The Challenge of Practical Theology

Selected Essays

Stephen Pattison

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781843104537
• eBook ISBN: 9781846425936
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

This engaging collection of essays showcases the broad sweep of his scholarly and personal interests and experiences, and is a key instalment in his prolific literary output which will be of interest well beyond the confines of academic theology.

The challenging and sometimes controversial ideas contained in this book represent a way forward for practical theology, not because readers will necessarily agree with them, but because of their potential for stimulating lively debate. The lucidity and accessibility of Pattison's style, and the clear passion he has for his subject, mean that these ideas are destined to penetrate non-theological and non-academic circles, making this book a fitting embodiment of the public theology which its author seeks to promote.'

- International Journal of Public Theology

'Regardless of our beliefs, the meaning of life becomes more profound during an episode of suffering. Pattison has found a paradigm that allows practitioners to integrate personal, intellectual and theological perceptions - hence the term practical theology. He critically explores the use of terms such as mission, vision and hope that have been transferred from religious parlance into the world of health service management. Managers wanting change sell this message with evangelistic fervour to convert staff and bring them on board.'

- Nursing Standard

This collection of key writings by Stephen Pattison examines the implicit and explicit beliefs and value systems that guide practice in both religious and non-religious organisations.

Pattison draws on experience from his work in many different settings - including community service volunteering, working as a psychiatric hospital chaplain, NHS management and lecturing on pastoral studies - to promote a personal, practical, political and popular approach to theology, which stresses the importance of responsibility and contemporaneity. Broadly themed sections address issues of ethics and value in practice, organisation and management, Christian thought and practice, theology and the Christian tradition, and pastoral and practical theology studies. The author takes a critical stance towards traditional religious thought and practice, and argues the need for reform to make theology more generally accessible and relevant.

This volume will be inspirational reading for, among others, care workers, clergy, managers, nurses, counsellors and doctors, as well as students and those involved in the academic study of theology.

PART 1

Ethics and Values in Practice

Introduction

Over the last two decades ethics and values have grown in prominence in all areas of life and practice. Moral dilemmas in health care are everyday headlines in the news. Politicians and economists constantly appeal to (ill-defined) values and ethics. Professions like nursing and social work formulated codes of ethics or conduct in the 1980s. They have been followed by most other groups – even clergy now have codes of practice (though, like most other professionals, they seldom seem very well acquainted with them). Most recently, academics have begun to think about whether or not they themselves should have codes of ethics, values and conduct. In almost all public institutions and organisations, and many private ones too, statements of values and ethics, with committees to oversee their implementation, abound.

All of which, as far as it goes, is entirely to be welcomed. However, it is not clear that the superficial flourishing of concern about values and ethics goes much beyond rhetoric and skin depth. While many groups now have some initial training in ethics, there are many professionals who have had none, and continuing professional development in ethics and values is negligible. Such training as is given often seems to be concerned with cultivating ‘good professional behaviour’ and avoiding litigation rather than helping people broaden their minds and practices to become responsible, responsive professionals. For many, the promulgation of some kind of code of ethics or practice seems to be both the beginning and end of their encounter with ethics.

This is symptomatic of the fact that ‘ethics and values’ are treated as an encapsulated area of life that becomes problematic at certain moments of crisis rather than being seen as an omniprevalent aspect of everyday existence, both within and outside the workplace. Furthermore, ethics and values are mostly discussed only with regard to individuals in moral difficulties and not to the normal, everyday habitual behaviours of organisations and collectivities. Instead of being situated within an important, ongoing public discussion about the large questions of who human beings are, where we are going, and why we are going there, ethics and values are treated as procedural matters, or problems of governance and conformity, to be quickly glanced at, then ignored.

At the most basic level, many people are confused about the terms of thought used to understand ethics. Does ‘ethical’, for example, mean doing the right thing by one’s own lights, behaving according to the law or professional rules, behaving in a way that conforms to stringent moral reasoning, aspiring towards the greatest good of humankind, or just being able to negotiate the kinds of arguments advanced by moral philosophers? The term is used in all these ways, sometimes in the same conversations by people who therefore end up talking about different things while using the same language.

In the papers in this section I have tried to clarify some of the confusions about ethics and values in practice and to put this whole area within a larger horizon that might make the resources of thinking about these subjects more useful to practitioners of various kinds.

Lying behind and beyond the ethical decisions and possible dilemmas of everyday life are fundamental values and commitments that shape people’s identities and within which they make their everyday choices. ‘Questioning Values’, written at the beginning of the King’s Fund project ‘Living values in the National Health Service’ (Malby and Pattison 1999), is a broad survey of the language and concepts that compose the amorphous field of values. There are many different understandings and kinds of values, not all of which are moral, but all of which can be important in everyday life and practice. So, for example, aesthetic values can play an important part in determining the actions of some people. I have not come across a similar introductory paper to values. It therefore provides a useful orientation to the field for ordinary people. Values are much appealed to but little understood in either theory or practice. While this paper does not resolve the ambiguities of concepts of values, it may at least provide some clarity as to the kinds of issues and questions that are at stake in this field.

For those who do not want a full frontal assault on the theories of value and values considered in ‘Questioning Values’, the next paper, ‘The Trouble with Values’, provides a summary of some of the main points considered. It then goes on to consider the values that are appealed to within the British National Health Service (NHS), summarising the operant values that seem to prevail in everyday practice and suggesting that practitioners might need to be more actively engaged in thinking about how they intersect with the values of their organisation. The paper, originally commissioned by The Journal of Healthcare Chaplaincy, was aimed specifically at chaplains, who, one hopes, should have a particular concern for the values that determine the shape of this important British institution. Values, however, are everybody’s business and members of other professional groups in health and care organisations should find material there to stimulate their own response to, and management of, their organisational and professional commitments. (For those who wish to explore values further, I suggest that they consult the edited interdisciplinary volume, Values in Professional Practice (Pattison and Pill 2004).)

Ethics are perhaps better understood and explored in public life and professional practice than values. However, it is not clear how far professionals really understand the scope and potential value of ethics to themselves and those with whom they work. Protesting against the narrowing of ethics into conformity to professional codes, ‘Are Professional Codes Ethical?’ discusses the extent to which these documents can really help people to become better, more responsive and more responsible practitioners. While some of the codes in nursing, counselling and social work that I use to exemplify my arguments in the paper have now been revised, the same general issues and problems about the status and use of these documents as springboards for practice remain. While they are potentially a useful source of guidance, a general lack of clarity and vision limits their value to practitioners and their clients. Since most people now ostensibly work to some kind of professional code, this paper should be useful for helping to raise awareness of the assumptions and limits that some of those codes embody. (For further development of the ideas in this essay see Wainwright and Pattison 2004.)

The last essay in this section, ‘The Value of Ethics’, was originally written for health services managers. Managers and others with corporate responsibilities (many of us, in fact, at some point in our lives) are often not perceived either to have, or to need, ethics when ethics is understood in a narrowly individualistic paradigm. However, if anything, the need for an understanding of the corporate and institutional aspect of ethics is greater and more neglected than in the personal and individual sphere. In this paper, I explore how the resources of a fairly traditional kind of academic ethics might become more relevant to corporate managers and make a case for its importance. While the paper was first aimed at managers, it should be of interest to anyone who is interested in the ethical dimensions of corporate life, whether in churches, schools or any other kind of institution that has managers and attempts to promote human flourishing in its work.

References

Malby, B. and Pattison, S. (1999) Living Values in the NHS. London: The King’s Fund.

Pattison, S. and Pill, R. (eds) (2004) Values in Professional Practice: Lessons for Health, Social Care and Other Professionals. Oxford: Radcliffe Press.

Wainwright, P. and Pattison, S. (2004) ‘What Can We Expect of Professional Codes of Conduct, Practice and Ethics?’ In S. Pattison and R. Pill (eds) Values in Professional Practice: Lessons for Health, Social Care and Other Professionals. Oxford: Radcliffe Press.

1

Questioning Values

The more I have thought about values the more confused I have become. The language of values is everywhere in contemporary society. Everyone is deemed to have them, and to have a competent view on values (while ethics seem, perhaps, a more esoteric realm that is the province of experts and professionals). Prima facie, the possession of values seems to be deemed a good thing (Aaron et al. 1994). Value-driven organisations are thought to be admirable because of their clear convictions. Individuals who have a set of articulated values are often lauded over against others who are muddled or inarticulate about theirs. Politicians who talk up values are in vogue – so long as their lives are not lived in too flagrantly a contradictory manner to the values they commend. But what are values, and why do they command such uniform interest and respect at the present time?

My aim here is to problematise the notion of values and the uses to which this notion is put. My working hypothesis is that the concept ‘values’ is one of those portmanteau concepts which chase after meaning, like ‘community’. It derives its popularity and legitimacy from the fact that it is an apparently simple, universally accessible concept which has a simple unexceptional primary meaning (a value is something which people value) which conceals a large number of secondary meanings and understandings. This enables people to find in it many nuances of meaning and to use it in many different ways and contexts. The notion of value and values can happily slip, chameleon-like, between users and utterances, delighting all and offending none because most people do not take the trouble to think about what it actually means in their own lives or those of others.

Definitions and synonyms

Having started with meanings, it is perhaps appropriate to start with the issue of definitions and synonyms for values.

The primary definition of the noun ‘value’ in the 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is firmly economic. The value of something is ‘that amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be equivalent of something else; a fair or adequate equivalent or return’. The verb ‘to value’ means ‘to estimate or appraise as being worth a specified sum or amount’.

These definitions immediately prompt some observations:

(a)The concept of value emerges basically from the world of economic exchange, or the market. Perhaps this is why it has come to prominence over the last 20 years.

(b)The 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary does not note the use of value to connote a moral context, though it does note the use of the term to evaluate persons and their merits. This suggests that the current dominant use of values in an essentially moral context is a relatively recent phenomenon. It would be interesting to know why this usage has come to prominence in this way over the last couple of decades.

(c)The notion of value or valuing something is relative in its very essence. The value or estimate of something is not something fixed but transitory. Essentially, value is in the eye of the beholder, valuer, or evaluator. At the core of the apparent concreteness of the notion of ‘values’, relativity is built in. Value and values are, then, not platonic ideals or innate concrete realities, but rather transient and thoroughly embedded in a fluid process of change. I believe that it is this inner relativity obscured behind the apparent concreteness and static nature of the noun ‘value’ that provides the notions of value and values with much of their conceptual slipperiness. The concepts are, so to speak, thoroughly postmodern; they appear to refer to some kind of tangible external reality while in fact this is illusory and they are thoroughly non-realist and, at best, only partially referential. Gold is only valuable to those who value gold – and those who value gold may do so for many different reasons. The metal, being itself inanimate and an object, does not require people to value it.

(d)Talk of gold brings me to thoughts of ‘standards’ and the way in which this particular metal is taken by many to underwrite and guarantee the economic orders. A similar intrinsic and unconscious positive valuation of the concept of ‘value’ as worthwhile in itself seems to perform an analogous purpose within the social and moral order. If we have values then all will be well. However, as is well known, all that glitters is not gold. Gold cannot perform many important functions, e.g., it is not a good material for cooking with. The notion that somehow values in and of themselves will form a foundation for life and the social order is a (perhaps necessary) illusion. While illusions and faith systems may indeed be necessary for individual and social functioning, the belief in values must be recognised as just such a faith system. The reification of values to the status of pre-existent, indispensable entities is an act of human creation – or, indeed, valuation.

These preliminary observations highlight the relativity and conceptual slipperiness of the notions of value and values outwith the economic realm. They provide a valuable framing perspective on some of the synonyms and alternative words that often seem to be used alongside or instead of the words themselves. It will be noted that some of these synonyms, substitutes and associated words are far from having the positive, desirable and solid resonances that so often surround the concept of ‘values’ itself.

Preferences, choices and desires

This group of words comes from the economic domain where it is thought that what people prefer, desire or choose is what they value or confer worth upon. What is preferred, desired, or chosen is what people are prepared to pay for and so value. To find out what people value, one must look for what they choose and express a desire for, or more concretely, what they will pay for. It is this set of meanings that often dominate in discussion of values in the public policy arena (Aaron et al. 1994).

Attitudes and beliefs

From the psychological domain come the notions of attitude and belief. From this perspective, what people are attitudinally predisposed towards, or believe in, whether they articulate it or not, is what they value. Attitudes and beliefs, and the values that they uphold or sustain, can be discerned by watching people’s behaviours, e.g. voting for a particular party in an election, as well as by asking them what they believe in or are well-disposed towards.

Norms, assumptions, expectations, judgements and prejudices

Social norms, assumptions, expectations, judgements and prejudices are the province of sociology. They are what holds people together in groups so that society is coherent and individual behaviour is to some extent predictable and conformist. Embedded in social norms, assumptions, judgements and prejudices are shared views of what is good and bad, desirable and undesirable. Interestingly, values in common parlance are often presented as desirable while assumptions are questionable! I have values – you have assumptions and prejudices. The person with values may be thought of as moral, while the person with assumptions may be perceived to be unthinking or uncritical. This is just one instance of the phenomenon of value and values being differently evaluated and perceived according to the vocabulary used.

Standards, visions and goals

The world of management and manufacturing provides the concepts of standards, visions and goals that relate closely to those of value and value...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Making of Practical Theology
• Part 1. Ethics and Values in Practice
• Part 2. On Organisation and Management
• Part 3. On Christian Practice and Opportunities: A Critique
• Part 4. On Theology and the Christian Tradition
• Part 5. On Pastoral and Practical Theology
• Stephen Pattison – Principal Publications 1980–2005
• Subject Index
• Author Index