Migration, both national and international, is a modern global phenomenon in an age of globalization. In the last decades human mobility has notably increased. Reasons that compel people to leave their homeland and move to an unfamiliar place in search of better futures for themselves and their families include war and conflict, poverty, lack of economic opportunities, unstable political situation, and pollution.
While some migrants attain a satisfactory social status and a dignified level of life through proper integration into their new social setting, many others are living at the margins, frequently exploited and deprived of their fundamental rights, or engaged in forms of behavior harmful to their host society. On the one hand, many people of the receiving countries resist migrants and refugees entering their countries due to fear, misunderstanding, or innocence. They think that migrants and refugees would become a burden or even a threat to local people. Sometimes, it is even the community or political leaders who take the lead to discriminate against the migrants. On the other hand, migrants and migrant workers are often regarded as an invisible population or just factors of production, not always on the top of agenda of the policy makers. They are often treated as outsiders or âthe other,â being excluded from the mainstream society. Living in a culture with stark difference from the place of origin, many of these migrants, in fact, have to face various kinds of difficulties and adaptation. The process of integration entails rights and duties, attention, and concern for the dignified existence of migrants; it also calls for attention on the part of migrants to the values offered by the society to which they now belong.1
My social consciousness emerged during my college study when I visited the underprivileged who lived on boats and the so-called cage house in Hong Kong with my Catholic friends. Soon after I graduated, I joined the Hong Kong Justice and Peace Commission in the 1990s as a full-time church worker working in the social justice ministry. Since then, I have been involved in various social issues and rights related to the underprivileged groups such as Vietnamese refugees, migrant workers, ethnic minorities, and low-income workers. I have chances to engage with these marginalized groups and advocate their rights with other non-governmental organizations. Many of the marginalized are migrants or people of another ethnicity from other places. The problems they face involve both unjust social policies and indifferent attitudes of the local community, including the Catholic community. Gradually, I found that in order to work together persistently to change the unjust social structures, a consistent commitment to solidarity with the marginalized is needed among people. Some social virtues in a religious or secular community are imperative to foster such an attitude in a virtuous life.
During that time, as a pastoral worker of the Catholic Church, I often reflected on how to motivate members of the Church to be concerned with the marginalized of the society based on the social teachings of the Catholic Church. Aiming at guiding peopleâs behavior, Catholic social teaching (CST) is the intersection where Christian life and conscience touch the real world. Treating the poor and the marginalized with care and hospitality has always been an important teaching and lived experience of Christians in different ages of the Church. There are three levels of teaching, namely, the foundational level of motivations, the directive level of norms for life in society, and the deliberative level of conscience, called to mediate objective and general norms in concrete and particular social situations.2 The first level is the level of the heart, motivating people to care and to act. The second is the rational level, which refers to norms, that is, principles and themes to assist people in interpreting reality and to discern various courses of action. The third level is the integrative level, challenging people to link these norms to their everyday lives. These are three distinct activities. Although CST, which links Christian faith with social issues, can be engaging for todayâs believers, the way the church has addressed these issues may not be. One of the reasons is the fact that the teaching of CST rests too much on the presentation of principles alone, neglecting the heart and the integration levels.3 Thus, it is insufficient to motivate people to engage passionately and help solve problems. Because of this, one can, after all, know justice or human rights theories or even the situation of the poor and not be motivated to do anything.
Moreover, according to my own pastoral experiences of faith formation and teaching social ethics, I have found that different ways of approaching CST differ in their effectiveness at bringing Catholics to be more compassionate and merciful and to show commitment to the poor and the marginalized. When CST is taught from a deontological approach, that is, as principles to be applied (whether human dignity and human rights, option for the poor, or solidarity), no matter how much Catholics accepted and appreciated the principles cognitively and could intellectually articulate the need for systemic change in the society, their understanding may not lead directly to a change in their practice. However, when we contextualized the vision of CST by linking the main themes with narratives from the field (voices of the marginalized and the justice promoters) and sacred traditions (stories in the Scripture and different periods of church history), and including these learning opportunities for Christians to follow as examples and practices in real life, their attitudes were more likely to be transformed and motivated to actions of justice in solidarity with others.4 Critical to this formation, I believe, is articulating an ethic that will promote the virtuous life in the concrete context and bring out the spirit of Catholic social teaching through the lives of people who have incarnated it, that is, the justice and peace advocates.
Furthermore, when my colleagues and I discussed social issues with parishioners, certain questions arose repeatedly. These questions include, why must we, as Christians, link up our faith with political affairs? Shouldnât we, as believers, focus on spiritual life rather than politics? Others do not mind serving the poor and underprivileged through charity work or almsgiving, but wonder whether it is a must for Christians to play the prophetic role and criticize unjust policies and advocate for social justice. Still others agree that they should be active and good moral persons, but argue that it is beyond their ability to change the society and cure social evils. In other words, to a certain extent, these believers separate spiritual life and secular life, spirituality and morality, relationship with God and relationship with people, personal ethics and social ethics, personal sin and social or structural sin.
In view of this, in addressing migration and other social issues, I believe that it is important to develop an ethical approach which integrates insights of both principles-based and virtue ethics approaches to social ethics, particularly Catholic social ethics, to narrow or break down some of these gaps. This is because virtue ethics emphasizes linking spiritual practices with morality, personal moral cultivation with the goodness of the community or the bigger society, virtues with action.5 It gives attention not only to the goal of life, but also to a personâs virtues, dispositions, practices, moral cultivation, transformation, and life direction.6 It is important to emphasize the âother-regardingâ dimension of virtue ethics, what social virtues need to be highlighted, relationships among various virtues, what kind of spiritual or religious practices are relevant to moral cultivation, and how these practices can transform a person and communities to be more compassionate toward the underprivileged.
In highlighting the virtue ethics approach, I do not mean to neglect the other approaches in social ethics. In fact, through the principles-based, human rights approach, Church leaders and other ethicists can highlight the duties and obligations of political and economic leaders as well as Christians in upholding justice and working toward common good, making sure that the poor and the vulnerable, including the migrants, can access resources and participate in economic, social, and political life.7 Whereas through virtues and the model of Jesus, Christians can be touched and transformed and empathetic and sympathetic feelings can be aroused. They are moved to carry out pastoral actions in accordance with the social mission of the Church, leading to human flourishing and union with God. Problems relating to interpersonal relationships and social integration of the marginalized can be addressed. These approaches are complementary to each other.
Apart from the Catholic tradition, I will also discuss, in this book, Confucian ethics, one of the Chinese cultural traditions affecting many Chinese people in Hong Kong and other parts of the world. The insights of Confucian ethics will be a useful resource to enrich the Catholic tradition. Some scholars consider Confucian ethics as rich in virtue features and virtue ethics as the implicit theory behind Confucian ethics, with emphasis on virtues, moral exemplars, and formation of moral character.8 Thus, it is suitable to integrate the main elements of this virtue-based ethical approach in a Chinese context, particularly in transforming oneâs character and motivating a person to commit to altruistic attitudes and behavior. Moreover, although there is no explicit human rights discourse in Confucian texts, that does not exclude the possibility of similar values between Confucian ethics and human rights discourse. Thus, I will also explore the social values in Confucian ethics that seek to protect the rights and well-being of migrants.
The goal of this book is to demonstrate the importance of integrating virtue ethics and principles-based Catholic social teaching in order to motivate the Christian community in Hong Kong or elsewhere to embrace an ongoing and comprehensive commitment to social justice, particularly showing concern and hospitality to the migrant communities. Through comparing the virtue-based features of Catholic social ethics and those of the Confucian tradition, I will demonstr...