Precarisation and social ethics

1. Precarisation, Exclusion and Social Workconference paperbyJörg ZellerThe Seventh SUPI Conference, April 4 – 6, 2013 FH Joanneum , Graz supi Graz

2. Precarisation and social ethics I understand the concept of precarisation as designating social changes that deteriorate the work and life conditions of an increasing number of society members. Such deterioration may in the individual case have accidental causes but it has – as an epidemic social disease - obviously 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. I will say that social systems of this kind operate with an integrated precarisation logic. In addition - 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. supi Graz

3. Conceptualizing social work as practicefield 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 actor, i.e. a subject of action/practice. By ‘ethics’ I understand the way of thinking (logic) of an actor to base actions/practices on intentions. I call it also: practice logics. ‘Intentions’ I take as ‘wishes to realize desirable/valuable ends’. Intentions are thus conceptually connected to values. They are members of the same concept-family (Wittgenstein 1963) enfolding what people consider as valuable. supi Graz

4. Action • I understand actions as constituted by • Actors or subjects of action – a subject understood as a conscious human being. • Conscious human beings are able to experience, feel, imagine, remember, percept, conceptualize, predicate, infer, and act. • Action organs – an actor’s body and optionally objective action instruments • An actor acts by activating or forbear to activate sensorimotor organs of his/her body; an actor’s body is according to Merleau-Ponty 1945/2006 to be understood as living body, i.e. an incorporated mind. • Performance – the actor’s making his/her/their intention real. • Result of the action – the by performance of the action realized state, event or process. • Consequences of the action – effects of the action on the actor and/or other actors or living beings and their existence conditions. supi Graz

5. Practice and its logic By ‘practice’ I understand a spatio-temporal extended and coordinated 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 actors or by a system of interactions of a plurality of different actors. Interactions of humans are steered by the different intentions of the interacting actors. By socially interacting, humans try to make their intentions real – i.e. to make the world meaningful or to construct (Nørreklit 2004, 2012) a meaningful and valuable reality. I call the way how a community of actors constructs a meaningful and valuable reality the logic of practice or ethics of this community. I understand meaning and value realizing social interactions on the basis of Wittgenstein’s 1963 concept of language games as practice games. Practice games are on the background of my above considerations also ethic games. supi Graz

6. Language games as logicexperiments Youcan look at Wittgenstein’s 1963 seminalconcept of language game either with theoretical or methodologicaleyes. Theoretically a language game canbetaken as an explanation of languagelearning ofhuman actorsby creating a conjunctionbetweensigns (sounds, gestures, facialexpressions, postures) and other kinds of social actions. Youcan, however, also look at language games as an experimentalway to make human existence and activitiesmeaningful. Thus language games become a laboratory for the building(constructing) and testing of communication and cooperation forms. The logic of such forms is created and/or learned by doing. So herewe have to do with a – to express it in a Kantianway – aposteriorilogic or – as I prefer to call it – a practicallogic. It is a logic of communication and action thatemergesby the attempts or experiments of actors to communicate and interact with eachother. supi Graz

7. Practice games as ethic games • By practice human actors try to make their life meaningful and valuable. By ‘practice game’ I understand therefore an extended variant of Wittgensteinian language games. It is the experimental logic of making human existence not only semantically meaningful but also in different other ways valuable. Besides meaning understood as semantic or cognitive value I differ between • aesthetic or experiential • instrumental or utile • ethic or way-of-life or existential • values. • Practice games can thus be taken as the at the same time experiential, experimental and constructive endeavours of human actors to make their existence meaningful and valuable. • By practicing their ideas of a good life, human actors show their understanding and (aesthetically, instrumentally and morally) appreciating of reality. They perform the practicing of their existence within what Bourdieu 1980 called practice fields. supi Graz

8. Practice field • A practice field is a dynamic system of different practices, consisting in • Subjective action potentials, i.e. habitus forms (Bourdieu) • An actor’s 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 actor’s 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 actors, 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. supi Graz

9. Ethics and morals The function of ethics is to find out how an actor 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) actor 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 actor. I call it also the mentality of this actor. The mentality of actors 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 actor 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. supi Graz

10. Social Work as welfare or charity practice SW as a profession and practice field is ruled by a social community’s intention to help citizens in social need. This can be done on the basis of different attitudes (mentality): as either a welfare support or a charity practice. In both variants 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 community’s political and legal expression of either an understanding of social responsibility or a principle of charity. The understanding of social responsibility 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). In contrast: charity doesn’t help people really but just accidentally– just making them survive under precarizing existence conditions. supi Graz

11. Basis of ethics • Ethics is based on two conceptual pillars of practical wisdom: • Free will of the actor • The actor’s valuation ability – i.e. a disposition to discover values among what there is and takes place: • to motivate an actor 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 supi Graz

12. Rationality and desire The free will of an actor 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 conceptsand 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 don’t exist or take place but can (by action) possibly be made to exist or take place. An actor 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. supi Graz

13. The actors of SW • Social Work (SW) as professional activity takes place as an interaction between two social actors • social worker – a person professionally trained to help people in social need; in this function the social worker acts as an 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. supi Graz

14. 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 actor 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 often the mafia with its patronage system that takes over SW functions. supi Graz

15. SW in ethically reductionist societies Present day western style societies try to combine a freedom-welfare based (utilitarian) 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. supi Graz

16. The paradox of social work Reducing the actor-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 so 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 accurately 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. supi Graz

17. 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 doesn’t enable the good life of some citizens at the cost of the needy life of other citizens. supi Graz

18. References Bourdieu, P. 1993, Sozialer Sinn, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Nørreklit, L. 2004, Hvad er virkelighed?, in: Christensen, J. 2004, Vidensgrundlag for handlen, Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, p. 25-59. Nørreklit, L. 2012, Filosofi i praksis, in: Reinbacher, G. S. and Zeller, J. 2012, Filosofiens anvendelighed, Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, p. 9-48. Merleau-Ponty , M. 1945/2006, Phenomenology of perception, London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. 1963, Philosophische Untersuchungen, in: Wittgenstein, L. 1963, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Tagebücher 1914-1916, Philosophische Untersuchungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, p. 279-544. supi Graz