The Philosophy of Ethics for Macro Social Work

The concept of ethics in social work is the practical knowledge based on professional experience. To understand ethics in macro social work, first, ethics and morals will be described broadly as well their relevance to social work identity. Then, codes of ethics, standards, and ethics committees are presented as components of integrity systems. In the same way, professional principles and values together with their relation to macro–social work definitions are reviewed. These account for procedures that display autonomy, reciprocity, reflexivity, and conflict acceptance to arrive at prudent and fair decisions. As an applied ethics, social work ethics is concerned with the systematic analysis of ethical issues in practical contexts. In this sense, the work is focused on decision-making in macro social work, bringing out the challenges that professionals face and how they address these challenges. This analysis will be done considering the moral dilemmas that might arise for social workers in practice with/in communities, organizations, and the public policy arena. Finally, to argue decisions and actions in professional practice, some philosophical approaches are presented, which are selected according to their relevance to macro social work. Summarizing, communicative ethics, the ethics of conflict, the ethics of recognition and moral offense, and intercultural ethics are reviewed in order to avoid all kinds of fundamentalism and relativity in professional action.

Recognition and Responsibility

While the concept of responsibility is a cornerstone of Christian ethics, recognition theory still lacks a thorough theological–ethical analysis. This essay seeks to fill the gap and develop normative ethics of recognition and responsibility. The first part provides a systematic analysis of the conceptual elements of recognition, emphasizing the need to focus on misrecognition as a heuristic tool and ethical priority. While recognition coincides with responsivity and attentiveness in the encounter of self and other, responsibility adds to this the moral accountability for acts, practices, structures, and institutions, rendering recognition and responsibility interrelated but also distinct principles of morality. This normative analysis is then correlated to the hermeneutical, narrative ethics of Christian ethics. The founding narrative of biblical ethics, the Cain and Abel narrative in Gen 4, is interpreted as a dialectic of recognition and responsibility. Both exegesis and ethics profit from this interdisciplinary and correlative approach between philosophical and biblical ethics. Finally, the ethics of recognition and responsibility, which emerges from the Frankfurt School critical theory, is confronted with exemplary indigenous approaches focusing on mutual responsibility as the foundation of ecological ethics. Christian ethics of recognition and responsibility resonates with this approach, yet emphasizes the distinctiveness of human interactions and the demands of moral responsibility.

The Color Line, Race, and Caste: Structures of Domination and the Ethics of Recognition

The Black Lives Matter movement has been trying to awaken the rest of the United States to its failure to recognize systemic racism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy. With a keen awareness of racism as structural, this article first considers the pervasiveness of systemic racism in the church and then investigates how in the United States anti-blackness was first documented as the color line, then as racism, and now as caste. Recognizing these social structures, it concludes by considering virtues and practices that could help in decentering the dominant caste in its expression of white supremacy.

Group Asylum, Sovereignty, and the Ethics of Care

It is assumed that the states have the right to control their borders and decide whom they want to exclude, isolate, ban, or impose restrictions on. Although it seems that the problematic notion of “sovereignty” gives the state the right to make these kinds of decisions, there are situations where ethical duties to other human beings supersede sovereignty and where, in fact, those ethical duties limit sovereignty. This would be the case of group asylum situations. In this paper, we propose Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition as a complement to the liberal notion of solidarity. By introducing a derivation of the ethics of recognition, namely, the “ethics of care,” we argue that our connection to others and the ethical duties we have with them impose some limits on the idea of sovereignty.

An Ethics of Recognition: Redressing the Good and the Right

In Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur proposes a new ethical theory that integrates Aristotle’s eudaemonist virtue ethical outlook with Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics. The goal is ambitious, and recent discussions in anglophone philosophy have made its undertaking look to be founded on a confusion. The new argument goes that the ethical justification at work in the Aristotelian and Kantian traditions is of opposed kinds. Attempts to integrate them, as a result, are either incoherent, or, in the best case, simply minor variations on one or another predominant ethical outlook. The essay grants the opposed kinds thesis and argues that despite its apparent impossibility, Ricoeur nevertheless does succeed in integrating two ethical approaches, including their different sources of justification, to produce a novel and thus ethically interesting theory. The essay closes, finally, with a reflection on how this method might be developed one step further to include an insight by Emmanuel Levinas on the look of the Other, and so make for an ethics of recognition.