Justice in the Small Encounter
On Professional Judgement, Participation, and Responsibility
Justice is often associated with laws, political institutions, and major social questions.
We ask how goods should be distributed, which rights citizens should have, and how the state should protect those who are vulnerable. We think of courts, parliaments, conventions, and public budgets.
All of this is necessary.
But for a person who depends on health and social services, justice often does not first appear as a legal provision or a political declaration.
It appears as another human being.
A social worker who sits down and listens.
A disability support professional who knocks before entering.
A nurse who explains what is about to happen.
A staff member who waits a few seconds longer for an answer.
A manager who chooses to protect continuity in a relationship, even though it would be organisationally easier to move staff elsewhere.
In such small encounters, great principles become concrete.
Dignity may be protected or violated. Participation may become real or be reduced to a ritual. Professional judgement may open a person’s life or make it narrower.
Justice therefore lives not only in society’s laws.
It also lives in looks, words, rhythms, and decisions.
It lives in the small encounter.
The Professional Between the System and the Person
The professional always stands between two worlds.
On one side is the system: laws, budgets, formal decisions, routines, case records, professional guidelines, and demands for efficiency.
On the other side stands a particular person with a specific history, body, fear, hope, and life situation.
The system needs categories.
The person is always more than the category.
The system needs equality and predictability.
The person needs difference to be recognised.
The professional must therefore continually translate between the general and the particular. She must follow the law, yet understand what the law means here. She must use professional knowledge, yet interpret how that knowledge fits this person. She must manage resources while also protecting dignity.
This is the domain of judgement.
It is also the most vulnerable domain of justice.
No rule can describe the whole situation in advance.
Why Judgement Is Necessary
Professional work cannot be reduced to following instructions.
A regulation may state that the service user should participate in decisions. But it cannot fully determine how this particular person is best able to express themselves.
A procedure may regulate the administration of medication. But it cannot by itself decide how to meet the fear of someone who does not understand why the medicine must be taken.
A formal decision may specify a certain number of hours of support. But it cannot describe which moments in life matter most, or how those hours should be used to create greater freedom.
Judgement is necessary because reality is more detailed than rules.
The professional must assess, interpret, and choose.
This does not mean that judgement is the same as personal preference. It is not a free space in which the employee may simply do what she likes.
Professional judgement must be justified.
It should be grounded in law, knowledge, experience, and ethics. It should be possible to explain it to colleagues, management, and the person affected.
Good judgement is therefore not arbitrary.
It is reflective discernment in a concrete situation.
The Small Encounter Is Never Merely Small
A decision may seem insignificant to the employee.
Should the person be allowed to eat later than the others?
Can the outing be moved?
Should a familiar staff member accompany the person to the doctor, or must someone new do it?
May the door remain closed?
For the person providing the service, this is one decision among many during the working day.
For the person concerned, it may shape the entire day.
This is a fundamental asymmetry in professional services. The employee moves on to the next task. The service recipient remains in the consequences.
There are therefore very few genuinely small decisions when a person depends extensively on others.
A cup, a key, a routine, or five minutes of waiting may become questions of self-determination and dignity.
Justice in the small encounter begins by understanding this difference in significance.
Judgement and Power
The person who exercises judgement also exercises power.
She decides which needs will be recognised, which wishes will be accommodated, and which risks are acceptable.
Power does not have to be brutal in order to be real.
It may lie in the right to define the situation.
The professional may describe a person as restless, difficult, uncooperative, or unable to understand their own best interests. Such descriptions may be professionally relevant. But they may also shape how others meet that person.
Once an assessment has been entered into a case record, it may follow the person onwards.
It becomes more than a description.
It may become a reality on which others act.
The professional must therefore use language carefully. Who is allowed to define what is happening? Which perspective is missing? Has the person’s resistance been understood, or merely categorised?
Judgement without awareness of power may become domination.
When the Institution Sees
Professional judgement never arises in a vacuum.
It is shaped by the workplace, colleagues, and organisational culture.
An institution develops particular ways of seeing. Some things are perceived as normal, responsible, and professionally sound. Others are regarded as impractical, risky, or unrealistic.
The employee learns more than formal rules.
She also learns what is valued in the environment.
Perhaps efficiency is rewarded more than patience. Perhaps staff are expected to stand together. Perhaps the employee who questions established practice is seen as disloyal to colleagues.
The professional’s solidarity with the workplace may then become stronger than her solidarity with the service recipient.
What is practical for staff may come to appear professionally necessary.
What challenges the organisation may be described as unrealistic.
In this way, institutional judgement may replace ethical judgement.
Collegial Loyalty and Professional Responsibility
Loyalty to colleagues matters.
Professional work is demanding, and staff need trust, cooperation, and mutual support. No one can stand alone in difficult situations.
But collegial loyalty has limits.
It cannot mean protecting a practice that violates a person.
Professional ethics binds the employee to something more than agreement within the workplace. She is responsible to the person receiving the service, to the law, and to the ethical foundations of the profession.
Sometimes this means asking uncomfortable questions:
Why do we do it this way?
Is this routine for the person, or for us?
Who benefits from this solution?
Who carries the cost?
The professional must be able to remain loyal to colleagues without making collegiality the highest value.
The first loyalty must be to human dignity.
Participation as More Than Being Asked
Participation has become a central ideal in welfare services.
The person receiving support should be able to influence how services are designed and delivered.
But participation can become superficial.
The person is asked what they think. The answer is recorded. Then the service continues more or less as before.
The person has been allowed to speak, but has not necessarily been allowed to influence anything.
There is an important difference between being heard and having influence.
Genuine participation means that the person’s perspective may change the decision.
This may make everyday life more difficult for the system. Routines may have to be adjusted. Plans may need to be rewritten. The solution preferred by staff may have to give way.
Participation without the possibility of consequences is merely consultation.
Developing One’s Own Voice
Participation presupposes that a person has the opportunity to express a perspective.
But not everyone has had equal opportunities to develop their voice.
A person who has been directed by others throughout life may struggle to answer what they themselves want. They may have learned to wait for other people’s suggestions, or to say what they believe is expected.
The professional cannot therefore ask once and conclude that the person has no opinion.
The voice may need time and support.
It may develop through experience, alternative communication, experimentation, and safety.
Sometimes a person must experience different possibilities before knowing what they prefer.
Participation is therefore not merely a matter of extracting a ready-made opinion.
It may also involve supporting the development of a perspective.
Listening Beyond Words
Not all people communicate through fluent speech.
Some use signs, images, sounds, body language, or actions. Others have language but need a long time to formulate themselves.
Professional listening must therefore be broader than hearing words.
A person who turns away may be expressing no.
Someone who becomes distressed when a particular staff member arrives may be communicating an experience.
The person who repeatedly returns to the same activity may be showing what gives joy and meaning.
But interpretation is risky.
The professional may project her own wishes onto the other person. She may interpret silence as consent or resistance as a lack of understanding.
Listening must therefore be combined with humility.
I believe I understand.
But I may be wrong.
The Right to Say No
Participation is tested most clearly when the person says no.
It is easy to respect wishes that fit the service’s plans. It is more difficult when the person rejects what the professional believes to be good or necessary.
A refusal may express fear, pain, misunderstanding, or previous experience. It may also be an independent choice.
The professional must explore what the refusal means.
Is the information understandable?
Has the person been given enough time?
Are there other options?
Is the risk so serious that action is necessary, or does the employee simply have a low tolerance for uncertainty?
Respecting a no does not always mean doing nothing.
But it does mean taking resistance morally seriously.
Time as an Ethical Resource
Good judgement needs time.
It takes time to listen, explain, and wait.
But modern services are often marked by time pressure. Tasks must be completed, documentation written, and the next person is waiting.
Pace may then become a hidden form of power.
The person who needs the most time receives the least real influence.
The employee asks a question but begins answering before the person can respond. She offers two choices but is already pointing towards one of them. She interprets lack of response as consent.
Time is therefore not merely a practical resource.
It is an ethical condition.
Without time, participation easily becomes a formality.
Predictability and Flexibility
Professional services need predictability.
Staff schedules, appointments, and procedures make care stable and safe.
But human life does not always fit the plan.
A person may be having a difficult day. A meeting may require more time than expected. A relational situation cannot always be ended simply because the shift is nearly over.
Good practice therefore needs both structure and flexibility.
Too much structure may subordinate the person to the system.
Too much flexibility may create unpredictability and inequality.
Judgement must find the balance.
The question is not only whether the rule is followed.
It is whether the rule serves its purpose in this situation.
Equality and Individual Difference
The professional often administers an ideal of equality.
Similar cases should be treated similarly. Resources should be distributed justly. No one should be favoured arbitrarily.
But people are never entirely similar cases.
One person needs stability.
Another wants variation.
One person needs extensive explanation, while another experiences explanation as interference.
Justice therefore does not always mean identical treatment.
Nussbaum’s theory reminds us that what matters is which real opportunities the person receives.
The same service may produce very different outcomes.
Good judgement seeks equality of worth without erasing difference.
Dignity in Practice
Human dignity is a fundamental principle in professional ethics.
But what does it mean in an ordinary working day?
It may mean that a person is spoken about respectfully when she is not present.
That private information is not discussed in a shared room.
That the employee introduces herself.
That the person knows who will enter their home.
That an appointment is kept.
That the body is covered during intimate care.
That the person’s own explanation is not dismissed too quickly.
Dignity becomes real through such actions.
It does not exist only in the intention to be respectful.
It must be felt by the other person.
The Home as a Workplace
When services are provided in the home, two realities meet.
For the person, the place is a home.
For the employee, it is a workplace.
Both perspectives are real, but they do not have equal priority.
The home belongs first to the person who lives there.
The professional must therefore be attentive to how work routines enter private life. Keys, records, shift changes, and staff conversations may gradually make the home institutional.
Just practice asks:
How would I want a stranger to behave in my home?
Do we knock?
Do we tidy up after ourselves?
Do we speak about the person as though she were not present?
Do staff needs take over shared spaces?
Working in a home requires the humility of a guest, even when the assistance is necessary.
Care and Control
Welfare professions have a dual role.
They are expected to help and protect.
But they are also required to monitor, assess eligibility, and manage public resources.
This duality cannot be removed.
The social worker may support a family while also reporting serious neglect. The service provider may promote self-determination while also having to protect against harm. The employee may be close to the person’s everyday life while also documenting it for the system.
The problem arises when control is concealed as care.
Power then becomes difficult to criticise.
Professional honesty requires the roles to be made clear. The person has a right to know when the employee is helping, when she is assessing, and how the information will be used.
Trust requires transparency.
The Ethics of Risk
A self-directed life involves risk.
People may make mistakes, experience disappointment, and harm themselves. This is true for everyone.
But people with disabilities are often protected more extensively than others. Risk becomes an argument for restricting freedom.
Sometimes this is necessary.
But zero risk is not a human life.
If protection becomes total, the person may lose opportunities for learning, experience, and self-respect.
Professional judgement must therefore distinguish between risks that must be prevented and risks that belong to a free life.
Who decides where the boundary lies?
And can we tolerate that the person chooses differently from what we ourselves would choose?
What Is Professionally Defensible
The phrase “professionally defensible” carries great authority.
It protects people against arbitrary and unsafe treatment. But it may also be used to end discussion.
When a solution is described as professionally necessary, it becomes difficult for the service recipient to object.
Professional reasoning must therefore remain open to justification.
What knowledge supports the assessment?
Are there other professionally defensible solutions?
Has the person’s own perspective been included?
A professional assessment that does not examine the other person’s experience may be technically correct and ethically inadequate.
The Good Justification
Professional judgement should be explainable.
Not only to colleagues, but as far as possible also to the person affected.
A good justification shows which considerations have been weighed. It does not conceal the conflict. It acknowledges that something may be lost.
“We are doing this because the rules say so” is rarely sufficient.
Rules must be interpreted, and the interpretation should be defensible.
The person who cannot speak for themselves has the same right to well-reasoned decisions about their life.
Perhaps an even stronger right.
Arne Næss and the Connection Between Levels
Arne Næss developed a model showing how fundamental convictions, shared principles, policy, and concrete action can be connected.
At the deepest level, people may justify human dignity in different ways. Some do so religiously, others philosophically or humanistically.
At a shared level, they may nevertheless agree on human rights and equality of worth.
These principles must then be translated into policy, services, and practical action.
The model shows that just practice requires coherence.
It is of little value to affirm human dignity if staffing arrangements repeatedly break important relationships.
It is of little value to emphasise participation if the person is unable to influence anything.
It is of little value to support the right to privacy if staff enter without knocking.
When the levels do not connect, values become decoration.
From Principle to Action
Great values need to be operationalised.
What does equality of worth mean in this encounter?
What does bodily integrity mean in this care situation?
What does citizenship mean in the design of a weekly plan?
Nussbaum’s capabilities may be used as questions for practice.
Does the action strengthen the person’s health?
Does it protect the body and privacy?
Does it create opportunities for attachment, play, and influence?
Does it contribute to the social basis of self-respect?
In this way, theory does not remain a distant academic addition.
It becomes a way of seeing.
The Professional as Interpreter
The professional interprets constantly.
She interprets laws, situations, body language, and needs. She decides what matters and what can wait.
But every interpretation is made from a particular standpoint.
The employee sees through her education, culture, experience, and organisational role.
She never stands entirely outside the situation.
Professional judgement therefore requires hermeneutic humility.
I see something.
But I do not see everything.
The other person’s perspective may correct my own.
When Mistakes Occur
Professional practice will always involve mistakes.
A reaction is misunderstood. A decision has unexpected consequences. The employee acts too quickly.
The decisive issue is not whether every mistake can be prevented.
It is how the practice responds to mistakes.
Can the service listen to criticism?
Can the employee apologise?
Can the decision be changed?
An organisation that defends itself against all criticism protects the system’s self-image at the expense of learning.
Justice requires corrigibility.
The professional must be able to say:
I was wrong.
The Complaint as a Democratic Voice
A complaint is sometimes regarded as a problem.
The demanding service user, the difficult relative, or the dissatisfied patient creates additional work.
But the complaint may be an important democratic voice.
It reveals where the service does not work as intended. It brings everyday experience back into the system.
Of course, not every complaint can be upheld.
But complaints should be treated as information, not merely resistance.
The person who complains is often trying to restore their position as a subject.
Relatives as Resource and Power
Relatives may possess knowledge no professional can replace.
They know the history, the signals, and what creates safety. They may be essential supporters.
But relatives also have their own interests, concerns, and interpretations.
Their voice is not automatically identical to the person’s.
The professional must therefore listen to relatives without allowing them to take over completely. This is especially difficult when the person has limited language.
Who represents whom?
What does the person want?
Where does care end, and where does the family’s need for control begin?
There is no simple rule.
There is only the need for careful judgement.
The Power of Documentation
Documentation is intended to ensure continuity and accountability.
But what is written also shapes the person in the eyes of the system.
The record may accumulate problems, incidents, and risks, while joy, development, and relationships become less visible.
A person may gradually become identical with their documentation.
Professional writing is therefore an ethical responsibility.
How is the person described?
Is the language respectful?
Are observation and interpretation distinguished?
Does the person’s own voice have a place?
A case record is not merely information.
It may influence future encounters and decisions.
The Necessity and Danger of Efficiency
Welfare services must use resources responsibly.
Efficiency is not in itself inhuman. Poor organisation may also harm those who need support.
But efficiency must remain a means, not the highest value.
When what is easy to measure dominates, what matters most may become invisible.
Time spent in conversation may appear unproductive.
Continuity may cost more than frequent staff changes.
Waiting for an answer may look inefficient.
Yet this may be precisely where dignity, trust, and participation arise.
A system that measures only completed tasks may fail to notice whether the person received a better life.
Moral Distress
Professionals sometimes know what should be done but lack the time or resources to do it.
This can create moral distress.
The employee must leave a person who still needs presence. She must use an unfamiliar substitute even though continuity matters. She must carry out a solution she experiences as inadequate.
Moral distress is not only an individual workplace problem.
It may be a sign that the organisation makes ethically good practice difficult.
The criticism must then be directed upwards, not only inwards towards the individual employee.
Professional responsibility is personal, but also organisational and political.
The Responsibility of Leadership
Leadership shapes judgement.
It does so through staffing, culture, supervision, and the considerations it rewards.
A manager who asks only whether tasks were completed communicates one kind of quality.
A manager who also asks how the person experienced the service communicates another.
Just practice requires space for reflection. Employees must be able to discuss dilemmas without fear of appearing uncertain.
Silence about doubt does not create better professionalism.
It creates hidden power.
The Task of Education
Professional education should teach students methods, legislation, and theory.
But it must also develop judgement.
This does not happen merely by teaching correct answers. Students must practise seeing conflicts, justifying choices, and recognising their own power.
Ethical dilemmas should not be presented as problems with one correct solution.
They are situations in which several values conflict.
The aim of education is not to make the student certain about everything.
It is to make the student responsible within uncertainty.
Justice in Conversation
A conversation may be a place of participation.
But it may also be a place where power is concealed.
The professional often determines the topic, the time, and the language. She asks the questions and writes the conclusion.
The person may be given the floor without being allowed to define the issue.
A just conversation therefore requires more than politeness.
It requires curiosity about what the other person considers important. The professional must be able to set aside parts of her plan and follow what emerges.
Sometimes the most important thing lies between the answers.
In the pause.
In what is repeated.
In the question the person was never asked.
Responsibility for Action
Listening is not enough if nothing follows.
Professional recognition must have practical consequences.
If a person says that a particular situation feels unsafe, the service must investigate.
If a routine violates privacy, it must be reconsidered.
If the person wants greater participation, the barriers must be identified.
Otherwise, the conversation itself may become a way of calming dissatisfaction without changing the conditions.
Participation involves a transfer of power.
Without that transfer, the system remains unchanged.
When the Professional Must Speak
Some people cannot participate directly in political and administrative processes.
The professional may then have a responsibility to bring their experiences into the public sphere.
This may mean identifying deficiencies, challenging practice, or contributing to policy change.
Professional loyalty is therefore not only loyalty to the workplace.
It may also mean loyalty to the social mandate of the profession.
The person who witnesses injustice at close range has a particular responsibility not to make it invisible.
Small Courage
Just practice sometimes requires courage.
Not necessarily grand, heroic courage.
But small everyday courage.
To question an established routine.
To ask for more time.
To support a wish colleagues find impractical.
To admit that a decision was wrong.
To protect a person’s dignity when no one outside the room is watching.
Such courage is rarely celebrated.
But it is essential.
Justice as Relational Practice
Nussbaum shows that justice concerns people’s real opportunities to live.
Professional practice directly affects those opportunities.
It may expand them through support, accessibility, and recognition.
It may restrict them through control, time pressure, and standardisation.
Justice is therefore not merely something the professional follows.
It is something she does.
In how she listens.
In how she interprets.
In how she uses power.
The Irreplaceable Person
The system needs comparable cases.
The professional meets an irreplaceable person.
No procedure can fully capture this person’s history. No category can explain the whole life.
Justice requires the professional to hold onto both truths.
The person should have the same rights as others.
And the person is not the same as anyone else.
This is where judgement gains its ethical significance.
It should not make rights arbitrary.
It should make them alive in the encounter with difference.
The Great Significance of the Small Encounter
It may seem modest to connect justice with a door, a conversation, or a meal.
But for a person who lives much of life dependent on professional services, this is the very face of society.
The state does not first meet the person as an abstract authority.
It meets them as the employee who enters through the door.
The quality of the small encounter is therefore also part of the quality of democracy.
Is the person heard?
Is the body respected?
Do wishes have consequences?
Is power visible and justified?
These are not merely questions of good service.
They are questions of citizenship.
Professional Responsibility
Professional responsibility means being responsible for more than the task.
It means being attentive to what an action does to a person’s opportunities, self-respect, and belonging.
The employee cannot control every condition.
But she is responsible for how she uses the room for action she actually has.
She cannot always give the person what he wants.
But she can listen, explain, and meet him as a subject.
She cannot solve every structural problem.
But she can refuse to make them invisible.
Professional responsibility is therefore both limited and far-reaching.
Limited because no single helper can carry the entire system.
Far-reaching because every encounter may matter.
Justice in the Small Encounter
Justice is often presented as something large and distant.
But it is also decided in what is near.
In whether we wait for the answer.
In whether we knock.
In whether we explain the decision.
In whether we allow the other person’s perspective to change our own understanding.
The small encounter cannot by itself create a just society.
But a society cannot be just if its small encounters repeatedly violate people.
Nussbaum’s philosophy reminds us that dignity must become real opportunities. The task of the professional is to help make this happen in practice.
Not by taking over the life.
But by opening it.
Not by speaking for the other when the other can speak for themselves.
But by making the voice possible.
Not by hiding power behind kindness.
But by using it responsibly and allowing it to be criticised.
Justice in the small encounter is therefore more than friendliness.
It is professional judgement, ethical courage, and a willingness to allow the other person to matter.
And perhaps this is where society’s great words are truly tested.
Not first in what we say about human dignity.
But in how we meet the concrete person standing before us.
Nussbaum’s philosophy reminds us that dignity must become real opportunities.
The task of the professional is to help make this happen in practice.
This essay is based on my lecture notes on Martha Nussbaum, which I often used in my lectures for students in Social Work. The text is developed in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT, which also made the illustration.
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