panel data indicate that students attending Catholic and mainline Protestant affiliated institutions decline in religious participation at a faster rate than students attending evangelical institutions or students attending nonreligious public colleges and universities. This finding is consistent with Catholic and mainline Protestant institutions less successfully providing a shared moral order that legitimates religious language, motive, and behavior when compared to conservative Protestant colleges. At the same time, the religious and ethnic pluralism that activates minority religious identity at nonreligious public institutions is also less likely to be present on Catholic and mainline Protestant college campuses. Additional results indicate that evangelical students' religious participation declines while attending Catholic colleges and universities, while Catholic students increase their participation while attending evangelical institutions. The religious composition of students may act to alter friendship networks, and thus participation rates, on these campuses, although further research is necessary to validate the proposed institutional mechanisms.     

Intention

This review examines outcomes, tensions, and variables contained in eight Canadian legal cases, which are important because of their profound implications for current and future stakeholders of Catholic education. These cases prompt educators to re-examine the understanding of student rights, teacher rights, and the rights of the Catholic school boards. It is not the intention as researchers and authors to defiantly question Catholic school boards’ authority to promote the Catholic religion; rather it is to contrast this authority with the rights of all citizens outlined within the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.     

Restricting health worker migration in the name of solidarity

This paper explores and adds to Gillian Brock and Michael Blake’s debate on health worker migration. Brock argues for a limited right of states to restrict the migration of health workers beyond their borders. She offers a range of reasons to support this argument based broadly on her account of global justice. In the context of health worker migration, she supports her argument more specifically by linking health workers’ obligations to duties of reciprocity and not imposing costs on their compatriots. In this paper, I seek to support her argument by offering solidarity, as developed in the literature on public health ethics, as a ground for the obligations of health workers to their compatriots and a limited right of states to restrict their movements. On a narrow view of reciprocity, health workers are obligated to repay their communities for the benefits that they have received during their childhoods and training. Solidarity augments this view by arguing that all persons also have positive obligations to take public actions to address injustices. This complementary ground for restrictions on the movements of health workers helps to address Blake’s critiques of communitarianism and reciprocity as justifying state restrictions.     

ESOTERIC CONFUCIANISM,MORAL DILEMMAS,AND FILIAL PIETY

Two controversial cases in Confucian literature present the demands of filial piety as conflicting with those of impartial justice. Let us call them the Case of Concealment (Analects 18.13) and the Case of Evasion (Mencius 7A53). A dogmatic reading of the texts indicates that both Confucius and Mencius give more weight to filial piety than to justice. This essay, however, provides an alternative reading of the cases: the liberal reading. I argue that the Confucian teachers used the cases as moral dilemmas that force Confucian students to learn how to use a cluster of Confucian virtues, including practical wisdom, discretion, and straight determination, under difficult circumstances. The liberal reading views these moral dilemmas as rhetorical tools; they guide Confucian students in meditative exercises and ultimately transform students’ mode of seeing and being.     

Peace and Justice: A Limited Reconciliation

This paper aims to relax the tension between the political requirements of making peace and the moral demands of doing justice, in light of the ‘peace processes’ in South Africa and Northern Ireland. It begins by arguing that criminal justice should be reconceived as consisting primarily in the vindication of victims, both direct and indirect. This is not to deny the retributive punishment of perpetrators any role at all, only to insist that it be largely subservient to the goal of vindication. Why should we take such an account of justice to be true? The paper offers two reasons. First, Christians – and even secularist liberals – have a prima facie reason in the consonance of this account with the Bible's eudaimonistic conception of justice as ordered to the restoration of healthy community. Second, since all concepts of criminal justice share the basic notion of putting right what is wrong, it would be odd if the repair of damage done to victims (i.e., their ‘vindication’) were not prominent among its concerns; and there are reasons to suppose that this vindication should actually predominate in relation to the other principles of justice (the retributive ‘balancing’ of crime and punishment, and the reform of the criminal for his own sake). In its final sections, the paper applies the proposed conception of criminal justice to the ‘peace processes’ in South Africa and Northern Ireland, and concludes that in both cases, notwithstanding concessions to the politics of peace-making, considerable justice has been done.     

Practicing the Common Good: The Pedagogical Implications of Catholic Social Teaching

A persistent question for pedagogy is that of whether and how the content of a course ought to shape the teaching method. Both the understanding of practical reason and the substantive concepts of modern Catholic social teaching support a classroom dynamic of a relatively egalitarian dialectic. The author grounds the case for this pedagogy in the understanding of practical reason as found in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and shows that such an understanding is continued in modern Catholic social teaching. He then shows how the social teaching's substantive move to a more egalitarian social theory reinforces the egalitarian mode of reasoning. The author and others are attempting to practice this pedagogy in the context of the University of Notre Dame's new Program in Catholic Social Tradition. The investigation as a whole raises the question of whether colleges and universities that have actively maintained religious affiliations have a decided advantage in sustaining an academic culture where faculty and students can practice practical reason.     

Religion and Public Health: Moral Tradition as Both Problem and Solution

Despite strong religious influence in the development of medicine and medical ethics, religion has been relatively absent in the rise of preventive medicine and population health. Episodic, clinical medicine has a powerful hold on the religious imagination in health care. Nevertheless, Hebrew Scripture, elements of rabbinical teaching, and modern concepts of social justice all can be used to inspire action in health care that goes beyond clinical medicine. The Christian tradition can call upon the corporal works of mercy, virtue ethics, and Catholic social teaching, as well as the modern history Catholic sisters in the U.S. to do the same. By considering the moral imperative for public health, Jewish and Christian individuals and organizations reaffirm the notion that the human person is both sacred and social. This article suggests a need for religious traditions to consider their moral traditions anew with an eye toward prevention and population health.

     

Global Economy,Justice and Sustainability

Although this paper attends to some extent to the question whether the global economy promotes or impedes either justice or sustainability, its main focus is on the relationship between justice and sustainability. Whilst sustainability itself as a normative goal is about sustaining inter alia justice, justice itself requires intergenerationally the sustaining of the conditions of a good life for all. At the heart of this is a conception of justice as realising the basic rights of all–in contrast to a more demanding distributive principle or a less demanding principle of not violating the liberty rights or other basic rights of others. Although Pogge’s analysis that the global economy causes harm by failing to realise basic rights is seen as a useful challenge to common libertarian assumptions, the acceptance of other positive correlative duties, following Shue, is advocated. Insofar as the global economy fails to realise basic justice, the question is ‘how far can it realistically be changed?’ and this is a function partly of the moral attitudes of individuals at large.     

Discursive Construction of Political Categories and Moral Fields: God Versus Rights and Access in a Reproductive Health Legislative Debate

Using a discursive lens, we argue that politicians rhetorically construct categories, storylines, and moral fields. We further claim that such discursive products are action‐oriented toward gaining popular support in a public sphere that is politically fault lined along similar moral orders. As a case in point, we analyze speeches delivered during congressional voting on a Reproductive Health bill (RH bill). Employing a mixed methods strategy, we first implement a quantitative lexical analysis of frequently used words, followed by a qualitative detection of cohering storylines on both sides of the debate. Results show that oppositionists mark their speeches with a deployment of the word God, while bill supporters use the word access conspicuously. One storyline claims that The RH bill stands against God, while the other purports that The RH bill advocates rights and access. Although both storylines assert moral righteousness, they invoke two different moral orders backed by power blocs and the public at large. The God story appeals to a Catholic discourse and the moral order loudly supported by the politically powerful Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. The rights/access narrative references a liberal morality frame maintained by social liberals and Philippine President Aquino. We end our paper by introducing the idea of an intrastate discursive lens to analyze moral fields constructed by politicians, oriented toward winning support from the public at large.     

GLOBAL JUSTICE AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

To a great extent, recent discussion of global obligations has been couched in the language of human rights. I argue that this is a mistake. If, as many theorists have supposed, a normative theory applicable to obligations of global justice must also respect the needs of justice internal to recipient nations, any such theory cannot take human rights as an important moral notion. Human rights are inapplicable for the domestic justice of poor nations, and thus cannot form a plausible basis for international justice. Instead, I propose an alternative basis, a form of welfarist maximizing consequentialism. My alternative is superior to rights-based theories in dealing with the special problems of justice found in poor nations.     

Workfare: the Subjection of Labour

abstract When viewed as a question of distributive justice the evaluation of workfare typically reflects exclusively on the distribution of income: do the physically capable have a justified claim for state support, or is it fair to demand from those who do work to subsidise this support? Rarely is workfare appraised in terms of how it affects other parties such as employers or other workers, and on the structural effects the pattern of incentives it generates brings about, or as an issue of distributive justice related to a more extensive range of objects of distribution such as access to pleasing jobs. We propose to evaluate workfare by looking at its effects more broadly: (1) we discuss and dismiss on empirical grounds the two most common arguments in favour of workfare, namely that workfare develops self‐reliance among participants and it is more economical in the use of altruism among taxpayers. (2) We suggest that workfare focuses on work as a burden and as a means to income, ignoring other beneficial aspects that are conducive to the worker’s self expression. These other benefits are distributed unevenly between two main groups: the privileged well off and the disadvantaged. (3) we argue that workfare functions as a mechanism to preserve these privileges to one class of workers at the expense of another. Or, to put it the other way, the payment of unconditional welfare to the long term unemployed might be justified as one method of mitigating unjustified privileges.     

Is the debate on ‘global justice’ a global one? Some considerations in view of modern philosophy in Africa

At present, the debate on global justice, a debate which is at the core of global ethics, is largely being conducted by European and American scholars from different disciplines without taking into account views and concepts from other regions of the world, particularly, from the Global South. The lack of a truly intercultural, interreligious, and international exchange of ideas provokes doubts whether the concepts of global justice introduced so far are able to transcend regional and cultural horizons. The article introduces concepts of justice from African scholars, whose voices have remained marginal until now, like the Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka, the Ethiopian philosopher Teodros Kiros, and the debate on ubuntu, one of the most controversial concepts in southern Africa today. These concepts focus on issues that are seldom considered in the debate on global justice, such as the importance of bodily needs as a prerequisite for human beings to act as moral beings and the importance of human relationships and solidarity. The last part of the article discusses factors which lead to exclusion from the academic discourse and the question how we as scholars can work for more academic justice.