"horizins of care" and responsible use of freedom

hey everybody. So I am an older returning college student, in my senior year of pursing my bachelors degree in social work. anyway, im taking a higher level of ethics than what is required for my degree because “ethics in public policy” sounded relevant to my focus, but I am in way over my head. My professor doesn’t believe in the online learning platforms like canvas and blackboard so there isn’t anywhere to confer with other students and the textbook we are working with was written by him so it doesn’t offer a different way of understanding the material . I am going to reach out to other students next week but in the meantime I have a questionnaire due and I feel like im reading Gaelic. I don’t get these concepts at all, so I was hoping some of you might be interested in spreading the knowledge and/our love. I don’t want answers to my essay questions, I genuinely need help deciphering the concepts being discussed so I can actually engage with the material. I have searched and searched and cannot find some of this shit anywhere.
here are the questions I am struggling with if you can help me break them down id be much obliged

  • how does endorsement of free markets leave unanswered questions about the responsible use of freedom? Here I am struggling with the “responsible use of freedom”
    -What are the different meanings of good? How do they form a hierarchy of horizons of care? I have found in the readings that the three kinds of “good” are, what’s good for me and mine, what’s good for my community, tribe, etc and what’s good for everyone (like protecting human rights) but again I am thrown off by the phrase “horizons of care”, does this mean how we understand and care about the world or how we care about the goods? Ughh, brain pain!
    these are the two I am struggling with the most so any input is appreciated. also if any of this sounds familiar and you can point me in the right direction for some helpful resources that’d be rad

This is probably asking if all/any actions are ethical within the free market. Generally, it can be said that one should not do everything that one is able to do. One has to practice some responsible restraint. For example:
Is it okay to pay workers really low wages because they are desperate and they are willing to take any job? Is it okay to make employees work in unsafe conditions? Long hours? Is child labor okay?
Is it okay to sell products which harm the buyer? Is it okay to lie about the ingredients of products? Is it okay to ruthlessly drive competitors out of business - which may result in significant hardship for them, their employees and the community? Is it okay to form alliances with other companies to drive out competitors?

Yeah, “a hierarchy of horizons of care” is funny.
I think you have a good starting idea about it. At the base, you are only concerned with yourself and what is good for you - you have a very limited view. But as you “climb up higher on a ladder” you see what is good for your family… climb higher and you see what’s good for your friends … higher you see what’s good for strangers in your community , etc.

You start to care about more than yourself and ultimately you care in some way about everyone/everything in the world.

So these steps create a hierarchy.

thank you phyllo, your explanation was super helpful!

Hey! I’m in the same class, and I’m having the same problem answering the questions. I’m completely lost. I kind of understand the 1st and 2nd questions from asking around, but I really don’t understand the 3rd one. And I don’t have the readings in order to answer the 4th one. However, I did ask an economics professor, and I hope he can help me. Let me know if you know anything, and I;'l send you whatever the professor answers!!

As someone with free market sympathies, I find this phrase troubling. This sounds like the kind of language a policy-maker might use right before taking away my freedom to smoke e-cigarettes. Is “responsible” meant to be subjective or objective? If I own my body, can’t I smoke all the ecigs I damn well please? or waste my precious time if that’s what I choose? Can’t I choose for myself that I want to live my life poorly, even if by someone else’s standards it’s living ‘irresponsibly’?

I think support for the free market entails a certain agnosticism about ‘value’: There is no objective valuation, things are worth what the collective action of the market decides they are worth. But without objective value, on what grounds can we say that someone is using their freedom wrong? Each person is the ultimate arbiter of whether or not they are getting what they want from life (as long as they aren’t interfering with anyone else’s pursuit of happiness).

Not sure if it’s what was intended, but this reminds me of something Peter Singer talks about often, of ‘expanding the circle’ of moral concern. You can look at how people cared about each other over time. In early human societies where anyone outside of your literal tribe was excluded from moral considerations, they could be killed or tortured or raped or enslaved as necessary. Over time, the circle expanded, to encompass not just a family/tribe, but fellow citizens, but still without concern for rival groups. Then it included larger and large cities, to nations, to races, to species. The modern concept of ‘human rights’ is fairly recent, only arriving within the last couple centuries, and ‘animal rights’ is a younger concept still. The expanding circle is a growing set of who counts as morally valuable, whose feelings we care about, whose well-being matters when we’re judging outcomes.

Come on now, we aren’t all in the class, share the prompt!

at first read of this I think “what is a responsible use of freedom?”

but on second read i deduce this is phrased to attack the idea

i think it is best to respond with an attack on the first half–

“how does an endorsement of ____ leave unanswered questions about the responsible use of freedom?”

any answer to this underscore/“fill in the blank” can be used to form a question for your class

your prof is a liberal

fwiw the word “community” is liberal (particularly black liberal), and the word “tribe” is governmental

This seems like quite a leap, and motivated not by the content of the question but by your own political animus. We have no reason to believe that filling in the blank with “chocolate” or “Nickleback” would form a question that would be at all interesting for the class. It’s a class about social policy, and the blank is filled in with 1) a social policy, that 2) is premised on the notion of ‘freedom’. Probably filling in the blank with things like “the freedom of speech” or “the freedom of religion” or “free love” or any other social stance involving freedom would work, but “any” is almost certainly wrong.

Probably, but once you know he’s a “prof” you can conclude that with about 90% confidence.

I’d like to see any research you have to back up that claim, especially the claim that a word is particularly prominent among those of a particular race and political leaning. I’m skeptical such work has been done (how, for example, did they control for the possibility that black people are just more liberal, rather than blackness as such being associated with the word use?).

I don’t know what you mean by “tribe” being “governmental”. I’d think it’s primarily anthropological.

Your professor sounds like a quack. Get him some professional help. Some real philosophers like Satyr should set him straight. “Horizons of care” is him being deliberately wordy, mysterious and pretentious to create an aura of authority for himself.