A Critical, Political Ethics of Care

Abstract

To attend to the unique challenges posed by the pluriverse (outlined in Chapter 3), a different orientation to ethics, a different understanding of morality, and a different set of tools is needed. Chapter 4 begins theorizing such an orientation and toolkit, drawing upon feminist ethics and the ethics of care. This chapter reviews the literature on the ethics of care, with a particular emphasis on its feminist relational ontology, situated epistemology, the ways in which this ontology and epistemology foreground vulnerability, and the ways in which the ethics of care reconceptualizes ethics and morality. This chapter also responds to three charges often raised against the ethics of care: (1) that the ethics of care essentializes women and cannot attend to difference; (2) that the ethics of care is only useful for particularistic and close relations, and therefore offers little value for navigating global ethical issues; and (3) that the ethics of care is not a political ethic. In so doing, Chapter 4 presents an understanding of the ethics of care as a critical and political theory that is attuned to differences all the way down.