CAVA
members are regularly presenting their work at local, national
and international conferences. If permission is given, you
will find most of their recent conference papers on these
pages, freely available to download as PDF files.
September 2004
Fiona
Williams and Alan Deacon
‘Personal Qualities and Civic Virtues: Care, Values
and the Future of Welfare’. Paper presented to
the Annual Conference of the European Network for Social
Policy Analysis ESPAnet, University of Oxford, 9-11 September
2004.
For
more information about ESPAnet’s activities, please
visit their website: http://www.espanet.org/
ABSTRACT
This
paper presents and discusses some of the findings of programme
of research conducted by members of the ESRC Research Group
on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare (CAVA) at the
University of Leeds. It is the first step towards an examination
of the light these findings throw upon the debate between
proponents of a feminist ethic of care, and what may be
termed covenantal communitarians. Both of these sets of
ideas are grounded in an understanding of the interdependence
of human beings and the relational self. Both are dismissive
of attempts to demarcate the public from the private, and
both speak of commitments rather than choices. Both view
morality as grounded in social practice rather than adherence
to external norms, although they differ in the degree to
which it should be understood as the product of negotiations
or as something acquired through habitual behaviour. Their
understanding of what these commitments are, however, is
framed and structured by radically different perceptions
of gender, sexuality and the proper regulation of intimacy.
The studies undertaken by members of the CAVA research team
at Leeds revealed the ways in which people make morally
informed responses to the circumstances in which they find
themselves. Nevertheless important questions remain about
how public policy should respond to those who do not act
in this way. If personal qualities are civic virtues, then
is the converse also true?
For
the full paper as a PDF file, please click here
Other
papers and articles by the CAVA Research Group
