The Young Foundation recently hosted a lunchtime seminar with Dr. Samantha Callan, Family and Policy Adviser in the Conservative Policy Unit. Dr. Callan’s discussion raised some interesting questions about how we think about the family, and indeed, how policy makers and those working for a concept of the public good balance the delicate act of entering into the private space of individuals. Callan suggested that government has lost its ability to speak authoritatively on issues connected to contentious subjects that are at the heart of the family environment, like duty and responsibility.

The question of morality, of common principles of societal good, is an important subject for many countries, including the UK. In many cases, discussions about morality have raised issues of power imbalances around race, class and gender. For example, I recently conducted interviews for a research project on community cohesion. These conversations highlighted feelings within some BME voluntary organisations that ‘cohesion’ is about valuing sameness, rather than promoting diversity.  As a result of these tensions, the debate about moral issues is often glaringly absent from ‘mainstream’ politics.

The economic downturn has once again raised the importance of community as a provider of resources in the face of a retreating state. The thinking is that if government can’t provide social safety nets, communities will have to step in. However, market forces continue to dominate the language of politics over the discourse of community and family, where avoiding ‘moral’ questions is impossible.

The current changes in the economic and political climate force us to think about what we mean when we say, ‘working for the common good’. Jonathan Sacks, author of The Dignity of Difference, argued that our public discourse has been dominated by notions of, “[…] autonomy and rights, which share the mentality of the market by emphasizing choice, while ruling out the possibility that there might be objective grounds for making one choice rather than another”[i].

These concepts of rights and autonomy, rather than inspiring principles of common good relating to the attainment of unalienable rights and responsibilities—have inspired a whole new era of relativism where issues like race and gender appear to be neutral. The story of recently nominated US Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor is a prime example of this phenomenon.  Her now infamous quote about being a ‘wise Latina woman’ whose experiences could help her make ‘better decisions than a white male’ was attacked as being ‘racist’, rather than ‘realist’. While there are issues to address in this comment, the point remains that who we are as people changes how we think about and understand society. We must ask what is lost by not being more precise and open about our moralities. As Sotomayor said, “I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society”[ii].

Political and welfare systems in many countries are showing the effects of an increasingly second-person commitment to promoting social good. This is being driven, to some extent, by the inability to talk about concepts such as duty and collective responsibility that, as Sotomayor said, are anchored in our differences. Resultantly, issues of participation and the reform of public services is a debate aimed at the poor and uninsured, those for whom private markets do not exist. For these people, the ‘tyranny of participation’[iii], (as practitioners in the developing world call it) is a reality rather than reform. Much like public services, communities are being left to those who can’t leave.

As the political winds shift, people serving the public good, whether in the public, private or voluntary sector, need to ask the difficult questions about what working for social justice means for how we live in community. Until those concepts are mutually reinforcing, it is hard to see how we, as a society, can regain the ability to speak about the sensitive issues at the heart of family and social policy.

[i] Sacks, J. (2002) The Dignity of Difference, Continuum: London.

[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/15judge.html

[iii] Cooke, B. and Uma Kothari (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny? Zed Books: London.