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Feminist Ethics of Care
... Yet, meanings related to avoiding causing animal suffering prevailed. I relate the findings to the idea of care, as conceptualised by feminist care ethicists (see, e.g., Fisher & Tronto, 1990;Keller & Kittay, 2017), including ecofeminist approaches to care and the ideal of caring masculinity . ...
... It was common for the vegan men who participated in this study to be deeply affected by the plight of nonhuman animals, which prompted embodied responses of care. These experiences illustrate the entanglement of rationality with emotions and embodiment in moral action in how we relate to other animals, as suggested by several CAS and ecofeminist scholars and feminist care ethicists (Aaltola, 2013;Gruen, 2007;Donovan, , 2006Nussbaum, 2001;Keller & Kittay, 2017). As Lockwood (2018) puts it, "[i]t is never only our 'disembodied' intellectual evaluations that guide action, but always thoughts entangled with bodily reactions that become knowable and nameable as emotions: joy, disgust, anger, fear, etc." (p. ...
... ). In feminist ethics of care, emotions and reason are entangled and equally important, asKeller and Kittay (2017) aptly summarise:Care done without the right affect, such as love and empathy, is often not experienced as care at all. Similarly, when care is not offered through an intuitive and immediate response but mediated by reasoning, care can be experienced as insincere and calculated. ...
This book explores the potential of men’s veganism to contest unsustainable anthropocentric masculinities. Examining what it means to be a vegan man and connections between men, masculinities and veganism addresses exploitative human-animal relations, climate change, and social inequalities as urgent and interconnected global issues. Using conceptual insights from critical studies on men and masculinities, ecofeminism, critical animal studies and vegan studies, this book examines the potential of men’s veganism and vegan masculinities to foster more ethical, caring and sustainable ways of relating to nonhuman animals and to contribute towards more egalitarian gender relations. This book is grounded in a qualitative empirical study of the lived experiences of 61 vegan men in Northern Europe. The themes explored include men’s transition to veganism, the emotional and embodied dimensions of men’s veganism, negotiating social and intimate relationships as vegan men, and links between men’s veganism, gender equality and social justice.
... Yet, meanings related to avoiding causing animal suffering prevailed. I relate the findings to the idea of care, as conceptualised by feminist care ethicists (see, e.g., Fisher & Tronto, 1990;Keller & Kittay, 2017), including ecofeminist approaches to care and the ideal of caring masculinity . ...
... It was common for the vegan men who participated in this study to be deeply affected by the plight of nonhuman animals, which prompted embodied responses of care. These experiences illustrate the entanglement of rationality with emotions and embodiment in moral action in how we relate to other animals, as suggested by several CAS and ecofeminist scholars and feminist care ethicists (Aaltola, 2013;Gruen, 2007;Donovan, , 2006Nussbaum, 2001;Keller & Kittay, 2017). As Lockwood (2018) puts it, "[i]t is never only our 'disembodied' intellectual evaluations that guide action, but always thoughts entangled with bodily reactions that become knowable and nameable as emotions: joy, disgust, anger, fear, etc." (p. ...
... ). In feminist ethics of care, emotions and reason are entangled and equally important, asKeller and Kittay (2017) aptly summarise:Care done without the right affect, such as love and empathy, is often not experienced as care at all. Similarly, when care is not offered through an intuitive and immediate response but mediated by reasoning, care can be experienced as insincere and calculated. ...
This chapter highlights the challenges that vegans face in speciesist societies and the communicational effort required of them to navigate socially difficult situations around veganism. Inspired by social interactionist theoretical approaches, the social and relational dimensions of veganism are canvassed. Underscoring ways in which doing gender and doing masculinity are interlinked, the chapter explores the strategies that vegan men use to convey veganism and the communicational dilemmas they face in everyday interactions with non-vegans. As key strategies, vegan men avoided talking about veganism unprompted and practised non-confrontational styles of communication, including distancing themselves from the trope of the preachy vegan. The chapter considers the implications of the ways that vegan men negotiate veganism in everyday interactions for the spread of veganism and for the construction of masculinities.
... I'll start, then, from feminist approaches to vulnerability. These are strongly critical of the the modern ideal of autonomous subjectivity, for overstating the capacity for transcendence, independence and self-determination, and for denigrating various contrary properties like corporeality, emotionality, passivity, dependency, vulnerability (Keller and Kittay 2017;Lloyd 2004;Mackenzie 2021). Critics instead propose that dependency or vulnerability are ubiquitous, even fundamental, aspects of human experience, with various sources: bodily needs, illness, and disability; social and psychological injuries like humiliation or shame; or political harms like exploitation and oppression (Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds 2014). ...
Disability is a consistent topic of concern within philosophical ethics (including medical and applied ethics, and bioethics). In many cases, however, it is viewed as a misfortune, and an impediment to well-being. This is because matters of the good human life turn on some criterion—rational autonomy, say, or personhood—that distinguishes good from bad lives. These are based in the possession of certain properties or capacities that are purported to be essential to humans.[@HughesSocialModel1997; @PatersonDisabilityStudies1999] Disability here figures not only as an impediment to the capacity to realise the goods that attend a fully human life, but as a lack of some capacity that is fundamentally human. There is no shortage of arguments by influential thinkers concerning the moral permissibility of eliminating disabled people, based on the idea that the latter are not fully human in some meaningful respect.[@ShildrickVisceralPhenomenology2015; @ShildrickWhyShould2014]
I aim to develop some aspects of a critical orientation that does not rely upon definitively human capacities, and that, as such, does not exclude atypical bodies and minds from the outset. To explore such ideas, I consider feminist theories that understand vulnerability to be a ubiquitous or even universal aspect of life, and as such, a more appropriate basis for ethics. I suggest that instead of understanding vulnerability in either universalistic or particularistic terms, these two aspects can fruitfully be integrated. Vulnerability is an ineluctable dimension of embodied existence; however, it is always and everywhere realised and experienced in concrete conditions. Significantly, vulnerability is uniquely distributed: the vulnerability of some lives is safeguarded while that of others is exposed. I suggest that this provides a fruitful way to understand disability, without appealing to essentialist notions of the human: the potential vulnerabilities of some bodies are neglected in social and material situations, such that disability is actualised as a result. I finally suggest an approach for identifying and responding to vulnerability that is not grounded on any specific criterion of the human, and that involves a collective commitment to continually compose better relations.
... O contorno para esta complexa discussão sobre a ética do cuidado tem sua base em diferentes vertentes, destacando as perspectivas filosóficas de Leonardo Boff 12,15 e a ética feminista em sua busca de articulação entre cuidado e justiça 16 Além disso, a professora Maria Fernanda organizou um número especial da revista 'Ex aequo' 23 sobre MLP em que aborda diferentes aspectos de sua vida e obra. Logo na apresentação desse número da revista, ela disse sobre MLP: ...
RESUMO A proposta deste texto tem a função de trazer contribuições da ética do cuidado para práticas da Atenção Básica em Saúde a partir do legado de Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo (1930- 2004), Primeira Ministra de Portugal, de julho de 1979 a janeiro de 1980. Por meio do registro narrativo, trazem-se aspectos da trajetória de vida dessa política por meio do testemunho de uma importante parceira de luta, acrescido de aportes teórico-documentais, os quais fazem parte do acervo da Fundação Cuidar o Futuro, a qual buscava a melhoria sustentada da qualidade de vida e defesa de direitos básicos. A parlamentar teve expressiva participação política em Fóruns Europeus e das Organizações das Nações Unidas propondo ações que combatessem a desigualdade social e a opressão das mulheres. Inspirada na ética feminista, compreendia o cuidado como a pedra de toque de suas ações. Valorizava as experiências singulares das pessoas e comunidades como principal parâmetro de fortalecimento da participação social e efetividade dos direitos humanos. Por fim, expressava uma forma de fazer política em que o compromisso ético e o respeito consigo mesma, com o outro e com o meio ambiente balizavam seu modo de estar no mundo.
... There have been many writings on care and its relationship to politics since the initial publication of this book. For a summary see Keller and Kittay (2017). 36 That is to say, the greater inter-gender equality may contribute to a greater intra-gender inequality among women, not only because the ceiling is raised for some women, but because the floor is lowered for others. ...
... If we are only to care for those in our immediate circles, then it seems that such inequalities can be of no concern to us-but they ought to be. That said, many recent care ethicists have developed the standpoint beyond its initial formulations precisely so as to avoid parochialism; see Keller and Kittay (2017). ...
This chapter explores how birth bears on the temporality of human life. Temporally, lived human existence is future-oriented towards death and past-oriented towards birth. When we take our natal orientation towards the past into account, we see that when we project forward and create meaning we are always extending inherited horizons that we have received in and from the past. The chapter also considers whether birth can rightly be said to be a gift given to us by our mothers. Although that view has problems, thinking of birth as a gift illuminates some connections between our natality and the relational setting of our ethical lives and obligations. Finally, the chapter sums up the book’s main theses about how human existence is shaped by the fact that we are born.
... If we are only to care for those in our immediate circles, then it seems that such inequalities can be of no concern to us-but they ought to be. That said, many recent care ethicists have developed the standpoint beyond its initial formulations precisely so as to avoid parochialism; see Keller and Kittay (2017). ...
This chapter describes the complex relations amongst being born and birth-giving, mothers, women, and child-caring, and then defends the view that Western culture has concentrated narrowly on death at the expense of birth, taking existentialism’s focus on mortality as a case in point. Three aspects of natality are then examined. First, reception and inheritance: in dialogue with Camus and Beauvoir, it is argued that to be born is to receive and inherit the meaningful fabric of our lives and involvements from others around and preceding us. Second, vulnerability: the chapter distinguishes vulnerability in being born—coming into existence in more or less advantageous locations in the world—from vulnerability by virtue of being born—as infants who are helpless and so depend on adult care-givers. Third, negativity: being born is not an exclusively positive condition but has a negative side, in part through its links with vulnerability.
... If we are only to care for those in our immediate circles, then it seems that such inequalities can be of no concern to us-but they ought to be. That said, many recent care ethicists have developed the standpoint beyond its initial formulations precisely so as to avoid parochialism; see Keller and Kittay (2017). ...
The introduction sets out the project of this book, which is to explore how our existence is shaped by our being born. This is an exploration of how human existence is natal, that is, is the way it is because we are born. Taking birth and natality into account transforms our view of human existence. It sheds new light on our mortality, foregrounds the extent and depth of our dependency on one another, and brings additional phenomena—such as the relationality of the self and the temporality of human life—together in a new way. The introduction sketches these topics and explains how this inquiry is located within and draws on existentialism, psychoanalysis, and feminist philosophy.
... If we are only to care for those in our immediate circles, then it seems that such inequalities can be of no concern to us-but they ought to be. That said, many recent care ethicists have developed the standpoint beyond its initial formulations precisely so as to avoid parochialism; see Keller and Kittay (2017). ...
This chapter looks at four features of human existence—dependency, the relationality of the self, embeddedness in social power, and situatedness—and shows how they are connected with birth. We are dependent both as infants and children—natal dependency—and also to varying degrees throughout life. Because we begin life dependent on adult care, we attach to our care-givers very intensely; these attachments shape our selves and personality structures, partly through processes of identification as they are theorized in psychoanalysis. This makes us highly receptive in early life to social power relations, which even shape our possibilities for criticizing social power in later life. Finally, at birth we begin life situated within the world with respect to many variables, including culture; gender, race, class, and other social divisions; geography; history; body; and placement in a specific set of personal and wider relationships such as kin networks and generations.
This chapter focuses on the emotional, affective, and embodied dimensions of men’s veganism. While veganism is much more than a diet, the key way it is manifested is through eating. The body is thus implicitly central to the vegan praxis, although it tends to be neglected in the case of Western white privileged men in particular. The chapter provides an overview of conceptual insights on links between men, masculinities, emotions, embodiment, and affect, drawing on ecofeminist, critical masculinities, and feminist new materialist scholarship. The chapter argues that emotions and affects are interwoven with intellectual knowledge and rationality in men’s veganism. It demonstrates how men’s concerns about nonhuman animals, their own health, and the environment are simultaneously emotional, affective, and rational.
There are significant debates and conflicting views on how to define veganism. Existing definitions highlight different aspects of veganism, such as identity, diet, lifestyle, or ethical practice. The chapter provides an overview of the major definitions of veganism found in popular and academic discourses. It proceeds to examine how vegan men conceptualise veganism and the implications of these definitions. The findings suggest that while meanings related to avoiding causing nonhuman animal suffering prevailed amongst vegan men, veganism was understood in somewhat diverse ways, shaped by the men’s paths to and experiences of veganism, as well as by their other values and practices. The plurality of ways veganism is understood and practised by vegan men is explored through ecofeminist approaches to care.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore stark gendered care inequalities and the inadequacy of care provision across states. This article presents a feminist-ethics-of-care-informed discourse analysis of the representation of care that emerged at the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality – an innovative government-created citizen deliberation process. It identifies how care was represented as a ‘problem’ of both gender inequality and the market, and uncovers key silences, which ignored care as a universal need of all citizens and the significance of care networks to sustaining caring. We propose the necessity of ethics-of-care-based understandings to address post-pandemic care challenges.
See more recent paper for an updated iteration of these ideas.
L'A. etudie les relations entre la conception praticaliste de la verite (PTC) et la theorie du point de vue feministe (FST) dans la pensee maternelle de S. Ruddick. L'A. souligne la complexite d'une politique feministe de la paix qui se fonderait sur la diversite des pratiques maternelles