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Since 2015 Dutch street-level bureaucrats have ample discretionary space to determine how to help clients. Simultaneously, resources were reduced. According to Zacka SLBs should avoid three pathological positions: indifference, caregiving, and enforcing. At the individual level SLBs supposedly accomplish that by a gymnastics of the self. We observed SLBs. They avoided the pathological positions by (1) reframing the reigning policy for clients (enforcing caringly) and (2) managing clients’ self-image, bolstering their confidence, or tempering their expectations (caring forcefully). SLBs practice a gymnastics of the client alongside a gymnastics of the self. SLBs thus make the reigning policy palatable for clients.

Many of today’s problems revolve around distance and proximity. Progres­ sives argue that a universalist, inclusive ethics requires us to bridge distan­ ces in identity, space, and time. Conservatives object that such bridging is psychologically unrealistic: people of flesh and blood can only care about whom/what is close­by. Evolutionary and psychological research seems to corroborate this sobering view. Many researchers confirm that our intuitions (‘System 1’) are groupish and short­sighted, and largely deaf to the appeal of rational universalism (‘System 2’).But not all agree. We distinguish four ‘evo­progressive’ attempts to reconcile evolution and psychology with a universalist, inclusive ethics. Singer and Pinker (1), Buchanan and Powell (2), and Sunstein (3) contend that a reason­ based, inclusive ethics is psychologically feasible, but that such an ethics has to be thin, solely focusing on rights and no­harm. By contrast, Haidt (4) argues that an inclusive ethics should be ‘broad’, also encompassing moral domains like sacrality, loyalty and authority. This implies for him that it cannot be reason­based.We argue that a broad form of inclusive ethics can and should be reason­ based, but that this requires a rethinking of ‘reason’. We show that the evo­progressives’ conviction that a rational ethics is by definition thin, results from their theoreticistic conception of reason. But reason can also have more mimetic­embodied or mythical­narrative forms. These do allow or a broad, rational, inclusive ethics that can motivate real people to include stakeholders that are distant in identity, place, and time.

In many European countries, including the Netherlands, current care policies encourage ‘active citizens’ to support each other rather than having individuals rely on paid professional help. Rehabilitation centres also put greater emphasis on social networks assisting adults with acquired long-term disabilities and their caregivers. Often these adults and their caregivers feel insufficiently prepared to cope with the disability in daily life and struggle with community integration. However, little is known about the factors that make vulnerable people accept or decline support from their social networks. We researched the social support needs of persons with acquired disabilities and their caregivers eligible for a family group conference intervention by conducting 19 semi-structured interviews in rehabilitation centres in the Netherlands. A thematic analysis revealed that most couples (15) were reluctant to request (more) support from their social network, even though many of them had a good network to rely on. We identified five reasons for this reluctance: (1) not accustomed asking support, (2) not wanting to be a (bigger) burden, (3) fear of intrusion into one's privacy and independence, (4) fear or problematic motivations such as curiosity or pity and (5) lack of reliability, competence, or comprehension. The main factor seemed to be the lack of reciprocity: couples do not see sufficient options to reciprocate the necessary support. Therefore, before instigating social support-centred interventions such as family group conferences, social care and other health professionals should be aware of any factors causing a sense of reluctance and explore the experiences of an imbalance in reciprocity.