Care Ethics, Bruno Latour, and the Anthropocene

Michael Flower,Maurice Hamington

doi:10.3390/philosophies7020031

Abstract

Bruno Latour is one of the founding figures in social network theory and a broadly influential systems thinker. Although his work has always been relational, little scholarship has engaged the relational morality, ontology, and epistemology of feminist care ethics with Latour’s actor–network theory. This article is intended as a translation and a prompt to spur further interactions. Latour’s recent publications, in particular, have focused on the new climate regime of the Anthropocene. Care theorists are just beginning to address posthuman approaches to care. The argument here is that Latourian analysis is helpful for such explorations, given that caring for the earth and its inhabitants is the dire moral challenge of our time. The aim here is not to characterize Latour as a care theorist but rather as a provocative scholar who has much to say that is significant to care thinking. We begin with a brief introduction to Latour’s scholarship and lexicon, followed by a discussion of care theorist Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on Latour. We then explore recent work on care and the environment consistent with a Latourian approach. The conclusion reinforces the notion that valuing relationality across humans and non-human matter is essential to confronting the Anthropocene.

Highlights

The 8 October 2021 issue of the journal Science offered a sobering yet not unfamiliar warning: “Intergenerational Inequities in Exposure to Climate Extremes: Young Generations are Severely Threatened by Climate Change” [1]
From his first book co-authored by Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), to The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004), to An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013)—his magnum opus—to his recent books on the ecological mutation of the Anthropocene, Facing Gaia (2017), Down to Earth (2018), and After the Lockdown: A Metamorphosis (2021), Latour has challenged how we produce knowledge, how we account for experience and the manner of life amidst an intimately entangled world of fellow humans, plants, animals, microbes, instruments, texts, habits, political disputes, geological forces, disintegrating ecosystems, and much, much else that comprises the heterogeneous tapestry of our world
For Latour, this reassemblage has at least three characteristics: (1) non-humans are raised in status to actors rather than “hapless bearers of symbolic projection” [5] (p. 10); (2) society must be viewed as dynamic without fixed or static categorical understanding; and (3) social network thinking is more than postmodern deconstruction and seeks “new institutions, procedures, and concepts able to collect and reconnect the social” [5] (p. 11)

Summary

Introduction

The 8 October 2021 issue of the journal Science offered a sobering yet not unfamiliar warning: “Intergenerational Inequities in Exposure to Climate Extremes: Young Generations are Severely Threatened by Climate Change” [1]. Puig de la Bellacasa is one scholar who has endeavored to translate aspects of Latour’s work for care theorists in a limited manner. Translation is an essential concept for Latour in making networks functional The contributors to this issue are endeavoring to translate the work of significant philosophers to those interested in care theory and, reciprocally, care ethics for those steeped in mainstream philosophy. Latour describes his actor–network theory (ANT), a framework of dynamic relational existence including humans, non-human beings, and matter, as a “sociology of translations” [5] The response foments the flourishing of the other, but the one caring is no longer the same being as prior to the encounter

An Introduction to Latour

Current Work on Care Ethics and the Environment

Conclusions

Latour