Care and the Pluriverse

Abstract

This book begins with the concept of the pluriverse – the idea that we do not live in a single world with different belief systems, paradigms, or cultures, but instead live in a world of many worlds – and investigates the ways in which this notion necessitates a rethinking of the field of Global Ethics. In particular, the book considers how the field can reorient itself towards building an ethics for the pluriverse, where differences are deep and pervasive, and where different ways of being and knowing are at stake. Ultimately, drawing upon a feminist ethics of care, this book argues that a pluriversal ethics can fruitfully be thought of as an ethics of vulnerability and precarity. The ethics of care is premised on a relational social ontology, which sees ethics as a problem of responsibilities in relations, and which foregrounds the moral saliency of our mutual vulnerability (including the vulnerability of moral judgement) that stems from our relationality. In so doing, the ethics of care reconceptualizes moral dilemmas along relational lines. The argument is that this line of thinking, when combined with a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and precarity (where precarity refers to intensified vulnerability that results from unequal relations of power), provides a useful meta-theoretical orientation from which to begin building a pluriversal ethics.