Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Soumhya Venkatesan
(University of Manchester)
Olly Owen (Oxford University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel Roundtable Workshop
- Stream:
- Resistance
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
How does the privileging of ends inform rule-breaking, i.e. adopting means that rule-breakers themselves acknowledge as 'off', even illegal? This topical question begs exploration in a world of COVID19 restrictions, climate activism, right wing nationalism, and tax-avoiding philanthropists.
Long Abstract:
The relationship between ends and means is one that has long occupied not only philosophers, but also anyone interested in bringing about a certain desired change or with a clear goal in sight. The goals may be large and long-term (e.g. reversing anthropogenic climate change) or much more circumscribed (get Brexit done by shutting down nay-sayers in the UK Parliament). This panel explores the relationship between ends and means by focusing on rule-breaking. In other words, we ask how rule-breaking is justified as necessary to a project deemed important and worthy. We invite papers that explore the evaluative and ends-oriented dimensions of rule breaking, whether these ends be focused on large-scale socio-political change, domestic cohesion and reproduction, or individual salvation or this-worldly well-being. We are interested in individuals' or groups' relationships to rules, including the ways in which they posit hierarchies of rules. We are also interested in abstract understandings about rules - how they are placed in relation with abstract ideals such as freedom or sovereignty, and to concrete concerns such as wealth, family, employment, education, religious observance and so on. We are also interested in rules that almost seem made to be broken, often found in the religious domain but also increasingly in those applying to migrants in some countries, which both prohibit them from working and also from any welfare support. We hope to build a rich panel that, in exploring the above kinds of questions, opens up ethical aspects of rule-breaking including evaluations, justifications and aporia.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Sophie Andreetta (University of Liège)
Contribution short abstract:
Building on ethnographic fieldwork in French-speaking Belgium, this presentation explores how welfare bureaucrats navigate the sometimes-conflicting norms regulating social assistance for migrants in order to show their commitment to providing a certain service, regardless of government policies.
Contribution long abstract:
Torn between the ethics of care and the obligation to control imposed by recent policies, fundamental rights and instructions from above, welfare bureaucrats often navigate complex, sometime conflicting sets of rules, especially when dealing with social assistance requests from migrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within welfare bureaucracies in French-speaking Belgium, this presentation considers how these civil servants manage to reconcile logics of care and control (Perna 2019), sometimes circumventing or breaking administrative guidelines in order to safeguard fundamental principles such as the right to human dignity. Achieved through the distribution of social assistance, the right to human dignity is implemented by welfare institutions such as public centers for social action or the federal agency for the reception of asylum seekers. In an attempt to counter the welfare-magnet effect, according to which migrants chose their country of destination depending on the welfare benefits available, recent policies have restricted migrants’ access to financial assistance and accommodation in Belgium. This paper explores how civil servants implement such policies and delves into the dilemmas that they face. In an effort to realize what they perceive as higher principles (fundamental values, national laws, or initial mission statements of their institution) they sometimes break administrative guidelines, make use of exceptions, or advice migrants to sue the administration in court. This paper eventually demonstrates that civil servants are loyal to the state and to providing a public service, rather than to specific government injections or policies (Lentz 2014) – even when the “client” is not politically represented.
Oriana Rainho Brás (Universidade de Lisboa) David Monteiro (Instituto Politécnico de Portalegre)
Contribution short abstract:
During the COVID-19 pandemic Portuguese hospitals forbade visits to interned patients. Palliative teams sought ad hoc solutions so that dying patients received visits, and justified them by articulating biomedical and moral reasonings concerning patients’, families’, and professionals' well-being.
Contribution long abstract:
Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has posed important challenges to healthcare professionals, teams and institutions worldwide, namely in the domain of Palliative Care, where multidisciplinary teams of specialized professionals provide assistance to the clinical and social needs of terminally-ill patients and their families. In Portugal, hospital administrations activated several measures to ensure the safety of patients and professionals, among which the prohibition of visits to interned patients. Concerned with the negative effects of depriving terminally-ill patients and their families of face-to-face contact, several palliative care teams have since sought to secure ad hoc solutions to ensure that patients receive visits, under specific conditions, sometimes in conflict with the rules imposed by hospital administrations. We argue that, by articulating biomedical and moral reasonings on patients’ life time and considering the social character of dying, palliative professionals configure patients’ time as irreplaceable and therefore exceptional, and thus justify such solutions as essential to patients’, families’, and professionals’ well-being.
Corinna Howland (University of Cambridge)
Contribution short abstract:
I consider how particular ethics were contingently suspended in pursuit of a sale for organic quinoa growers in the Peruvian Andes. Suggesting a more complex engagement with organics regulations than outright 'rule breaking', I explore the shifting status of lying and honesty as moral practices.
Contribution long abstract:
Drawing on research among a quinoa-growing cooperative in the Peruvian Andes, I consider how particular ethics were contingently suspended in pursuit of the anticipated greater good of a successful sale to international exporters, which did not eventuate. Suggesting a more complex engagement with organic certification regulations than outright 'rule breaking', I explore the shifting status of lying and honesty as moral categories and practices for cooperative members, tracing how and when they became salient. The kinds of future possibilities cooperative members perceived, including 'productive' kinds of uncertainties which were foreclosed following a revelation of pesticide contamination, significantly informed their ethical orientations and actions in their shifting presents—namely, the two very different presents of before and after the collapse of the sale. The moral injunction not to lie was subject to different interpretations pre- and post-failure. Before the sale, a collusive and coordinated performance by the cooperative at an institutional level was considered a pragmatically permissible, logical, and almost admirable response to organic certification regulations, when the prospect of a future financial windfall loomed large. After the sale's collapse, lying became more morally problematic for the cooperative, when future prospects of making a good sale were bleak and members were searching for someone to blame. I will suggest that this shift in moral orientation indicatives a pragmatic or instrumental attunement to the future material 'opportunities' available to people in a given present, where ethical considerations (the 'ought') are inflected by the relationship between what is and what could be.
Olly Owen (Oxford University)
Contribution short abstract:
Field work in Nigeria over ten years of working with bureaucracies indicates a consistently inconsistent relationship with rules. On one hand, practice is centred on proceduralism, but on the other, when efficacy in outcomes is demanded, procedure is often rapidly laid aside. Why and to what effect?
Contribution long abstract:
Field work in Nigeria over ten years of working with bureaucracies ranging from the national police, to tax bodies, to local rural government, indicates a consistently inconsistent relationship with rules. On one hand, practice is centred on proceduralism, but on the other, when efficacy in outcomes is demanded, procedure is often rapidly laid aside with an alacrity which is notable. This paper explores why this paradox exists and to what effect. Chief among these are an eternal reproduction of incompleteness and flaw which reproduces uncertainty and undo-ability, as well as the possibility of reversal of the normative bureaucratic of paperwork into post-facto 'regularisation' of social action. This creates a kind of archaeology of documentary knowledge which looks very different to the actual logic of the social action of government, pushing us to think of rules and breaking them as embedded in aesthetic practice and meaning-making as much as governmental logic.