Toward an expansion of an enactive ethics with the help of care ethics

Abstract

An important and urgent way of widening the scope of embodied and situated approaches to intersubjectivity consists in exploring their implications for ethics1. Cash (2010, 2013) has recently argued for a rethinking of seminal ethical concepts against the background of the idea of socially distributed cognition. Colombetti and Torrance (2009) have proposed an ethics based on an enactive cognitive science of social life2. In this short paper, I want to focus mainly on the latter proposal and argue that recent developments in the enactive approach to social phenomena call for further expansion of an enactive ethics beyond its initial focus on face-to-face dyadic interactions. In this respect I aim to draw attention to the so far underappreciated kinship between an enactive ethics and the ethics of care. I consider the alliance of these two as remarkably well suited for abandoning the pitfalls of a widespread view of human autonomy in terms of the self-determination of individual rational agents, a view that has been systematically questioned from the perspective of care ethics over the last 35 years, but which still exerts a strong influence on our thinking about the good life and morality3.