Care Ethics: The Introduction of Care as Political Category 9042938617, 9789042938618, 9782130586333, 9789042938625

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Care Ethics The Introduction of Care as a Political Category With a Preface by Joan Tronto Fabienne Brugère

VOLUME 7

Care Ethics. The Introduction of Care as a Political Category

Ethics of Care Editorial Board Prof. dr. Helen Kohlen, Vallendar Prof. dr. Sandra Laugier, Paris I – Sorbonne Prof. dr. Frans Vosman, Utrecht, chief editor Advisory board Prof. dr. Andries Baart, Utrecht Prof. dr. Guillaume le Blanc, Paris Prof. dr. Sophie Bourgault, Ottawa Prof. dr. Fabienne Brugère, Paris Prof. dr. Elisabeth Conradi, Stuttgart Prof. dr. Chris Gastmans, Leuven Prof. dr. Per Nortvedt, Oslo Prof. dr. Annelies van Heijst, Tilburg Prof. dr. Linus Vanlaere, Leuven Prof. dr. Marian Verkerk, Groningen

Cover from a painting by the German Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944). Site of the Museum of his work: http://www.osnabrueck.de/fnh/10508.asp. Nussbaum has—while firmly rooted in the European tradition of modern art— given the atrocities of Nazism a face. We honor his life and work by pointing at his artwork on the covers of this series Ethics of Care. Felix Nussbaum Liebespaar, 1928, WV nr. 61 Oil on canvas, 59 × 42,5 cm Private collection Foto © Felix-Nussbaum-Haus Osnabrück Permanent loan from the Niedersächsischen Sparkassenstiftung

Ethics of Care Volume 7

Care Ethics The Introduction of Care as a Political Category With a Preface by Joan Tronto Fabienne Brugère Translation: Armelle Chrétien, Olivia Cooper-Hadjian and Brian Heffernan

PEETERS Leuven – Paris – Bristol, CT 2019

This book was originally published in French as F. Brugere, L’Éthique du care, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 2014, in the series Que sais-je? [ISBN 978-2-13-058633-3], and republished here in English with permission of PUF. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-90-429-3861-8 eISBN 978-90-429-3862-5 D/2019/0602/21 © 2019 – Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven

Table of Contents

Preface by Joan Tronto

1

INTRODUCTION

5

CHAPTER I – The Theory of Care and The Voice of Women

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I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.

Attention to others: another moral psychology Caring is not mothering The indistinct voice of women How can one care for others without losing sight of oneself? A gender of solicitude and care? Gendered identities Ethics vs. morality How to live better From an asymmetrical world to a reciprocal world A feminist ethics

10 11 15 19 23 28 30 32 34

CHAPTER II – Care Versus the Liberal Individual

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I. Human beings are fundamentally vulnerable, but… II. Critiques of the liberal man III. The turning point of practical philosophy in the 18th century IV. Vulnerability and the critique of identity V. An ontology of the accident VI. Vulnerability and dependency VII. Good care

41 45 47 50 51 53 59

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CHAPTER III – For a Caring Democracy I. II. III. IV. V.

The neoliberal use of care Caring within the family Care practices Social work A caring democracy in France

67 68 74 82 89 94

CONCLUSION

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REFERENCES

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A Short Preface Joan C. Tronto, University of Minnesota

This short book makes an unusual contribution to the English literature on care ethics. Here, Fabienne Brugère introduces English language readers to her version of care ethics. Why should English language readers want to know about the reception of care ethics by a French thinker? Simply put, insofar as care ethics is a deeply relational and contextual way of understanding the world, no one reading of these ideas is enough. While Brugère does not attempt to summarize the French reception of care ethics in this text (that reception is broad and significant), her reading, as something of a stranger, of how Anglo-American care ethics develops provides a valuable re-reading of this tradition. And her account at the end of the book about how care has fared in French politics in the past decade provides valuable insights into anyone who wishes to use care ethics politically. This book provides, then, a reliable guide to the ethics of care. Brugère organizes her text out from individual psychology, where, arguably, care ethics began, to understandings its nature as a relational ontology, to understanding the ways in which care might be embodied in contemporary French politics. She both reproduces much of the Anglo-American discussion and she brings additional insights from contemporary theoretical approaches in France to her account. Anyone who is just coming to this field of study will find this book to be a fine introduction; those who have read much of this literature will still benefit from her insights and readings.

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What Brugère does in this text is to take us, ever gently, through a series of steps that allow the thought, gradually, to come to us: we are truly in a state of mutual vulnerability. She begins by re-reading Carol Gilligan’s path-breaking work about In a Different Voice and shows that during the Reagan years, it was critical to take notice of a voice that provided a new conception of attention to others and to social responsibility. By the end, she argues, a “theoretical and practical revolution” had begun. She also notes that for women, one part of the problem has always been how to care for others without losing sight of the self. Allowing other vulnerable voices to come forward does not require an erasing of the self. Bringing the task of ethics down to the most concrete level, Brugère notes that care helps us to answer the basic ethical question, how to live better, by noting that, while our behavior is “never a completely rational affair,” it does require us to use our emotions and our judgments and to be aware of others as we act. In offering a rethinking of the self, the ethics of care displaces a narrowly self-interested individual with a person who recognizes vulnerability and dependency. As she writes, “the ethics of care finds its purpose in a form of attention to others…” (23). While observing that issues of gender still inform what constitutes good care for and from men and women, Brugère then argues for a more political account of care ethics. The dangers are not only about how individuals relate to one another, but in a novel turn, she also turns to how fields such as social work consider their caring work. Drawing upon French observers of the state such as Didier Fassin and Didier Vranchen, she argues for a less paternalistic approach to social work. She insists that it is time now to think about populations who have been rendered invisible. “Care,” she claims, “Is a redistribution principle whose aim is to turn forced dependence into accepted interdependence” (40). She ends by observing that we can think of new rights to receive and offer care, and of the importance for civil society to make such claims. These are the beginnings of a broader discussion about the politics of care for the future. That will such a politics require? Brugère makes a few observations about this point. She argues first, that it changes the way we think about collective

a short preface

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life, so that we come to think of each individual as such instead as of a representative of something else. She writes, “The ethics of care, both as “caring about” and as “caring for,” deconstructs the possibility of a collective master narrative involving each and every individual in an impersonal and indiscriminate way. The assertion of our freedoms and of a spirit of autonomy must be reassessed in the analysis of forms of vulnerability and the injustice they entail in an interdependent world” (41) Second, Brugère observes, in passing, that “Feminism must now divest itself of its Western arrogance…” (15) and she is correct to make this claim. Widening the places where care is studied closely (the geographer Parvati Raghuram calls this “emplacement”1) will reduce this bias, but care ethics must clearly become more global in order to make any claims to be more universal. Third, Brugère allows us to see what is incorrect in contemporary political life; she writes, “Developing an ethics of care helps to reaffirm the idea that no vision of society can involve only individuals who thrive on individual performance, money, and power” (41). All of these observations are really vital at present. Scholars within the ethics of care field, and interested members of society, will continue to debate which political steps are the most crucial and strategically useful. But surely this is the debate that we now need to have. It has perhaps never been more important than now for people around the world to come to understand how different the world will be if we place care at the center of human life. For those of us who have been writing about the ethics of care for some decades, recent political developments throughout the globe are frustrating and disheartening. Feminists might have imagined a world today that is moving forward to new understandings of care, greater sensitivities to human vulnerabilities, and a more genuine response to the crisis of climate change. Instead, we are faced with so-called populists around Raghuram, Parvati. 2016. “Locating Care Ethics Beyond the Global North “ Acme: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 15 (3):511-33. 1

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the world who are mongering fear and insisting that the only way to set the world aright is to return to a mythic past of nationalism and authoritarianism. Fear of migrants, fear of greater complexity in relations among people of different genders, religions, racialized groups, nationalities, languages, have become the grounds for trusting in “fearless leaders” who gain their status and strength by turning citizens into children in desperate need of protection. Were the change we are envisioning not so markedly dramatic, there would be no reason for such a huge reaction against it. Yet somehow, in their hearts, people know that they have become more vulnerable to all others and to the great conditions of change in the globe, at the same time this knowledge makes them susceptible to covering their ears and saying, “no, it cannot be so.” What the world needs now is people who are brave enough, and strong enough, to listen to others. We need to hear the voices of others speaking of their vulnerability, as well as to hear, deep within ourselves, our own acknowledgments of vulnerability and dependency. Out of such mutual regard, an ethic of care may find a place to grow and to thrive.

Introduction

In In a Different Voice,2 Carol Gilligan suggested that women’s conception of morality is different from men’s. By doing so, not only did she extend the gender divide to morality: she also emphasized a concept that had been utterly neglected and long left incomplete – the concept of care. This has wrongly led some to believe that, in her view, care-giving was necessarily the role of women. Her point was actually different: she wanted to question the borders of morality, the possibility of an untold experience of moral life of which women are primarily – but not exclusively – at least the witnesses, if not necessarily the sole depositories. A new voice emerged, which needed to be problematized and brought to light. It inaugurated a multifaceted problem: the philosophical, psychological, sociological, and political problem of care. I would like to shed light on this issue by showing that there is indeed a caring attitude, a way of renewing the question of the social bond through the attention paid to others, through care-giving, mutual care, solicitude, and concern for others. These behaviors, which are related to practices, groups, or institutions, fall within a new anthropology which combines vulnerability and relationality, with the latter understood as having two aspects: dependence and interdependence. This conception of humanity undermines individualism and reveals the Carol  Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 2

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negative assumptions it is based on. The fact that the ethics of care emerged in Reagan’s America is no coincidence. In a context which celebrated the enterprising individual, whose interest lies in the evergrowing possession of goods in a self-regulated market society, it was a reminder that the conquering crusades of some were only possible because others were there to carry out care tasks (for children, elderly people, enterprising individuals, etc.) – not only women, but also people in need of a livelihood, or migrants. As new forms of vulnerability emerged – whether vital, social, or environmental –, it was also a reminder of the necessity to renew the social state. The ethics of care focused on new social groups and new forms of exploitation. As a result, two philosophical options emerged. The first was to argue that activities of care, which are largely invisible or euphemized, must be recognized as the sine qua non conditions of economic activity. Liberalism, and a fortiori neoliberalism, cannot emerge as long as the activities of care which allow some people to devote themselves to conquering market shares are not taken into account. By promoting this form of recognition and delegation of care, the ethics of care helps us to reflect on a complementarity to which current types of divisions between the voiceless private realm and the public realm do not do full justice. Is this enough? Or could we go a step further, and claim that the complementarity between the private and the public realms needs, not only to be taken into account, but, more fundamentally, to be questioned? Identifying activities of care, taking care of care itself and of the institutions that provide it are not only endeavors which need to be recognized as such. The idea is to develop a new conception of attention to others and social responsibility by calling into question a society in which individual success relies on people’s capacity to become entrepreneurs of themselves, showing little concern for others or for the community. The theories of care demand a new framework, which does not spontaneously coincide with the traditional division between the private and the public realms, nor with the (often patriarchal) society in which this division is grounded. What is actually at stake, along with the possibility of a

introduction

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major reorganization of society and its norms, is the questioning of a political system that unquestioningly accepts the premises of neoliberalism. This second philosophical approach, which is incomparably more challenging than the first, is the one I am proposing to clarify by following four levels of argumentation that are at play in the ethics of care: the voice expressed in care and the acknowledgement of gender inequalities, the care given to vulnerable and seriously dependent individuals, the possibility of implementing public policies suited to these new modes of individual protection, and the promotion of true equality between women and men. The ethics of care is not a local mending of the abuses of neoliberalism: it is a theoretical and practical revolution. This is the argument I want to make. This ethics rests on the necessity to consider human beings as relational, embodied beings, against any objectifying temptation of morality. At the same time, this very recent ethics, which is structured by its reference to a form of intelligence inseparable from affects, is shaped in radically different ways depending on its advocates: there are versions of ethics of care that are more or less political, more or less feminist, and more or less critical of neoliberalism. This is why I will sometimes talk about an ethics of care and sometimes about multiple ethics of care. This book is an introduction to the ethics of care, and I have therefore focused on the founding American texts.

CHAPTER I

The Theory of Care and the Voice of Women

The ethics of care emerged as the discovery of a new morality whose voice needed to be acknowledged in a world which did not have the right words to express and recognize notions of care-giving and of feeling responsible for the well-being of others. Yet, the various activities of care support behaviors and a mental development which are beneficial to society: an inclination to pay attention to other people, to be responsible, and to help others. These activities are a serious antidote to a form of psychology which only takes into account the self-interests that inform people’s behaviors and the construction of an autonomous, self-absorbed ego. The theory of care was initially elaborated as a relational ethics structured by the attention people give to others. No human being is self-sufficient. Individuals are fundamentally vulnerable and interdependent beings: most of them, at least at some point in their lives, rely on relationships that provide protection, help them develop, or allow them to cope with their dependency. Yet these relationships are ignored, euphemized, or disdained. The reflection on ethics is rooted in the acknowledgement of gender inequalities and in the firm belief that women do not handle moral problems the same way men do – a surprising premise, since morality is always regarded as universal and devoid of such divisions. In short, the ethics of care encourages us to stop idealizing the dominant ethics imposed by patriarchal power. It does so by reexploring the field of the psychology of development and of the stages

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of life to support the expression of a silenced moral voice, emphasizing ordinary lives and the indecision or difficult decisions that persist in spite of the moral superego’s stranglehold on our psyche. The point is to shift the borders of morality by allowing the dissonant voices of women to be heard. For many women, “the moral person is one who helps others,” and so kindness is defined as being helpful, fulfilling one’s obligations and responsibilities towards others.3 How can this vision of “the good life” be reconciled with the moral theory of developmental psychologists, which regards a form of morality anchored in the will and in impartial, detached actions, as superior? This anti-intellectual ethics was born in Reagan’s America during the 1980s, at a time when the welfare state, heir of the Declaration of Philadelphia, the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the creation of the United Nations, was being dismantled in favor of a financial capitalism that was expected to self-regulate.4 Its first modest development was based on reflection on the psychological burden of care activities, on their invisibility, and on the very marginal place that the forms of relationships it covers occupy in research on moral development. More generally, it is part of a trend which argues that not all human bonds are reducible to a form of commercial trade. This revival of a human value that is more than a mere commodity entails a requalification of the “social question” and, above all, of its psychological and moral foundations.

I. – Attention to others: another moral psychology By advocating a form of feminism that revives the idea that “the private is political,” the various ethics of care have aimed their criticism at the predominant and generally male voice of moral reasoning, with its arsenal of principles, rules, and intangible values, so that another, dissenting voice may be heard: a voice firmly anchored in Carol  Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 66. 4 In L’Esprit de Philadelphie (Paris: Le Seuil, 2010), Alain Supiot encourages us to return to the international order that was established after the Second World War, starting with the cornerstone of social justice. 3

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the experience of women, in the feeling of being responsible for others, and motivated by the urgency of care-giving. During the 1980s, this theme developed in two distinct theoretical directions. One was Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, published in 1982, the other was Nel Noddings’s Caring, published in 1984. While Gilligan’s ethics has had a great impact on society and on the evolution of the human sciences for several years, also triggering a political clarification of the concept of care in France as elsewhere, the orientation suggested by Noddings has remained more marginal, because it is tied to a female naturalism built on the notion of care as a norm rooted in mothering. This second orientation has blurred the message of care and has rendered it inaudible to some readers. It has led some to believe in a new female essence or identity which could reshape itself through care, mainly considered as an activity exclusive to women – given their experience of mothering. For this very reason, understanding Noddings’s assertions is essential in order to better decipher simplistic or dishonest readings of the concept of care. According to such readings, the ethics of care develops the idea of a complementarity between men and women, the latter being assigned to the traditional sphere of maternal feelings. It has even been argued that mothers have a specific way of thinking. However, with such theses, this ethics is likely to become confined to a conservative social and political theory, with women being reduced to mother figures and to the education they provide.

II. – Caring is not mothering Nel Noddings is the most representative thinker in this maternalistic trend. As a specialist of education, she has endeavored to underline the benefits of a female ethics of care by contrast with a male ethics that confines love and justice to an impersonal universe, detached from the exigencies of ordinary life.5 In Caring: a Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), she has, on the one hand, Nel Noddings, “Caring,” in Justice and Care, ed. Virginia Held (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1995), p. 18. 5

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advocated anchoring the ethical dispositions involved in caring in female virtues, and on the other, the notion that the caring attitude is structured by the model of the mother-child relationship, maternity being understood as a specific biological and psychological experience which can be used as a foundation for a conception of social cooperation based on care. The starting point is the defense of a natural ethics of sentiments which consists in taking care of other people. This ethics is anchored simultaneously in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness. Such a moral theory runs counter to a longstanding rationalist and masculine philosophical tradition: it develops an ethical ideal that emphasizes concern for others and is rooted in the moral experience of women. Nel Noddings’s reflection is clearly based on women’s capacity to become mothers. The value ascribed to caring and educational attention is feminine. It expresses the greater moral sensitivity of women, stemming from the possibility of maternal love. Mothering is thought to be a result of maternity. Yet, this confines women to an image that rigidifies and essentializes them, excluding women who deviate from it. Defending female values in this way cannot be done without reasserting the heterosexual matrix. Furthermore, this description of relationships of care is embedded in an ethics of love which involves a moral naturalism. More specifically, the attitude of the care-giver is analyzed as an attitude of receptivity directed entirely towards others – and which lies at the root of empathy, since the care-giver naturally adopts the other’s point of view – rather than as the taking over of a dependent life by the care-giver. Although one of the merits of this more positive vision of care is that it criticizes the traditionally dominant position of the care-giver and introduces more horizontal relationships, the flaw in its reasoning is that it normatively promotes an ethics of love stemming from supposedly feminine virtues related to a concern for others. The psychological description of the relationship of care helps to reveal some of its premises: a weighty responsibility, tensions between sometimes contradictory demands, weariness related to the degree of attention required which is constantly diverted towards others in connection

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with this new ethics of love. If the achievement of the relationship entails the figure of a recipient, from whom the provider awaits a response, what characterizes care is mutual recognition. Further still, this relationship consists in the demand for a better world where patterns of care can spread thanks to each individual’s memories of the relationships in which they have been involved. Sensitivity and memory partake in the development of an ethical attitude, which is rooted in natural and feminine predispositions to care for others, but also involves the daily practice of care. Indeed, care is not simply a predisposition. It lies in repeated actions whose center of gravity is the great attention that is given to the recipient of care. Even though such a theory conveys the ideal of an ethics of non-violence, opposed to all forms of domination, the fact remains that defining women as beings dedicated to relationality and care for others is debatable. Why would it be self-evident that women prefer to pose moral problems in terms of concrete situations,6 as Nel Noddings claims? Why would they be engaged more naturally in peaceful relationships, while men’s interactions are both aggressive and cold? Such an ethics immediately raises questions since it is based on popular characterizations of women which have been assimilated. How can women make the social world less fierce and invest their energy in the public sphere to propagate their vision of the world if the representations of men and women are not disrupted, and if relationships of dominance remain unchanged? Ideally, women could be the agents of a moral education of which care would be the centerpiece, and which they could provide as the only group supposedly able to transmit these forms of openness to others. Such a model of care is easy to caricature, for it contains its own limits. On the one hand, it clearly defines the fate of women across the world: they should care for their friends and relatives, keep the family together, and the role of caring for others to the point of selfsacrifice is assigned to them. On the other hand, this depiction of women seems like a step backwards: the deconstructions of “straight” 6

Ibid., p. 23.

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thought7 have taught us that we need to go beyond such alienating categories as “men” and “women.” Women are once again assigned an intangible identity and a predetermined existence. Such an assignation perpetuates women’s alienation from public life, as it develops a political strategy which revives the expression of an eternal but dominated female nature. It is an approach which robs care of its character of a struggle for women’s liberation by confining it to a new essentialism. The maternal and mothering figure imprisons women in a disposition which deprives them of the possibility of becoming as free as men. Thus, when Sara Ruddick calls for “maternal thought,” considered as a whole made up of reflection, judgment, and emotion,8 she perpetuates prejudices which necessarily undermine the political objective of women’s emancipation. Admittedly, this way of thinking, which of course acts as a counterbalance to the hegemony of logical reason in the intellectual world, is implemented in analyses of the family sphere: a realm in which attention to the most fragile, protection and care, as well as the safeguarding of emotional ties – which generally devolve on mothers – undermine differences in position and an authority that can be unjust and abusive. Theories of justice, which generally consider that the family belongs to the private sphere, have not been able to perceive the feelings and attachments that run through this specific social unit, whose most vulnerable members – children – are still growing. They have not managed to account for the asymmetrical relationships between parents and children, but also between fathers and mothers. Consequently, why not imagine family policies that would make the – ideally loving – action of mothers visible? Recognizing women’s actions in service of the emotional construction and protection of the most vulnerable would then become a way of circumventing the violence inherent in the family sphere, considered as a patriarchal model, removed from the moral ideal of justice as structured by a Monique Wittig, La Pensée straight (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2007). Sarah Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 7 8

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fundamental equality between people. According to Ruddick, women can repair this social violence, which is rooted in male dominance and female subjection. Ruddick’s theses are more convincing than Noddings’s because she dismisses gendered moral naturalism. I strongly support her idea that the family realm should be rethought, not as a private realm, but as a realm in which relationships are both public and private. This means taking into account the domination exerted over everything that escapes institutions and is connected with personal relationships invested with norms of power. But how are we to believe that maternal thinking, which champions peace and peaceful coexistence, might develop against the violence of male thinking when the public and private realms are inextricably intertwined, and when relationships of power are present in the most ordinary activities of our lives?9 Maternal thinking lies in the voice of the dominated, which is condemned to silence, prevented from expressing its own violence. Actually, subscribing to an ethics of care which reveals a “feminine nature” or “thinking” inclined toward maternity and its values builds an ideal of care and education which disregards relationships of power and patriarchy, at a time when the latter is reasserting a difference between genders through their main stereotypes. How can theories of care which defend a pragmatic morality and a situational psychology also be so normative and naturalistic? The contemporary re-actualizations of this current are no different in this respect: women belong to a heterosexual construction of the world and its gendered normality.

III. – The indistinct voice of women Carol Gilligan’s book is much more relevant. It allows an anchoring of the various ethics of care in feminist theory and in the particularistic turn in moral philosophy. In In a different voice. Psychological 9 Iris Young, Justice and the Politics off Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), chapters I and II: the domination related to power is reflected in the most personal relationships and the most personal, quotidian activities.

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Theory and Women’s Development, Carol Gilligan does not seek to defend feminine morality and the assignment of women to maternity. Her point is not to think of women’s morality as different from men’s and as stemming from the sphere of the finer feelings. As she has stated very clearly, her goal has always been to question well-established certainties on morality, to reveal practices rooted in care for others, practices which have been undervalued since they were mostly carried out by women. Being a feminist starts with the will to allow inaudible voices to be heard, in order to establish an ethics of the equality of voices against male dominance, joined to a moral standard which serves and confirms it. In order to do so, Gilligan initially denounced a recurring methodological problem in Piaget and Kohlberg’s theories of moral development: the exclusion of women. According to these psychologists, women are less capable of abstraction, and are unable to attain to the standards of moral perfection: individual autonomy and the capacity to justify one’s behavior rationally. Kohlberg, with whom Gilligan initially collaborated, considered that the cornerstone of a moral attitude was the development of an autonomous self, capable of evaluating problematic moral situations in an impartial way. According to his investigations, men were better able to achieve this than women, thus showing greater moral maturity. As to the sensitive field of moral dilemmas (all the situations in which moral values are in conflict, and thus decision-making is very difficult), Kohlberg established that women were unable to justify their behavior, whereas men were better at explaining the reasons why they acted the way they did. Gilligan has exposed the scientific flaws in Kohlberg’s methodology and the results of his investigations, caused by the tendency of developmental theorists to project a male image onto their thinking. More specifically, Gilligan has pointed out that Kohlberg’s aim was to explore the logic behind the resolution of a conflict between two moral standards. He interpreted the moral reasoning of Amy and Jake, two 11-year-olds, within this framework. The children were asked to solve one of the dilemmas that Kohlberg had elaborated in order to evaluate the moral development of teen-

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agers: “in this particular dilemma, a man named Heinz considers whether or not to steal a drug which he cannot afford to buy in order to save his wife’s life.”10 Jake immediately answered that Heinz should steal the drug. More importantly, he construed the dilemma as a conflict that needed to be solved between the right to property and the right to life, eventually defending the priority of the latter and concluding that the husband should break the law, even if it meant ending up in prison. For Jake, solving this moral conflict meant treating it like a kind of mathematical problem projected onto human beings. For Kohlberg, this child had gone beyond stages one and two of moral development, which are concerned with the needs of individuals, and had reached stages three and four, which are characterized by a burgeoning autonomy that takes the form of a reasoned acceptation of the principles of justice anchored in conventions. He was on his way to reaching the higher stages of moral comprehension founded on a sense of justice and involving autonomous individuals who privilege both equality and reciprocity. The conclusions are quite different for Amy who, from Kohlberg’s point of view, expressed a lack of logic insofar as she did not reason based on a system of rules, but perceived the moral problem as a narration of human relationships: the value of the wife’s life should be set in the framework of a wider humane attitude: letting Heinz have the drug for free, and thus saving someone’s life rather than bringing tragedy upon a couple, is no big sacrifice for the pharmacist. Amy proposed that Heinz should talk to the pharmacist and explain to him the urgency of the situation and the responsibilities that he has. On Kohlberg’s scale, Amy stood between stages two and three of moral development. She remained very much beholden to a naive faith in human relationships and did not manage to ground her thinking in a concept of justice which would cause her to examine the logic of received morals truths. For Gilligan, what is at stake is actually Kohlberg’s method of investigation. Amy refuted the premises of Kohlberg’s question – the 10

Gilligan, In a Different Voice, p. 25.

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idea that morality is a logical matter. She construed the problem differently by considering how Heinz should behave to meet his wife’s needs, and thus be able to remain by her side instead of going to prison: “the world she knows is a different world from that refracted by Kohlberg’s construction of Heinz’s dilemma. Her world is a world of relationships and psychological truths where an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another, a perception of the need for response.”11 Amy and Jake do not inhabit the same world. According to Gilligan, this does not mean that we should deduce a moral hierarchy from their respective remarks, but that we should consider the differences which lead to two types of moralities. As the first chapter of In a Different Voice shows, women’s place is uncertain and doomed to be obliterated if it is elaborated in reference to the male life cycle. This leads to male behavior being regarded as the norm and female behavior as a kind of deviance. While Kohlberg believes that morality anchored in the logical reasoning that men generally produce is superior, Gilligan has argued that women construct moral problems differently, by placing the understanding of shared responsibilities and human relationships at the heart of moral development. This morality reveals a fundamental concern for the well-being of others and the necessity of mutual assistance. In contrast, Kohlberg’s conception of morality is only a reflection of the organization of power and knowledge in a well-established masculine thought which considers itself to be universal, rational, and applicable to all human beings. Hitherto, the theories of development had deemed men’s mode of judgment to be more suitable than women’s and, in this respect, Gilligan truly paved the way for the voice of women. Rather than treating the differences between Jake and Amy as hierarchical, she described two types of ethics, one based on justice and the other based on care. While the first approach had been developed many times through references to subjects of law and to the notion that the individual develops thanks to emotional 11

Ibid., p. 30.

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separation, the second approach has been neglected. The point was to name and describe an ethics based on a very strong sense of responsibility toward others and their needs. Women are fundamentally vulnerable because they lack the power and capacity to have their judgments recognized.

IV. – How can one care for others without losing sight of oneself? Against a modesty resulting from male practices of power and knowledge, Gilligan wanted to make the voice of women heard. The two chapters devoted to abortion are a way of listening to women’s specific voice in an area where they have the power to decide (as indeed with contraception). Abortion is the perfect example of a conflict specific to the female voice, a conflict between oneself and the other, or between autonomy and attention to the needs of others. Knowing how women take the decision to terminate a pregnancy helps to better understand which possibilities of development or progression come into play in these very difficult moments – moments in which an irrevocable choice is made and the relationship to care as concern for others seems to be put in danger. Gilligan has analyzed the question of abortion to show how, in such difficult situations, women may experience responsibility with regard to others, and more fundamentally, how the true nature of care as concern12 is at work. In the case of an abortion, women must be able to make their own decisions, be aware of their own situation, and leave aside everything that prevents them from making the decision: on the one hand, the selfishness of needs, on the other, the conventional vision of care. The latter attitude in particular, which represents the “kindness of women” as a form of self-sacrifice, can present itself as an easy way out, as the embodiment of an imposed femininity. It conveys the silenced and concerned voice of women as long as they do not embed their concern for others in their concern for themselves. For many women, having an abortion means disavowing this vision of For a reading of Gilligan’s theses on abortion, see Fabienne Brugère, Le Sexe de la sollicitude (Paris: Le Seuil, 2008), pp. 112-115. 12

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femininity as centered on maternity. The decision to abort stumbles into a trap, because it puts feminity in conflict with itself – or more precisely in conflict with conventional morals, which enjoin women to be concerned for other people in all circumstances. The point is to alter the female gender itself as a gender historically constituted through the separation between the domestic and the public spheres, a gender ascribed to the realm of attention to others or assigned to what is commonly called “a sense of protection” – an expression which erases the social construction of this protective role. The interviews that Gilligan held were designed to help women escape this imposed femininity and place their decision within an ethical questioning disposed to become feminist: how will I lead my life? In a way, the decision to have an abortion should be connected to an assessment of the situation – which is a situation of vulnerability – by the woman herself (single or in a relationship, working or unemployed, experiencing precariousness or exclusion, etc.). Deciding whether to have an abortion entails a clinical process for women, a capacity to become aware of their own situation and to be able to understand it within a complex web of interdependence. This web can then be the object of an account of oneself, running counter to the moralizing determinism associated with the female gender understood as the gender of solicitude. Counter to the ancestral trap of self-sacrifice, the ethics of care must detach itself from mere altruistic kindness to reveal a practical truth, a truth which expresses the self of women in a performative way as a self that makes decisions in spite of tensions, conflicts, and conventional visions of femininity. The self, according to care, is of course not a separated self – that would mean going back to the selfishness of needs. It is an interdependent, concerned self. Women can shape themselves through such an experience even though it threatens their integrity: moral language may evolve and entail a form of care not simply based on the fear of hurting others, but that is in keeping with a “new understanding of the interconnection between other and self”13 founded on 13

Gilligan, In a Different Voice, p. 74.

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the interdependence and the successful coincidence of a sense of responsibilities and attention to others. Gilligan’s perspective could be wrongfully and feebly analyzed as a slightly naive belief in the powers of communication and the defense of a conflict resolution mode that would not upset anyone. Its horizon is actually much more ambitious and it has propelled the ethics of care toward discussions on the foundations of the moral psychology of individuals. The different voice of women is no longer silenced. It becomes the different voice of the ethics of care insofar as it really gives rise to an ethics of responsibility separated from selfsacrifice. This ethics must help solve the tension between what is good for oneself and what does not harm others. While the interaction between oneself and others is at the origin of this ethics, it must help overcome the individualistic opposition between oneself and others, and contribute to putting interdependence and cooperation in perspective. In addition, Gilligan gave rise to a new form of feminism by asserting a different moral voice: that of women. This mostly silenced voice, structured by attention to others and by effective but unrecognized care-giving, coerces women into a compassionate and selfsacrificial attitude. This feminism gives a clearer vision of the development of women in order to produce a more global vision of the relationship between women and men, and also to complement an ethics of rights (for which, it must not be forgotten, women have paid a high price, and which is still incomplete or nonexistent in certain countries) with an ethics of responsibility. The goal of feminism then is to reconcile a conception of responsibility recognized as an ethics of care with an understanding of people’s rights. The concept of rights transforms women’s moral judgments, making them more tolerant. A sense of responsibility toward others should allow men to develop social cooperation rather than aggression and separation. The aim is indeed to tie together the traditional voice of women and the more emphasized voice of men to argue for a pluralism of moral values, a bipolarity which finds its origin in the two constants of the cycle of human life: attachment and separation.

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Gilligan has sometimes been the standard-bearer for women who recognize themselves in care, but also for all people assigned to care who are made invisible or deprived of recognition. She has made people aware that these modes of existence are submitted to a specific domination based on the exploitation of their capacity to help or to take care of others to the detriment of their own integrity. The ethics of care must be viewed through the description of tense situations involving very vulnerable protagonists. On the one hand, the relationships that are taken into account reveal patterns of vulnerability in which abnegation is the expression of an absence of power. On the other hand, these situations testify to conducts which are not determined by rules or a priori principles applied to concrete cases. They reveal a concern about the interdependence of the world and an attention to others in need. Viewing care as an ethics that enriches the ethics of justice, and viewing the subject of need as a complement to the subject of law means following Gilligan’s approach to developing a pluralism of values. Of course, it also means participating in a critique of patriarchy that insists on the necessity to give a voice to all those (women, immigrants, workers, etc.) who form the invisible army of care-givers, unjustly forgotten actors of a capitalist world converted to legal individualism. As Gilligan has recently written,14 looking back on In a Different Voice, the ethics of care is deeply democratic since it is pluralistic and attached to promoting voices that resist the dualities and hierarchies produced by gender in market societies. In this sense, like multiculturalism, it is a politics of the recognition of difference.15 Further still, it belongs to the political struggle of feminism. It is not a naturalistic or differentialist view glorifying female virtues: “A feminist ethics of care is a different voice because it undoes patriarchal norms and values. This voice is not ruled by gender splits and hierarchies, it articulates democratic norms 14 Carol Gilligan, “Un regard prospectif à partir du passé,” in Carol  Gilligan et l’éthique du care, ed. Vanessa Nurock (Paris: puf, 2010). 15 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

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and values.”16 Attention to others and responsibility for the needs of the world have a highly political and social meaning: allowing all voices to be heard, particularly the voices of those who do not take part in decision-making processes of any nature. The fact that caring for others must be done in silence proves that our societies are not yet fully democratic. The voices of women deserve to be heard so that they can become a real issue in the eyes of humankind, and consequently produce social bonds and improve collective well-being: mutual assistance, solidarity, and fraternity stem from this voice of the dominated, which is finally heard and transformed into a truth.

V. – A gender of solicitude and care? Gendered identities The ethics of care deals with various forms of attention to others, ranging from caring about to taking care of other people. The former expresses the capacity to worry about others and the particular attitude which consists in being concerned about others as identified by a need or by their excessive vulnerability; the latter includes a number of activities and social practices which together problematize care-giving and care-receiving. Why is the sphere of solicitude and care-giving, of dispositions and practices, linked to the experience of women, who generally feel that it is assigned to them without their choice? According to the results of Gilligan’s inquiry, the marginal fate of women in relation to morality corresponds to behaviors that society does not value to the extent that they do not convey values anchored in the public space and in individual success. Yet these behaviors are useful to the development of a social bond that fosters connections between subjects, a bond which is highly emotionally charged and strongly inclined toward mutual assistance. But Gilligan’s reflection on how the different social behaviors of men and women are established goes further than that. Why does individual success captivate the male imagination? Why do women develop intense activities related to the attachment, care, and education of young children? 16

Nurock, Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du care, p. 25, translation ours.

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Because these behaviors correspond to stereotypes which have morphed into gender identities. According to these identities, men take more interest in their individual development. They establish relationships which leave greater scope for competition and for rules and laws that enable an emotional distance within their relationships to others. Sociologically, they tend to behave in ways that promote the autonomy of the individual and great emotional independence, while women become aware of themselves through personal relationships that attach them to others. They express a capacity to put themselves in the place of others in contexts that are always already clear. Consequently, these gender characteristics produce different ways of resolving moral problems: women experience conflicts as relating to responsibility rather than to rights, and solve them in ways that restore and reinforce relationships. Men implement more impersonal solutions which are more logically consistent with the principles of justice. Of course, Gilligan’s point is not to reduce the morality of women to solicitude or care, and that of men to abstract justice. Such an approach would be absurd. Her objective is to reveal the assignations that produce behavioral tendencies, whose theoretical foundations are concepts of identity shaped by gender assignations, which are built socially from early childhood on. Carol Gilligan has underlined the contribution made by a book by an American psychoanalyst, Nancy Chodorow, in establishing how powerfully the specificities of female and male personalities are constructed from early childhood on, before the Oedipal stage. According to her, responsibility for care is determined by the formation of different gender capacities in the first years of children’s lives. In The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow has analyzed gender identity which she believes is established when children are about three, through their attachment to their mother and the care she provides.17 At this stage of human development, the identities of Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978). 17

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girls and boys are constructed in radically opposite ways. She has argued that in the case of girls, who identify with the role of the caring mother, the experience of attachment becomes connected to the identity formation process. Boys, on the contrary, define themselves as male by separating their mother from themselves so that their personality develops by forgetting the sphere of needs and feelings related to care. The book has concluded that there is a strict division in the formation of the male and female psyches. The self of women is founded in relation to the sphere of intimacy, represented by girls’ identification with mothering, whereas the self of men is founded on the experience of detachment from intimacy, in favor of a relationship to the outside world. Thus, according to Chodorow, the problems that lie ahead are different for women and for men. Men are structured by separation, they tend to experience difficulties in their relationships with other people, while women, defined by attachment, experience individuation problems.18 Psychoanalysis then has to return to the theoretical problem of the construction of differentiated gender identities. The normative role of the first years of life in the construction of the self is debatable, but the psychoanalytical analysis of care certainly allows us to formulate the hypothesis of a primary relational self of which human beings have no recollection – an influential yet obscure self. As Judith Butler has reminded us in The Psychic Life of Power,19 relationships of primary dependence, whether they involve satisfying care or, on the contrary, unsettling care, are always forgotten or repressed. Primary subordinations – whether or not driven by love – are hidden, thus definitively precluding the possibility of being transparent to oneself. Thus, what is constituted in early childhood operates without revealing itself, through many silences, including that of emotional divisions according to gender. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler has reconsidered the impossibility Gilligan, In a Different Voice, p. 8. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 18

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of knowing oneself in a fully transparent way from birth: “primary repression,” conceptualized by Jean Laplanche as the child’s answer to the crushing world of adults, not only institutes the subconscious.20 According to Judith Butler, it can be interpreted in the sense that human beings are formed in strangeness, assailed by an enigmatic otherness from the beginning, in spite of the normative models that primary repression may build elsewhere. Psychoanalysis is then an essential tool to help point out this inadequacy to oneself. When Gilligan refers to Chodorow’s psychoanalysis, she combines two questions: the formation of the self and the construction of gender identities. She has used them to show that the gender dichotomy constructed from the first years of life partakes of the “opacity to oneself,” of what is always likely to escape us, especially as it concerns the relational manifestation of a need for love, which takes the form of either separation or attachment. The need for love is an effective gender marker because it is unconscious. Primary relationships already determine gender identities despite being repressed. This reference to the first years of human development also reminds us that human beings are fundamentally dependent and interdependent beings as soon as they experience attachment. The point then is to correct not only a male psychology of moral development which does not recognize how powerful the construction of gender identity is, but also to question moral philosophy in the Kantian tradition, based on a normative theory of the autonomous subject, which, in ordinary culture, is generally turned into a rhetoric of independence. This tradition has served as the basis for the moral values associated with the political liberalism of John Rawls, which has had great influence on American practical philosophies and which theoreticians of care always refer to as the model of the ethics of justice. This ethics relies on a separation between two meanings of the word “individual”: the individual as an empirical, particular man, a sample of humankind which can be found in any society, and the individual as a bearer of Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 71-78. 20

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values, an autonomous moral being or person who finds his or her own end in him- or herself. The moral dimension of humanity, which is eminently superior to its concrete existence, is then what elevates individuals to the status of universal subjects, and gives them their dignity as free or emancipated subjects. Morality guarantees a theory of justice, the possibility of a subject of law whose impartiality testifies to the equality of all human beings. But from the point of view of the different ethics of care that are strongly influenced by the psychology of moral development and reference to the stages of life, the empirical individual cannot be separated from the reality of his or her dependencies (even if these occur only at the beginning and the end of his or her life). Rawls, Kohlberg, and Piaget remain within the realm of idealization, conceived from the perspective of their separative male identity. They have trouble understanding the reality of dependencies, imagining collective conducts for those whose moral actions cannot be immediately characterized by independence or emancipation. It is a well-known fact that the great narrative of political liberalism has glorified free subjects, forgetting that autonomy cannot simply be declared, and that there are forms of subjection and dependency which cannot be ascribed to the sphere of law. Richard Sennett has phrased this very aptly in Respect in a World of Inequality: “The dignity of dependence never appeared to liberalism a worthy political project.”21 Yet, real subjectivity is precisely constructed through a diagnosis of dependencies (of what they make possible for subjects), a redefinition of the individual as essentially interdependent, a project driven by a moral approach which regards care as the greater good. Morality is not so much the subject of a discourse that justifies conducts, as the sum of multiple practices through which solicitude and care are extended to human beings in need. Contrary to the spirit of political liberalism, which takes the development of autonomy for granted, the point of the ethics of care is to redirect the Richard Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), p. 125. 21

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most vulnerable individuals towards social and political relationships, and thus to consider what political liberalism fails to take into account. In this scenario, women become the main protagonists of a new narrative, along with all those who work to keep others alive, in one way or another; care being an activity which maintains, repairs, protects, and supports individual or collective development.

VI. – Ethics vs. morality The reflection initiated by Gilligan calls into question a certain moral dogmatism infused with universalism, which excludes instead of including. Such an approach is a turning point in American human sciences: it relinquishes abstract formalism, informed by the dominance of linguistic sciences, and exposes the type of ideology which comes with references to an individual wrongly considered as abstract, bodiless, cut off from everything that constitutes ordinary human beings (their personal attachments and feelings, their gender, their personal projects, their anchoring in a collective history, country or area of the world, etc.). In this sense, using the theoretical arsenal of care means putting moral reasoning aside in favor of what particularizes behaviors, the needs of others, and the social force of situations. The point is also to denounce a manipulation of universality and autonomy to patriarchal ends. The universal is not necessarily dismissed, but it is deconstructed or criticized whenever it is not contextualized. In Gilligan’s view, the voice of women and the topic of care apply particularly when precepts are no longer self-evident, when rules are missing, when there are no certainties, and when individuals are left to face nothing but difficulties, problems, or crises. This dissenting morality has another name: it is called an ethics, a term which, following Gilligan, became the way in which this current of thought related to solicitude and care was characterized. Why is it fundamental to resort to ethics to identify these dispositions, these behaviors, and these practices? How can the alternative morality put forward by Gilligan definitively be qualified as ethics?

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Ethics, via applied ethics, has become a field of knowledge – insofar as we may speak of an ethical competence or expertise. But this competence alone is not enough to define it. Ethics also characterizes a point of view which anyone may adopt on any given difficult situation. Although ethics can sometimes, with precautions and on the surface, express the same ideals as a science, it more fundamentally stems from an existential disquiet and an immersion in a specific context. While morality is identified with practical reason, which promotes mostly male behaviors and values individuals who live under the illusion that they do not need anybody, ethics is connected to the relational world of care. In The Ethics of Memory, the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has distinguished two types of human relations: ethical relations and moral relations.22 Ethical relations are “thick” because they are loaded with affects, stories, and common memories; they are rooted in a shared memory or past; they include relationships with parents, friends, lovers, compatriots, etc. They are mainly the relationships that we develop in our ordinary everyday lives. Moral relations can be defined as “thin” relations; they rely on a minimal or abstract content – the fact of being human. They depend on certain general characteristics of human beings. These relationships involve a distance, as opposed to ethics, which involves closeness or familiarity; they are very legitimately established with strangers, people who are far away from us. Ethics makes it possible to base one’s reflection on comparisons between different forms of life or paradigmatic situations. Ethics lends itself to a philosophy Margalit has named “e.g. philosophy,” which is rooted in the idea that examples can be trusted. On the other hand, morality is based on principles that need to be clarified and conveyed. According to Margalit, morality expresses itself as an “i.e. philosophy” – a demonstrative, edifying philosophy based on general definitions and principles. It is

22 Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2002), introduction, pp. 7-8.

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unable to deal well with exceptional cases and unconventional or atypical life stories. This distinction has led the philosopher to warn against the expansionist tendencies of morality, which is always quick to bind as many things as possible to its principles. Morality is prescriptive, corrective, and authoritative. It overcomes the instability of behaviors and conducts. It determines norms that apply beyond the limited sector of any given practice. As for ethics, it is made up of people’s stories and of the color they give to their lives. It favors an immersion in necessarily subjective forms of life, in social habits which bear witness to one’s belonging to a group, to their existence in a specific time, space, and society. Ethics favors empirical investigations which propose to establish norms on the basis of lived situations. While respecting the rules is moral, groping one’s way to well-being in accordance with specific conditions of existence is ethical. Fundamentally, favoring ethical relations means dismissing moral certainty and embracing ethical disquiet. It also means putting aside a universality which has been defined too quickly, and is thus possibly misleading and untrue, in order to appreciate the singularity of a specific case. Ethics goes hand in hand with diagnoses, experiments, comparisons, and a fair amount of skepticism toward principles. Admittedly, the ethical position involves certain disadvantages: the love of what is close, relativism, and the unavailability of prescriptions are likely to prevent the correction of behaviors, whereas morality makes it possible to consider the rights of reasonable beings, all morally equal, all in the same boat, and expresses an ideal of justice.

VII. – How to live better However, ethics possesses a considerable existential power insofar as it can be regarded as a re-actualization of the old Greek question: how can one live better? It has been assigned the task of determining which life is worthiest to be lived (in terms of well-being, happiness, virtue, and reason) when no precise prescriptions are readily available. To act in an ethical way is to examine one’s life so as to identify

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the most suitable behavior. This task is difficult, since the choices to be made, the decisions to be taken, the actions to be accomplished, all defy the principles which might determine them. In short, ethics can apply to any situation in which things are not definitively cut and dried on a moral level. They give rise to particularly important reflections in the event of crises, conflicts, dilemmas, and situations in which choosing and deciding is very difficult. When we focus on care, the question is not so much to consider the place of values, rules or laws in a given action through moral reasoning, but to consider the best way of behaving in a particular context toward other subjects who have specific social or cultural beliefs, personal emotional backgrounds, etc. Ethics is never a completely rational affair. With solicitude and care, it comes into play in a sphere that spans other people’s needs, the necessity to respond appropriately, attention to others, the preservation of relationships as opposed to the hasty judgment of people’s behavior, and indifferent attitudes. The theory of care falls within this context: the redefinition of the relationship between ethics and morality. Such a definition of ethics must be associated with a turning point in the human sciences as regards the very redefinition of human beings as essentially vulnerable. This ethical approach to vulnerability begins with a concern for others in their singularity. Becoming receptive to another person entails completely dismissing voluntarism and impulsive aggression. It means putting aside the selfish objectives of self-preservation,23 objectives which are reactions to a ubiquitous social command: “be autonomous individuals,” i.e. “preserve your interests.” But it also means accepting that the share which falls within the scope of moral reasoning is not defined a priori in ethics, but is questioned again and again in a singular way, according to the context, so that the place of moral reasoning in ethical life cannot be determined in advance.

23

Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 100 sq.

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VIII. – From an asymmetrical world to a reciprocal world To what extent does the ethical resolution of care enable a different voice to be heard, a voice existing outside morality? The power to act that is specific to care is due to an attention to vulnerability and to patterns of vulnerability (our own, those of the other people for whom we are responsible, etc.). It is a way of acting according to dependencies and interdependencies, of considering them in order to act in the most suitable way. The division between ethics and morality makes ethics more operative than morality when the focus is on individuals and their doubts, on the complexity of reality, or on various fragilities. Carol Gilligan has rooted her consideration of the voices of justice and care in the close attention she pays to moral dilemmas, in which individuals are faced with decisions that are hard to make. In these situations, deciding may mean producing an individual logical reasoning which enables one to make a decision on behalf of a principle – this is the traditional meaning given to morality as a set of principles used as guidelines by an autonomous self. But decisions can be made differently, following the themes of care and attention to the needs of others: in this case, the idea is to journey toward a decision which proves to be possible given the context and all the complex interdependencies that are at play. In this case, the resolution is ethical: it deals with vulnerable human beings, with situations of great fragility at points in life when decisions still need to be made. It expresses the concern of relational subjects, whereas morality postulates the structuring nature of the individual and presupposes autonomy. Ethics is associated with concern – for oneself and for others, both being necessary to the development of a greater good which must take the form of improved well-being or persistence in being. Morality is related to the necessity of justice established within the framework of a reference to neutral, impersonal subjects who guarantee the perspective of equality. Yet, does this mean that any ethical undertaking must ignore autonomy, the individual, and impersonal justice? That would be too

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Manichean, too simplistic. And simple is precisely what reality is not. What it does mean is that vulnerability should be introduced within autonomy, subjectivation within the individual, solicitude and care within justice. Above all, it means recognizing that all human relationships cannot immediately be considered equal. Many are asymmetrical and deserve attention and protection. They deserve the possibility of reciprocating against abuses of power since they are based on a difference or gap. The fact remains, however, that ethics deals with the fuzziness of the real world. It is difficult to characterize, unlike morality, which takes the form of codes, rules, and obligations. Ethics is not exactly a discipline. It always develops within a specific context. Thus, it is also a perspective which anyone may adopt to look at a difficult situation, or at life as a whole. But the ethical perspective on situations never equals morality because it does not rely on the facile technique of applying precepts. Saying that something “is an ethical question” means underlining a lack of certainty on a given question, and the fact that there is a lack of rules, or that one is faced only with difficulties. Ethics is all the more complicated to define as it is on the side of what is local, contextual, or close. Thus, it is regarded as being the business of a “sensitive subject” rather than of a rational subject. From this point of view, it supports a rehabilitation of the question of the body and life. In this sense, it re-actualizes Spinoza’s conatus, a power to act which is nothing substantial or sovereign and can be made or demolished through one’s relationships to others. With ethics, there is no preeminence of the spirit over the body, and moral values are not intangible. Rather than speaking of right and wrong out of context, it is more accurate to speak of relationships, and thus of good and bad. Gilligan has linked the ethics of care to the question of the equality of voices, in opposition to the morality of discourse and justification that had stifled the issue of care raised by the voice of women. Ethics, more than morality, asks for a democratic culture, rooted in

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public debate and the possibility of dialogue. From this point of view, the ethics of care is consonant with Paul Ricœur’s considerations in Oneself as Another. Ricœur has argued that solicitude entails the mutual exchange of self-esteem,24 the construction of relationships through interactions. Relationships are ethical when they manage to institute a rule of reciprocity as an answer to the initial dissymmetry, thereby putting the agent and the patient on an equal footing. The voice of solicitude means that the plurality of people, their otherness one to another, and the differences in their positions of power are not obliterated by the global and abstract idea of humanity. Ethics is not the same as morality because it creates scope for a pragmatic conception of practical philosophy, with the notion that too many general ideas and abstractions make it more difficult to understand the diversity of human conducts, especially those which deal with the particularities of individuals, their crises, their problems, and their vulnerabilities. Ethics is typically embodied in the process initiated by solicitude or care, a process which makes it possible to establish mutual bonds and an equalization of conditions in deeply asymmetrical relations and situations which moral principles and law render inextricable or imperceptible.

IX. – A feminist ethics Gilligan has anchored the possibility of an alternative morality, more aptly described as an “ethics,” in the acknowledgement of a different voice25. This use of the word “voice” is meaningful: the point is to assert that other narratives than those which usually normalize behaviors should be heard and recognized. The point is also to state clearly that, unfortunately, we are not all equal, despite our status as subjects of law, which the silencing of the ethics of care clearly confirms. Theoretical abstraction can make us forget that certain Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press,1992), p. 180. 25 See Julie Perreault, « Renégocier la « voix différente » : retour sur l’œuvre de Gilligan, in Bourgault, Sophie, and Julie Perreault, Le care. Ethique féministe actuelle (Montréal: les éditions du remue-ménage, 2015), p.29-52. 24

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lives deserve more attention than others. These lives are all the more vulnerable as dominant moral standards tend to ignore them or consider them insignificant. Gilligan’s work thus proves to be closely linked to that of philosophers such as Judith Butler who, in Precarious Life,26 has denounced the fact that all lives are not equal, that some have become so vulnerable that they do not count anymore. Many lives whose legal and political status is suspended, have become intolerable because they count so little. They are so dehumanized that their exploitation is not even perceived. These lives must be understood as being in particular danger: we bear a collective responsibility toward them. Vulnerability shows the fragility and invisibility of real lives, not only socially, but also vitally, and environmentally. Every day, a difference or gap is widening between those who have nothing and are near breaking point (because of unemployment, precariousness, exclusion, floods, and earthquakes in poor or politically unstable countries), and those who believe they are powerful and high-achieving. Human beings are not only subjects of law, but people whose power to live, to speak, and to act can be hindered. Vulnerability is a burden which falls on people for no reason and in spite of the subjects’ capabilities: “Negotiating a sudden and unprecedented vulnerability—what are the options? What are the long-term strategies? Women know this question well, have known it in nearly all times, and nothing about the triumph of colonial powers has made our exposure to this kind of violence any less clear.”27 If there is a feminist ethics, according to Judith Butler, it consists in accepting vulnerability, in standing as its guarantor, in taking responsibility for it, and in considering the history of women. Feminism must now divest itself of its Western arrogance, its dreams of complete subversion of the masculine domination to rethink the meaning of bonding, of attachment, of relationships as they can be imagined within the framework of anti-imperialistic egalitarianism. Those who are vulnerable can be linked to the cate26 27

Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London, New York: Verso, 2004). Ibid., p. 42.

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gory of the “subaltern” in Spivak’s work, when she asks whether the subaltern can speak and be heard when it really matters in a given political context.28 Subalterns can only speak if they find a way to recreate a form of narrativity, which entails being careful about their words and about the conditions for them to be spoken. Gilligan’s different voice entails the possibility of a feminist ethics which would establish the equality of female and male voices, according to care and justice. It is also a way of recognizing all the forms of vulnerability that need to reach a form of expression, through an ethics that transforms goodness into truth, concern for others into a conscious and responsible relationship to others. Rather than describing a gender, the different voice is a theme used to bring to light dispositions and activities that have long been kept in the dark by patriarchy, under the guise of morality. It puts forward an anthropology of vulnerability as the grounds on which a better distribution may arise of the power to speak and to act between women and men. Gilligan’s ethics of care does not have much in common with Noddings’s female morality or Ruddick’s mothering ideal. It dismisses the limiting perspective of “women’s morality,” thereby showing how the circle of those who are involved in such activities is not only determined by gender. The implementation of an ethics begins with a conception of democratic culture based on the equality of voices and the protection of all those who experience vulnerability. Further still, capturing the specific ethical dimension at play involves shifting the borders of morality by refusing to accept that an abstract and universal point of view should be the only legitimate moral point of view. Envisaging the place of care from the perspective of an ethics means enhancing the status of care practices, which are unequally distributed and not recognized, too often thought of associated with the private sphere, with feelings, or with the simple fact of relieving suffering. Yet there is much more to care than that. The feminist ethics is anchored in the recognition of the various types of bonds that shape our individuality. It points to a critique of 28

Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).

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rationalism in favor of a better interpretation of feelings, based on the idea that we need to cultivate our affectivity rather than control it. This is why considerable attention should be paid to the development of moral and social capacities from childhood on, to the role of parental love, which makes the former possible, and to emotional as well as cognitive development. As Annette Baier has written in interpretation of Gilligan’s views, “the best moral theory has to be a cooperative product of women and men, has to harmonize justice and care.”29 Since the voice of women can be acknowledged, it is necessary to connect the “subject of law,” which has supported the power of men, with the “subject of need,” long hidden within the private and quiet experience of women, but without establishing a hierarchy between them. A feminist ethics makes public what was once regarded as private (care) and shows what is private in a space that used to be presented as completely public. It shifts the established borders between the private and public spheres. Contrary to the perspective of justice, the perspective of care entails protection and recognition for the voice of women, since, in ordinary life, women are the ones who express this moral orientation. Consequently, being a feminist means knowing how to listen to the accounts that women give of their lives, and interpreting these, since, according to Gilligan, “if women were eliminated from the research sample, care focus in moral reasoning would virtually disappear.”30 A feminist ethics consists in allowing the voices of women to be heard as vulnerable voices, in order to allow other ways of relating to the world to emerge. More generally, it is an attitude that consists of listening to the most vulnerable people, those who are heard the least, recognized the least. The feminist ethics which can be deduced from the work of Gilligan can be viewed as an attitude aimed at

Annette Baier, “The need for more than justice,” in Feminist Theory, eds. Ann E. Cudd and Robin O. Andreasen (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 250. 30 Carol Gilligan, “Moral orientation and moral development,” in Women and Moral Theory, eds. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana Meyer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), p. 25. 29

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defending all those who are dominated in the name of the suppression of their narratives by various forms of exploitation. Furthermore, the point is to argue that the recognition of vulnerability and the support given to vulnerable people lead to certain forms of performativity and restoration of the power to act. There is no contradiction between vulnerability and performativity. The purpose of care activities is an empowerment of subjects who have been forgotten or neglected by centers of power. In this sense, Gilligan believes that women, who are empirically the main champions of the topic of care, should be able to envisage ethics as a journey aimed at restoring performativity. Hence the three stages in moral development: the first is entirely egocentric, the second is entirely directed toward others, and the third lies in a balance in which the self stands in relation to others. This last stage emphasizes an interdependent self against a separate vision of the self. It expresses a moral maturity which involves, for women and men alike, the daily, repeated exercise of a feminist ethics that distributes an ability to be, to speak, and to act31 beyond gender stereotypes.

31 For these readings of Gilligan, see Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), p.  117 and Seyla Benhabib, “The generalized and the concrete other,” in Feminism as Critique, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 78.

CHAPTER II

Care versus the Liberal Individual

In his Collège de France lecture The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault noted how liberal rationality attempts to monopolize human beings from birth by capturing their capacities. Human capital should yield a profit; this is a sine qua non of the market. In this perspective, it is imperative to take an interest in human capital and its mobilization. The commercial logic can only be carried further if human beings are fully mobilized. This is where the perspective of care emerges, and where it finds its most ferocious criticism. Care becomes a capital which needs to be expanded in the service of capitalism. At best, it supports it; at worst, it is an ideology that serves the omnipresent and totalizing liberal ‘governmentality’32, which promotes trade – not only of objects, but also of human beings – as the only true value. Concern for others materializes in investments such as the time parents devote to giving affection to or providing education for their children. According to Foucault, the more or less voluntary investments that support the constitution of a human capital that may be mobilized by society encourage the emergence of “abilitymachine[s]” that generate income.33 The new liberalism described by Michel Foucault concerns the production of well-equipped individuals, who are better integrated in 32 « Governmentality » is a concept first developed by Foucault ; it designates the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed. 33 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 226.

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the current circuits of economic and political calculations thanks to the care they receive. However, Foucault’s analysis appears somewhat hasty and his judgment seems indebted to the analysis of the conduct of conducts and the regulatory controls which characterize the new forms of liberalism. We would like to suggest another reading: care is the locus of a new problem – that of vulnerability. The ethics of care and other theoretical mechanisms help analyze which new anthropological and social systems it emphasizes. So far from helping to perfect enterprising man, care for human lives may, on the contrary, appear as the recognition of a fundamental fragility, which at its heart reveals a vision of the individual that is far removed from that conveyed by liberalism. How can it be that vulnerability embodies a new anthropological order and questions a model of development based only on commercial ties? Can one argue that addressing vulnerability is part of a political project grounded in attention to others, when it appears very clearly today that everything which does not celebrate the individual as the entrepreneur of him/herself is cast aside, held in low regard, made invisible, and allocated to people who can be subjected and dishonored? Reconsidering vulnerability and the way it is addressed means proposing new modes of operation for capitalist societies, so that they may become more concerned with happiness, and so that wealth can be distributed more justly. The ethics of care can give an account of this by suggesting a conception of bonding which is rooted in the recognition of situations of dependence. It is true that, ever since Mauss’s The Gift,34 the work of certain anthropologists and sociologists has taught us that the social bond is not just a product of calculations and interests, but is grounded in human exchanges that take place outside the market. It can be argued that the focus on care in response to any form of vulnerability is part of a trend in the human sciences which goes well beyond the idea of the Homo oeconomicus and the perspective of rational action On the MAUSS journal, see the work of Alain Caillé and Jacques T. Godbout, in an special issue on care, “L’amour des autres,” Revue du MAUSS, vol. 32, (2008). 34

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structured by interest. The reference to care is part of a major questioning, whose goal is to reconsider the dark sides of liberalism and promote social logics that depart from commercial logic. It is congruent with demands from societies – defined in the broadest possible sense – that express aspirations to maximize the protection and freedom of women, migrants, and the poor, but also of all sexual and gender minorities, all ethnic and religious minorities, whose voices are not taken into account, especially as these categories may overlap. Recognizing that we are physically and mentally vulnerable, dependent on one another, has allowed us to imagine our common fate differently, and above all to emphasize our spheres of dispossession and interdependence. Turning the spotlight on care means revealing that we are always involved in lives which are not ours and with which we must live, without endangering or controlling them, but on the contrary by trying to institute their world: this means allowing other normative aspirations, other lifestyles. The point is indeed to promote a paradigm shift in the human sciences in order to reconsider all human beings. This implies starting from the fact that we are all linked to each other. As Carol Gilligan has written, “We are fundamentally relational, responsive beings as human beings… We are born with a voice and into relationships… These are the requisites of love, but they are also the requisites of democratic citizenship.”35

I. – Human beings are fundamentally vulnerable, but… How can we define vulnerability, this key concept in expressing all kinds of human fragilities related to vital, social, or environmental causes? The ethics of care itself often uses this concept as if it were self-evident, failing to define it but nevertheless positing a new anthropological reality: we are all vulnerable. In this context, how does care become the driving force behind a bond founded on human vulnerability? In the Anglo-American world, care is a word used in everyday language (as in “take care of yourself”). In The Ethics of Gilligan, “Un regard prospectif à partir du passé,” in Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du care, pp. 28-29, translation ours. 35

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Care, Virginia Held has observed how “take care” can be used routinely as a way of saying “goodbye.” But even if it is used in such a banal way, it reveals the existence of a social bond by acknowledging a relationship focused on the potential vulnerability of the other person. It hints at human relatedness based on daily reaffirmations of a connection.36 This social bond cannot be completely rational since it brings together dispositions and practices, activities by which one takes care of another in a very physical way, and simple affects – which are more or less benevolent and can also be ambivalent – through which we concern ourselves with someone. The ethics of care described by Virginia Held combines the activity of taking care of, and the mental fact of caring about. For instance, it is possible simply to take care of a child by meeting its most elementary physical needs, but generally, it is best also to care about the child, i.e. strive for its development.37 The fact of linking practices to concern helps to remind us that the ethics of care is not behaviorist, but is characterized by the acknowledgement that activity cannot be separated from disposition, the latter pointing to what gives the relationship its specificity: the care-giver’s concern. No one is concerned about a being who is fully invested with power, but it is easy to pay attention to someone vulnerable whose life and body are threatened, or are not yet viable. Defining human beings as capable of showing concern for others in need means recognizing a fundamental vulnerability which runs counter to the belief that the individual is omnipotent, independent, and detached from social relationships that take the form of mutual assistance or responsible interdependence. Reflection on vulnerability has developed gradually throughout the various ethics of care. Carol Gilligan rarely used the word “vulnerability”38 and preferred to speak of a “different voice” in 1982. 36

Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),

p. 30. Ibid., p. 30. Women’s “sense of vulnerability” (p. 66) and the “vulnerability of [their] professional position” (p. 135) are of course mentioned in In a Different Voice, but the concept of vulnerability is not explicitly analysed. 37

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It was only in 1985, with Robert Goodin’s Protecting the Vulnerable: a Reanalysis of our Social Responsibilities39 that the theory of care added vulnerability to its conceptual toolbox. While Goodin’s book does not specifically belong to the ethics of care, it was useful for authors like Eva Feder Kittay and Joan Tronto when they challenged the myth that we are always autonomous and potentially equal citizens. According to Eva Feder Kittay, Goodin pushed the field of morality closer to relationships oriented toward the vulnerability of others, which can be a source of actions. Goodin has thus developed a model of vulnerability in contrast to the model of will, based on the notion of promise. In this latter model, which is related to morality, even if the obligation related to the promise is intended for a particular person, the form of the obligation is general: it applies to whomever the promise is made to. Moreover, the promise is made by a fully conscious individual: it is a freely-made commitment. Under the model of vulnerability, relationships between individuals are morally grounded in one individual’s vulnerability and the other individual’s actions, the latter being in a position which enables him or her to meet the former’s needs. Commitment is moral each time an individual is in a position to meet the needs of others. The model of vulnerability, unlike the model of will, is not based on the freedom and self-determination of a person, but on the relationship instituted between a human being in need and another human being who can fulfil that need. The difficult question is: up to what point are vulnerable beings marked by the actions of others and how can they respond to them (favorably or unfavorably)?40 Joan Tronto has insisted on that which takes the form of the duty to “protect the vulnerable,” but she has shown herself critical as to the way in which care is really given to the most vulnerable, since those protecting them present themselves as protectors – the risk lies 39 Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985). 40 Eva Feder  Kittay, Love’s Labor (New York, London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 54-56.

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in the abuse of power by care-givers who might “come to accept their own account of what is necessary to meet the caring need as definitive.”41 Vulnerability is always open to abuse of power insofar as the care-receiver’s capacity to respond has nothing to do with reciprocity between equals. Establishing a moral relationship with the most vulnerable means introducing a notion of respect, by considering other people’s position through their own narrative, rather than assuming that they are identical to oneself. When vulnerability requires protection, care or attention, it means that it has caused an otherness to emerge, a situation which is not interchangeable, and deserves a suitable response. If we are all vulnerable, the question is: what suitable form of care can be developed in response to vulnerability? More specifically, how can one shift from a position of dependence to a position of independence within the course of a lifetime? As Joan Tronto has written: “Throughout our lives, all of us go through varying degrees of dependence and independence, of autonomy and vulnerability.”42 Thus, according to the positions we occupy – rich or poor, in the center or at the periphery of relations of power – we have a changing ability to forget others’ vulnerability and believe in our own power or invulnerability. We forget that certain beings experience vulnerability more than others, and we let less powerful and less recognized individuals take care of their needs, thus creating patterns of vulnerability which are also patterns of social precariousness. Vulnerable lives are first and foremost lives whose viability is threatened. They are also lives for which the dominant forms of representation do not leave any space, since they are regarded as useless, disturbing or unconventional. Certain lives are more vulnerable than others and, for this reason, need to be protected so that they can free themselves or express themselves. These lives can easily be crushed through the exercise of violence or power, all the more so as moral and political liberalism functions as a strong identitarian force, 41 42

Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 145. Ibid., p. 135.

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having taught us to consider all human beings, independently of their situation, as autonomous subjects who have always already been accepted by others as being themselves responsible for their present situation. How can we analyze the social anchoring of vulnerability in precise intersubjective manifestations? A more recent theoretical configuration is currently being used to address this question. Alongside the various ethics of care, the works of Judith Butler on wounds and Axel Honneth43 on contempt, for instance, can be read as identifications of various forms of vulnerability which socially mark bodies and minds in a way that emphasizes their lack of power. The harmful power of language in Judith Butler’s work, and the impossibility of fulfillment in Axel Honneth’s function like deprivations of socialization and of one’s power to act. They make people excessively vulnerable, because they lack recognition and subjective viability.

II. – Critiques of the liberal man Vulnerability fundamentally forces human beings to face their lack of power and the possibility of being attacked or abused. It opens a crack in liberalism, even in its most pluralistic conception – that of John Rawls.44 The point is not, however, to give a simplistic reading of liberalism, and particularly of Rawls’s, which is innovative and genuinely determined to reflect on the possibility of an egalitarian society.45 As Eva Feder Kittay has reminded us, by insisting on the importance of a political sphere away from the market, which escapes the utilitarian objective of simply distributing wealth, Rawls has theorized the necessity of a just society and a specific political space

43 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York, London: Routledge, 1997) and Axel Honneth, Disrespect (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007) for the English translation. 44 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Expanded edition, New York, London: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 24: “a reasonable pluralism in opposition to a simple pluralism.” See also Catherine Audard, “Le libéralisme démocratique de John Rawls,” in Qu’est-ce que le libéralisme ?, (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), pp. 401-473. 45 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 6: “an egalitarian form of liberalism.”

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where everyone could be treated as free and equal beings.46 From this perspective, it is necessary to construct “basic institutions,” whose role is to “serve as guidelines [to] realize the values of liberty and equality.”47 A major political problem for Rawls is the systematic correction of structural inequalities. The relationship to justice is central. But it is also apprehended through rules, mechanisms, and rational subjects of law. This is what sets Rawls’s views apart from the different ethics of care according to which the political sphere cannot easily be separated from a social and anthropological sphere – reasserting the omnipresence of relationships of power or exploitation, and acknowledging the existence of specific contexts and sensitive subjects in need. Rawls apprehended the political field through a normative approach that aimed to reflect on “the nature and aims of a perfectly just society.”48 This liberalism thus finds its force in an unequivocally abstract universalism and rationalism passed down from Kant. Founding a just society and inventing a public culture entails taking Locke’s, Rousseau’s, and Kant’s theories on the social contract to a higher level of abstraction. The original contract is not designed to be applied to any given society, or to establish a specific form of government – it allows the principles of justice to be recognized within a common space.49 Behind the “veil of ignorance” of the original position, which is supposed to symbolize the moment when the basic political institutions of the rule of law were constituted, what is at stake is a conception of human beings as rational and political beings. Behind this veil, nobody recognizes themselves in their social or sentient nature. We no longer have access to all the specific information which would transform us into interested and partial subjects: all human beings are alike. They thus understand others as well as they understand themselves: they can put themselves in anyone else’s Kittay, Love’s Labour, p. 75. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 5. 48 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Revised edition, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, 1999), p. 8. 49 Ibid., p. 14. 46 47

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shoes. The foundation of a just society is thus entirely rational: this is how the democratic social order must be constituted over time. Everyone can then accept a tolerable consensus for the most underprivileged, since they are disregarding their own situation to reach a universal form of reasoning. Rawls’s political philosophy found its perfect expression in legal thought, through a theory of justice which only regards human beings in society as subjects of law, on two levels: they are subjects in the eye of the law and subjects who have rights. Justice must allow the foundation of a democratic consensus through which citizens obey laws they have chosen for themselves, in order to respect the inherent equality and freedom of all human beings. The constitutional basis of societies and legal mechanisms are enough to establish a renewed democracy, which gives each person the chance to be fulfilled under the rule of law. This interpretation of the initial situation, which poses the choice of a society in rational terms, supposes that its members are autonomous people who voluntarily commit themselves to a system of social co-operation. But many problems are then pushed to the margins of politics. Feminists such as Susan Moller Okin, Annette Baier, and Eva Feder Kittay believe that Rawls’s liberalism has not managed to insert the “dependency critique” within its theory of justice. In other words, Rawls’s theory does not leave any room for relationships of dependency, which truly reveal human vulnerability and constitute situations of injustice. These relationships are seen as infra-political, because they do not develop as relationships of justice exclusively determined by reciprocity between free and equal people. Vulnerability, as revealed in situations of dependency, is rooted in asymmetrical relationships between dependent people and people who take care of dependent people.

III. – The turning point of practical philosophy in the 18th century More generally, Rawls’s theory stems from a turning point in European practical philosophy which took place in the 18th century, and which the various ethics of care seek to question. A transformation took place with the transition from Scottish philosophy (Hutcheson,

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Hume, and Smith) to Kantian philosophy. This proved that the nature of the social bond had changed: moral sentiments were replaced by a universalist morality. In Kant’s work, morality became an autonomous sphere of human life, whereas it used to be applied to social interactions through an interplay of reason and moral sentiments which attested that feelings can be a fundamental source of human activities. While Hutcheson claimed that there was a moral sense or natural benevolence which the political order had to shape and educate, Hume suggested a more problematic notion of sympathy, understood not as love for humanity, but only as attention to what happens to those close to us. Consequently, it became important to imagine a system of justice as a limitation of all the activities concerning ourselves and those who are close to us. Adam Smith made connections with other people and the possibility of moral feelings even more problematic by defining sympathy as a mental operation in which our relationship to other people does not qualify as a feeling, but as a projection which only allows us to imagine what they feel. According to Joan Tronto, sympathy in Smith’s work expresses greater complexity in the way we relate to others: “A key moral problem for Adam Smith thus became how people came to extend themselves into the position of another.”50 Sympathy, as an act of imaginary projection onto the experience of someone else, implies a sharing of what is common according to a sensible separation between life experiences. With Smith’s work, the foundations of morality were definitively modified, hinting at a greater isolation of individuals, influenced by an unprecedented development of trade, which made them more calculating, and more capable of indexing virtue on selfinterest. According to Tronto, Smith then became caught up in a “moral skepticism”51 rooted in the loss of effectiveness of moral sentiments and the diagnosis of an increased distance in social relationships. From this perspective, the figure of the impartial spectator must 50 51

Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 46. Ibid., p. 47.

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be interpreted as the possibility of introducing a thoughtful and distanced moral point of view in a society whose aim is to limit the power of the market and to build a political structure that allows the social bond to extend beyond the sole pursuit of economic interests. Consequently, morality had to incorporate the separation of individuals, and politics had to incorporate a public sphere that controls private interests. From Smith to Kant, there was only one other theoretical step, which consisted in giving up sympathy, which had already been interiorized, to create a model of the “moral point of view” which definitively weakened social interactions and transformed morals, now opposed to politics, into the sphere not so much of action, but of thought and practical rationality. Morality was no longer what allowed people to meet other people within a social life dedicated to benevolent exchange. It limited itself to the justification of our moral conduct. The moral issue became that of moral judgments formulated from a distanced and disinterested point of view, with a social bond that required control and regulation in the background. The sphere of feelings was definitively excluded from moral rationality, and placed outside the public sphere, so as not to let it damage the moral foundation of politics. The turning point which we have identified in the history of practical philosophy only serves to reinforce, in theory, forms of social relegation that take place in practice. In becoming a private issue, moral feelings can easily be ascribed to the private and quiet world of women assigned to the private sphere. The violence of this division of the world also reveals its muddiness, in spite of its claims to rationality. The world is filled with relationships of power which give shape to an “other”: women, and all those – slaves, migrants, etc. – who are pushed to the margins by a division that makes any “moral point of view” depend on one’s participation in a homogeneous or stable public sphere. According to Tronto, the ethics of care must precisely be understood as the questioning of a moral philosophy which has instituted the confinement of politics to an abstract theory of justice which fails to acknowledge the continuity between activities subject to universal morality and activities considered to be

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mundane, inframoral, and infrapolitical. Women now stand in the silent sphere of the ordinary. This sphere defines a periphery far removed from the center, with its male activities described as “detached” and “disinterested” based on a “moral point of view.”

IV. – Vulnerability and the critique of identity Trust in perennial mechanisms of justice and the possibility of giving an identity to a subject that is both rational and autonomous entail the existence of a stable world and linear evolutions for human beings who are transformed into citizens involved in public life. Although human beings are now characterized by their vulnerability, thanks to a questioning of the historical movement accomplished in the 18th century, integrated forms of citizenship, which allow democratic consensus to be established by sufficiently indistinct or neutral subjects, are no longer self-evident. Mentioning vulnerability reactivates the whole notion of a critique of liberalism in its moral foundation. Liberal theories prove unable to understand new social movements (feminism, the defense of new sexual or civil rights, struggles against discriminations) and new forms of uncertainty which now affect ordinary lives, particularly professional and emotional lives. They are also unable to give an account of individualities and collectives whose stories are rooted in precise situations of domination which prevent them from expressing themselves politically in a way that could be regarded as a participation in society under the rule of law. Further still, liberalism is likely to destine certain people to invisibility, to relegate to a space outside the process of redistribution and recognition all those whose identities only appear implicitly because they lack the power to speak and take action, in a normative system which excludes from the realm of justice all those who cannot prove they are active or deliberative citizens. By turning the spotlight on a subject of law very similar to the Kantian transcendental subject, John Rawls certainly found the means to conceive of a state that would not be in the hands of a caste or affected by sectarian identities, but he remained very vague about the category of the “most

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underprivileged.” He particularly struggled to render the complexity or the diversity of this category and to denounce the violence of assignations, to consider social reality beyond the ideal of justice, with the disruptions and accidents it involves rather than through the rational promise of justice.

V. – An ontology of the accident How can vulnerability be taken into account within the framework of a moral and political philosophy, as well as in the framework of an ontology capable of giving it the legitimacy of a key concept? This is one of the central questions raised by the ethics of care. Joan Tronto clearly anticipated this challenge when she proposed, in Moral Boundaries, a global definition of care as “a species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”52 Viable lives, however, are still vulnerable: each life expands into a world which needs to be maintained, developed, or repaired. Care entails an attention to all the lives and all the beings which inhabit the world. This very broad definition of care – which brings together certain attitudes, from the capacity to take responsibility, to care work, and the satisfying of needs – makes it a central and essential activity of human life: in this sense, the experience of care acquires a kind of universality, a universality which is by no means abstract since it characterizes the type of relationship that should be had with an individual being, a natural element, or an object, provided that its inclusion in a vulnerable world has been recognized. The world of care needs to be broadened considerably to be given its full scope: on this basis, it also becomes possible to “take care” of nature. Care is thus not only interpersonal: it fundamentally has to do with our world in its essence, with the possibility of it giving itself to us. In this sense, it is relevant to give the ethics of care ontological substance. Actually, the ontol52

Ibid., p. 103.

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ogy of care is rooted in a criticism of all forms of power, whether natural or manufactured by man, and emphasizes everything and everyone that deserves protection, attention, and is at risk of obliteration or disappearance. This world requires an ethics because it harbors many possibilities of living differently, following other norms than those which the self-proclaimed power of capitalism makes us accept. From this point of view, a philosophical reflection on care can certainly draw from the theses developed by Catherine Malabou in The Ontology of the Accident, although they stem from a very different tradition. In its most extreme forms, vulnerability not only characterizes fragile identities: it questions them, and emphasizes the fact that identities are not permanent. Vulnerability can certainly be expressed through accidents in the course of people’s lives, which operate like “transformations which are attacks.”53 These identities, divided by accidents as heterogeneous as serious disease or injury, war, natural disaster and family or professional drama, are put to the test of the impossibility of recognizing oneself or speaking about oneself when all that is left of one’s past life are shreds which cannot be put back together. Vulnerability becomes a negative, devastating experience which prevents people from instituting a common world on the same footing as others. As a result, it designates not only a philosophy of contingency, but also an ontology of the accident, taking into account other lines than those of continuous and necessary rationality. This is because taking vulnerability into account renews the fundamental issue of contingency (the possibility of being different than one is, and that of not being at all). It is a means of permitting the opacity that characterizes the beginning of each human life to resurface – the fact that we are fundamentally born weak or fragile and have need of someone to take care of us. Thus, it points to a strongly desired relationship of attachment, which may be unavailable, present through the violence of its absence, and whose traces we have repressed. Like Judith Butler, we may argue that it revives a form 53

p. 10.

Catherine Malabou, Ontologie de l’accident (Paris : Éditions Léo Scheer, 2009),

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of fundamental distress – that of having no recollection of one’s own birth –, a melancholy of the origins which we surely experience again at the end of our lives or each time death approaches, to remind us that we are fundamentally vulnerable, compelling us to solicit the attention of other people who are less vulnerable at that given moment.54

VI. – Vulnerability and dependency The ethics of care actively mobilizes an ontology of vulnerability on the one hand, destabilizing a spiritualist or intellectualist tradition on the other. The reference to vulnerability is essential from an ontological perspective in order to include the protection of nature or the environment within the scope of protection issues. However, it is also crucial to obtain better understanding of vulnerable lives, that of subjects of need who need to be “cared for.”55 In both cases, vulnerability takes on a pragmatic meaning aimed at highlighting the various experiences of dependency. Dependency can in fact be seen as indicative of an ontological and anthropological vulnerability. The ethics of care finds its purpose in a form of attention to others that can be considered an adequate response to dependent beings, whose status as subjects must be analyzed in connection with the necessity to survive, to maintain or to improve one’s quality of life. Human beings are not merely rational beings or subjects of law. They are also individuals whose power to live can be hindered. We are often dependent beings because we are fundamentally vulnerable beings.56 Human vulnerability is usually most manifest in lives marked by an apparent passivity and exposure to others. However, caring for these lives does not mean limiting them, but rather supporting and protecting them. If care can deteriorate into violence or abuse, it is Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 28. On the importance of « vulnerability » for law and politics, see Fineman, Martha A., and Anna Grear, ed., Vulnerability. Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013). 56 See Brugère, Le sexe de la sollicitude, pp. 26-27. 54 55

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because it involves relationships of dependency or highly asymmetrical relationships, as highlighted by certain extreme forms of dependency. The notion of dependency cannot remain purely negative: it takes on its full meaning within an ethics of care57. Eva Feder Kittay has initiated a similar moral and political reflection in Love’s Labor, turning from the issue of vulnerability to the wide variety of extreme dependencies, such as those pertaining to early childhood, the end of life, serious illnesses, and, further still, physical or mental disabilities. By grounding her theory in extreme forms of dependency, Kittay has emphasized interpersonal and institutional relations in which carereceivers are unable to meet their basic needs and to reciprocate what care-givers provide. Contrary to claims from other ethics of care, it is difficult in this context to consider the transition from dependency to interdependency as the sole horizon of struggles against dependency.58 Of course, we are all socially interdependent beings (a boss visà-vis his or her secretary, urban populations vis-à-vis agricultural communities, etc.), but some people are so physically and mentally fragile that their dependency never resolves into interdependency: “At some point there is a dependency that is not yet or no longer an interdependency.”59 Certain forms of dependency, like those which affect people who cope with severe mental disabilities, will never be preceded or followed by interdependent relationships, or relationships that involve a form of reciprocity. Interdependency cannot always represent the emancipatory ideal of struggles against dependency. Taking into account extreme dependency, rather than ordinary vulnerability or interdependency, serves as a counter-model for an ultimate critique of the liberal fiction of independence. Indeed, how can we account in this context for the possibility of an association of equals, which necessarily posits a certain reciprocity at the root of every social bond and human activity directed towards others? See St. Stephanie Collins, The Core of Care Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 97-123 : dependency relationships generate responsibilities. 58 See Marie Garrau and Alice le Goff’s analyses in Care. Justice et dépendance (Paris: PUF, 2010), pp. 111-124. 59 Kittay, Love’s Labor, p. XII. 57

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According to Kittay, “as long as the bounds of justice are drawn within reciprocal relations among free and equal persons, dependents will continue to remain disenfranchised, and dependency workers who are otherwise fully capable and cooperating members of society will continue to share varying degrees of the dependent’s disenfranchisement.”60 No society should view dependency as a fringe issue, but it should be regarded as a central problem to avoid reducing human existence to an ideal of citizenship which promotes the idea of a well-ordered society and transforms the individual into a legal entity. Based on the expressed necessity to reflect upon dependency, Kittay has explained how an ethics of care helps to acknowledge it. Dependency practices and work are reassessed from the standpoint of a social reality, that of women’s massive investment (in poorly paid care professions linked to dependency, and as mothers within the realm of the family). Dependency workers are predominantly women, especially poor women or women assigned, for one reason or another, to the realm of the family. The voice of care cannot be analyzed without reference to the experience of women and the exploitation of their labor power within the framework of care tasks. Hence Kittay’s tribute to Ruddick: her analysis of the work carried out by mothers described motherhood not as the expression of nature but as a work of mothering, a sum of practices which implies competences and an intelligence of its own. She also questioned the place of power in relations of care. Every relation of care contains some inequality of power between care-giver and care-receiver. According to Ruddick, however, this asymmetry of roles often leads to patterns of domination: domination of men over women assigned to care, domination of care-providers over employees they hire to care for a loved one, domination of care-workers over the fundamentally vulnerable beings in their charge. To dominate is to turn the other into an object of property. It also means believing that relationships of dominance are necessary to the well-being or to the life of the

60

Ibid., pp. 76-77.

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dominated.61 Domination is an illegitimate exercise of power which care relationships can enable, all the more so when they relate to the issue of extreme dependency, muffled by liberalism and excluded from the realm of justice. Against the unquestioned premises of liberalism, Kittay has called for a feminism that must necessarily be considered in connection with dependency. Gender division separates men’s work from women’s work. Equality does not prompt men to engage in the activities carried out by women when these activities have to do with the unrecognized care of dependent beings. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir already regarded women’s dependency on men as the site of an alienation that bars the way to equality. Shortly after, Susan Moller Okin also denounced the lack of justice within the family and private realms, placing the burden of care on women and thereby excluding them from the public space. To address the situation of women, we must develop a new theory of equality in which dependency has a central role. Instead of a differentialist feminist critique which assumes the irreducibility of female difference, instead of a dominance critique, in which domination precedes difference and accounts for all relations of gender, instead of a diversity critique – women have very different fates and gender intersects with race and class – , we must establish a feminist dependency critique whose chief concern is to achieve a reassessment of equality based on a moral and political analysis of the asymmetries triggered by any form of dependency.62 In other words, how can we envision an equality inclusive of relations of dependency, especially of those which cannot be removed? Feminism thus becomes the site of a new conception of equality with a shift from the realm of the abstract to that of the concrete, from constructivism to critique, from the mode of the impersonal to that of the personal or the interpersonal. 61 Sarah Ruddick, “Injustice in Families: Assault and Domination,” in Justice and Care, ed. Virignia Held (Boulder, Co.: Wetsview Press, 1995), pp. 213- 214. 62 Kittay, Love’s Labor, pp. 9-17.

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Equality cannot remain an elusive equality. As Kittay has written: “The question of equality fragments into questions of equalities. Equality for whom? Equality by what measure? Equality of what? Equal to what? Equal to whom?”63 Kittay’s remarks are very close to Amartya Sen’s, for whom defining and challenging inequalities involves a reflection on the kind of equality we mean to achieve, and measured according to what variable: income, happiness, gender equality, equality in the satisfaction of needs, or equal opportunities to succeed.64 This emphasis on concrete achievements links the equality advocated by the ethics of care to a politics focused on establishing priorities and comparing situations, and not only on implementing policies in keeping with a certain ideal of justice. Conceiving feminism as the site of a dependency critique from which may arise questions of equalities rather than of equality means conceiving a project for a society understood in its horizontal uses rather than its vertical axis and hierarchical positionings. Moreover, the world of dependency needs to be included within the scope of relations of justice, thus raising the issue of the feasibility of certain types of relation developed against practices of dominance. Which positions must be taken into account? First, we must bear in mind the burden that dependency places on others: care-receivers are highly vulnerable. Care-receivers are individuals nurtured by the care, supervision, vigilance, or support of another. Taking care of a dependent individual implies a kind of work in which one’s energy and attention are directed toward a beneficiary. However, if care is in fact a form of assistance, the care-worker in charge of dependency must have the necessary power and authority to accomplish his or her work responsibly. The problem lies precisely in the fact that these workers, paid or unpaid depending on whether the activity is carried out in an informal or professional context, are often themselves rendered Ibid., p. 5. Amartya Sen, Inequality Re-examined (New York, Oxford: Russel Sage Foundation, Clarendon Press, 1992), and “Equality of What? The Tanner Lecture on Human Values,” in Liberty, Equality and Law: Selected Tanner Lectures, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 137-162. 63 64

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vulnerable, as they perform these activities in the place of others who have the resources to free themselves from the burdens of care. A first dependency is then reinforced by a second dependency, which turns the actual care-worker, according to Kittay, into someone subjected to an “inequality of situation”65 with regard to the provider of care. This embedded dependency of care-workers does not further a fair distribution of care tasks. We must consider a specific moral power left unexamined by Rawls, which lies in the necessity to collectively acknowledge the need to care for others. This moral power yields responsibility rather than reciprocity in Rawls’s sense, which does not allow for relations of dependency. Extremely dependent beings cannot reciprocate the care they receive in any way. An intermediary is necessary. Kittay has therefore called for an expanded concept of reciprocity, employing a term characteristic of traditional societies, the doula. The idea is to consider a principle for help or care meant for those who, as they take care of others, cannot care for themselves. The form of reciprocity is indirect: just as children need care to grow, our society must provide adequate conditions for others to benefit from the care and attention necessary to support their lives. Societies can then be said to be fair when they implement support for institutions, not only to the direct benefit of dependent individuals, but also by offering care-providers the resources, support, and opportunities needed to exercise their competence. Care-workers’ second dependency, their activity in support of a vulnerable other, gives them a right to the support of the community.66 Just as Kittay has reexamined reciprocity from the standpoint of the responsibility that surrounds care, she has also reexamined the notion of action to explore the agency of dependent beings. In another book on mental illness, she has described the meaning of agency for people who lack a particular marker of humanity by which many philosophers define humankind: reason. This calls for a change in our behaviors, our institutions, and our conception of justice and 65 66

Kittay, Love’s Labor, p. 45. Ibid., pp. 106-107 and pp. 132-133.

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morality, to include other signs of activity than those which exhibit rationality in action (like the complete understanding of the consequences of one’s actions, a criterion which cannot be applied to people with mental disabilities).67 Eva Feder Kittay’s approach suggests that not all forms of dependency can be eliminated. She has given meaning to vulnerability by raising the issue of dependency. Dependency does not in fact allow us to examine the entire range of care, but it is an indicator of the narrowness of political liberalism, bent on the fiction of an independent, autonomous, and rational individual. Another point is to reflect on the possibility of good care, not only in the sphere of interpersonal relationships, but also in the workings of institutions and the mindset of our public policies. How can we build a care ethics that is consistent with the democratic demand for a truly just society, which excludes no one and respects the differences revealed by the issue of dependency?

VII. – Good care The ethics of care should not only be understood in terms of interpersonal relationships. Care calls into question the separation between morals and politics, and between the private and the public realms, as it challenges the distributions between center and periphery defined by these divisions. Furthermore, providing a general theory of care means offering prospects for political and social change. The ethics of care is then defined as a critical theory that denounces and exposes the processes through which caring for the most vulnerable has become marginalized, and through which the recognition of care-related practices, people, and institutions has been undermined. While those who provide care help to preserve a bond of mutual assistance, solidarity, and concern, they are also condemned to silence, uninvolved in public spheres of decision-making, poorly compensated, or relegated to unpaid and solitary dedication in the private Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 12-14. 67

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realm. It is important to offer a full assessment of the ideological context of care, which reduces its practices, despite their ethical specificity, to standards of economic profitability and management. More specifically, the neoliberal management of care tends to erase that which is reminiscent of the body within spheres that are regarded as intimate. Why? Because addressing how care-givers, through caring practices, relate to dependent bodies, often brought – despite themselves – to display their weaknesses, conflicts with imperatives of autonomy, and points to a totally different figure of the subject. A dependent subject is a subject who needs others. Dependency must therefore be regarded as the object of “sticky,” ambiguous (and sometimes violent) relationships that require the intervention of other people, organizations, or institutions. According to Joan Tronto, authority in caring relationships does not lie with care-workers, but with those who, without exercising care, determine how needs will be met: “it is the physician who ‘takes care of’ the patient, even if the care-giving nurse notices something that the doctor does not notice or consider significant.”68 It is symptomatic to notice that the more care departs from “taking care of” – according to the highly valued model of the doctor in charge of a patient’s recovery –, the more it is linked to care for local bodily concerns, like the nurse who cleans up a patient, and the more it is both abandoned by the powerful and depreciated by societies converted to an encompassing and seemingly dematerialized market. This is especially true if we consider the history of bodily cleaning tasks, which are central to the care given to the most dependent (young children, the elderly, the seriously ill, etc.). It can be pointed out that these tasks have been mainly assigned to women within the private, family, or professional spheres, as well as to immigrants or to the working class. Care is socially distributed across lines of gender, race, and class. It then becomes the object of poorly paid work (the work of the dominated or of the weak at the service of the powerful) and is 68

Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 109.

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depreciated even if it is essential to the workings of the market society. While care is an important part of our daily lives, we do not recognize its value and do not give this dimension the attention it deserves. Even though it aims at coping with vulnerability, it often only engenders patterns of vulnerability that make up as many patterns of exploitation of the individuals in charge of caring. We may add to Tronto’s analyses the fact that bad care is not only marginalized care, diminished care, or care whose institutional existence is at risk.69 It is also a form of care won over to market demands of economic profitability. Caring for an individual vulnerable being becomes a nearly impossible task, weighed down by relations which leave no time for personal or psychological availability. Care work is achieved by exploiting individuals and their supposedly humane dispositions. The systematic undermining of care stems from the inability of the current globalized political system to take care into account. How can our societies account for activities, practices, or occupations which, from their perspective, fall outside the narrow sphere of financial profitability? Among the privileged, devolving activities of care to other people prevents a deeper reflection on the question: what should we be collectively doing to further care? Our understanding of care is fragmented: caring activities are scattered and described as trivial concerns. The mission of the ethics of care is to produce a systematic reflection and to turn its very concept into a central category for the analysis of society. The difficulty of unifying care lies in the lack of recognition of its activities, grounded in the notion that talking about care is unnecessary since this concept lies on the border between the private and the public, the body and mind, or in the nebulous realm of the “heart.” It is grounded in the fact that care is consistently associated with intimacy, affectivity, and proximity – care is therefore naturalized and feminized, hindering its identification as a type of work. The fragmentation of care activities obstructs any unified perception of care. How can we then grasp the structurally central part it plays in social life? 69

Ibid., pp. 110-112.

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The unequal allocation of power, resources, and social distinctions affects caring activities in particular, as they take place in an impaired world governed by individuals who only have to care about themselves and their own self-interest. Engaging in a reflection on “good care” therefore means suggesting a different way of organizing activities pertaining to care, education, social work, and all fields that express a form of concern for others. It also means advocating a role for subjective dispositions for caring, which can be understood as a certain availability of care-givers, expressing the conciliation of capacity and activity. The attentive availability of care-givers is built on a form of respect for the specificity of care work, which implies a relation to time structured by the uncertainties of human life, and not by the reign of objects. Deciding to reflect on good care implies considering “when both the activity and disposition of care are present.”70 Defending a pragmatic approach to ethics does not necessarily mean we should abandon any reference to disposition and to a normative account of care. The aim is rather to explain the interplay of disposition and activity by describing the phases of good care in concrete terms. Tronto’s text is extremely clear with regards to this analytical project: “We noted that, as an ongoing process, care consists of four analytically separate, but interconnected, phases. They are: caring about, taking care of, care-giving, and care-receiving.”71 The first phase engages the caring process – defined as “caring about,” it consists in the disposition for attentiveness, a readiness to recognize unmet needs. This involves taking account of the dimension of moral disposition. The second phase, “taking care of,” implies seeing that the need can indeed be met and determining the means required to doing so – it involves taking charge and assuming responsibility. We are still at a dispositional stage, that of a moral disposition for responsibility. The third phase, “care-giving,” emphasizes the actual care work and the “competence” implicated in one’s response to a 70 71

Ibid., p. 105 Ibid., pp. 105-106.

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need. Finally, good care involves “care-receiving,” which implies the care-receiver’s responsiveness. This last step consists in an assessment of good care: the care-receiver is asked if the care in question was adequate to his or her need.72 We can then determine a role for the disposition to understand, as a disposition for receptiveness. Attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness constitute an ethical grammar of care, in which disposition still plays a role.73 What appears is the difficulty of describing the ethical aim of care as good care by completely dispensing with the notion of “disposition.” Instead, the indivisibility of disposition and activity needs to be examined, keeping in mind the necessity to recognize the specific kind of work and practices required by others’ needs.74 Considering care in terms of practice means fighting against idealization and remaining wary of any naive approach. If an ethics of care is more about practice than about a set of rules and principles, Tronto believes, we can derive from the four steps of good care the four steps of an ethics of care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness.75 Being inattentive to the needs of others constitutes a moral failure from the standpoint of the ethics of care. In societies that promote insensitivity to others and set distances between subjects, inattentiveness is called indifference and can become an unquestioned norm of social behavior. According to Tronto, Simone Weil’s philosophy exemplifies the value of attentiveness as the vehicle of genuine human interaction. Responsibility follows from attentiveness, as a moment of “taking care of.” Respon72 On the four phases of care, see Marie Garrau, “La théorie politique à l’épreuve de la vulnérabilité,” Intersections philosophiques. Cahiers de l’ED 139, (2006). 73 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, pp.  105-108. The four phases of good care were first described in an article I wrote for the website “La vie des idées,” “Pour une théorie générale du care,” 8 May 2009, http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Pour-unetheorie-generale-du-care.html. Joan Tronto has described a fifth phase of care: caring with, which carries the moral dimensions of solidarity and trust (in Caring Democracy. Markets, Equality, and Justice (New York, London: New York University Press, 2013), p. 35. 74 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, pp. 105-108. 75 Ibid., p. 127.

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sibility is not only a formal moral category considered as an obligation to be carried out: it also bears a political meaning that requires examining its allocation within society, which amounts to recognizing a need for care. The third step, that of competence, is to be understood in the framework of a moral consequentialism that requires a concrete expression of concern: it depends on the success of one’s actions. Caring implies caring about consequences and the final outcome. The adequacy of care to the situation expresses the competence of the practice itself. Finally, the responsiveness of the care-receiver is a key factor: it reminds us of the fact that the response is often difficult, indirect, or comes in the form of a denial of care, since relationships often play out in situations of vulnerability and inequality. Care provides a critique of autonomy understood as a position anyone can occupy at any time. This is not to say that autonomy does not exist, or to refuse to consider the life ideal it may convey. But the practice of care “is concerned with conditions of vulnerability and inequality.”76 Having to resort to care means being in a position of vulnerability whose importance is both moral and political. Enabling care-receivers to respond means recognizing their vulnerability, against the imperatives of individual autonomy. An ethics of care then implies an anthropology of vulnerability, an ontology or a world, a taking into account of the dignity of dependency, and a philosophy of care. Furthermore, defending a general theory of care which can be equated with a regulatory ideal of care allows us to develop new embodiments of care practices. This new philosophy is materialized by a shift of borders between the concepts of dependency, interdependency, vulnerability, and autonomy. Autonomy is complex because it is never more than the autonomy of fundamentally vulnerable beings. Equality must also be the subject of a renewed account, in that the reality of care displays unequal or asymmetrical relationships between concrete, situated, and irretrievably different beings. How can we recreate the community entailed by equality? How can reciprocity and mutuality be implemented, 76

Ibid., p. 134.

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even though nothing guarantees them in any direct way? Vulnerability debunks the myth that we are immediately equal, rational, and autonomous citizens. It questions the theoretical order on which the possibility of a democratic discourse on politics is founded. The problem is then to figure out how, based on the various ethics of care, we can promote democratic politics and a society built on equality.

CHAPTER III

For a Caring Democracy

Care has many meanings: as “care-giving,” care is a kind of practice. We care for the sick, for the young, for the elderly, for poor and excluded people, but also for each and every individual, for the environment, and for institutions: care affects both living and inanimate beings, as well as objects. In the human realm, it refers to an activity of support that seeks to maintain, continue, or restore one’s capacity to be, speak or act. It is grounded in a critique of contemporary individualism, to the extent that the latter considers the dictate of an independent self a sufficient foundation for the social bond. Against the moral and political ideal of a separate self, the ethics of care promotes the reality of an embodied self, defined through its relational practices. It accounts for relationships of dependency and interdependency, viewed as forces to capture our bodies and minds from the very moment of our birth, as Judith Butler has argued in Giving an Account of Oneself: “The ego is not an entity or a substance, but an array of relations and processes, implicated in the world of primary caregivers in ways that constitute its very definition.”77 The independence of the self is an illusion or a reconstruction that seems necessary for us to keep on living in a society of individuals presented as being detached from one another. But it also runs the risk of offering a representation that is disconnected from our practices and affects. This individualistic assumption construes human 77

Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 59.

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beings on the basis of imperatives of autonomy, as if human beings were in full control of themselves at every moment of their lives. To insist on the global interdependence of our lives is to promote another conception of social togetherness. It gives prominence to a democratic bond that is careful not to exclude those who are faced with situations of vulnerability and who require the attention of others, and of supportive public policies to contemplate the restoration of their agency.

I. – The neoliberal use of care Caring describes the action of addressing another being or thing that needs to be preserved, restored, and kept in existence, or guided in its development. But it is a term which becomes increasingly complex and ambiguous when it is confronted with its contemporary uses. Some forms of caring do not specifically pertain to ethics and can be characterized in a neoliberal and undemocratic fashion. The particularistic turn in the human sciences, in which the ethics of care takes part, cannot be understood without proposing a diagnosis of the present based on a critical description of the mechanisms of American neoliberalism. 1. The neoliberal extinction of democracy. – As Wendy Brown’s article “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy” argues, the Reagan and Bush years in the United States marked the beginning of an extinction of democracy, a “de-democratization” resulting both from the presence of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Current global policies, originating in America, are elaborated under the authority of an all-encompassing market rationality permeating all areas of life, the economic and the political, the social and the intimate alike. Neoliberalism not only consists in the expansion of the realm of oligarchic finance, often gendered as male. Its expansionism has led it to deploy political tactics combining relentless market rationality with an authoritarian statism fostered by conservative values imposed as behavioral standards upon ordinary citizens. Wendy Brown has argued that this ideology paves the way for the global

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construction of an undemocratic regime. The new governmentality not only promotes an economic rationality such as that developed in market economies, and whose intellectual emblem was Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but a contagious political rationality that has come to permeate every area of reality. It consists in “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action.”78 It embraces the state through oligarchical privatization, but does not limit itself to this diversion of public power. It penetrates individuals through their bodies and minds to create new subjects, modes of citizenship, and behavior, as well as a new form of social organization. Building on Michel Foucault’s analyses, Wendy Brown sees neoliberalism as a globalized structure stemming from a number of specific geographical sites, but nevertheless designed to subject politics and every dimension of contemporary experience to economic rationality. The human being is defined as Homo oeconomicus. Deep down, they must know that living in viable conditions today means assuming the role of an entrepreneur, of an efficient and evercalculating individual, with self-interest as the regulating power of human activity.79 The distinguishing feature of this construction lies in the way norms permeate individuals in their inmost recesses to turn them into creatures fully dedicated to economic rationality.80 2. Exploiting care. – By this account, care is reclaimed as the object of a construction based on the prominence of self-care, covered up by the neoconservative desire to expand the scope of individual responsibility against any collective project that would reintroduce solidarity, mutual assistance, or gratuitousness into the social bond. It is self-evident that, in the neoliberal and neoconservative society that pervades human behaviors across the globe, care can be Wendy  Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory and Event, vol. 7, (2003), paragraph 7. 79 On Homo oeconomicus, the calculating and measured individual, see Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 80 See Serge  Audier, Le Colloque Lippmann. Aux origines du néo-libéralisme (Lormont, Bordeaux: Éditions Le Bord de l’eau, 2008). 78

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exploited, interpreted as referring only to health, to the able-bodied adult, or to human capital, as Foucault argued (see supra p.  39). Care ends up being reduced to an all-encompassing economic rationality which rules out unruly or dangerous lives. It recommends limiting care activities to the protection of productive subjects, perpetually mobilizable, ready to accept and spread a discourse which associates human capital, well-being, a morality of individual guilt, and the return to a standardized social order. By this account, Wendy Brown has argued, the free subject is one who assumes responsibility for the consequences of his or her choices, one compelled by the dictate of contemporary individualism to map out his or her own path towards well-being and success. The neoliberal subject chooses strategically between various social, political, and economic options, in a standardized world of conservative values defined as norms by an elite which never actually applies them to itself. To the extent that neoliberal care does exist, it only refers to the self or to others related to that self, and it can in no way transform into a caring for others. Why is Wendy Brown’s account of neoliberalism so essential to understanding the project of an ethics of care? Simply because neoliberal constructivism focuses on care – seen as a highly strategic human function in today’s economic and political rationality – insofar as it promotes a relation to a privileged self considered as a producer of human capital, as an “entrepreneur of self.” On the other hand, the moment care reunites with a collective mindset, whether it takes the form of selfless attention to others or of any action carried out on behalf of a vulnerable other, it is rendered invisible because it does not match the spirit of contemporary capitalism. The ethics of care, as well as the policies it suggests, are relegated to the margins of reality, condemned to impotence, typically naturalized as a women’s issue or delegated to the poor, to migrants, to people who are stripped of any power and exploited in silence. It belongs to a conception of social togetherness that regards non-market morality as obsolete and disempowering for individuals. It prefers to merge neoliberal rationality with conservative rationality, in a composite

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alliance that nevertheless presents the benefit of concealing neoliberalism’s amorality behind moral strictures likely to give a vague image of dedication, patriotism, and honesty – but in so rigid a way that adhesion is only superficial or a minority phenomenon. Neoconservatism paradoxically amounts to minimal morality, which does not so much produce desire as the figures of the entrepreneur-citizen and the consumer-citizen. Neoconservatism preserves the appeal of neoliberalism, while supplying it with a morality that does not question the fundamental inequality of human paths or the current undemocratic vocation of society. Promoting an ethics of care requires that we establish a definitive diagnosis of the globalized present, built on the collusion of economy and morality and driven by a fundamental fear of egalitarianism. We are currently confronted with a crisis of care, parallel to that of capitalism: care can fully be a part of a society structured by reference to the enterprising individual. It is the invisible yet necessary condition of the labor market. The engagement of some in economic competition is only achievable because others are there to bear the burden of care in any given society: child rearing, bodily care for dependent people, social work, and volunteering. What tends to result from this is hinged on a center/periphery model and a cleavage between the much-valued world of efficient subjects and the marginalized world of care-givers and care-receivers, where, behind the category of vulnerability, gender and social barriers intersect. According to Joan Tronto, the less well-off members of society are charged with giving care, especially bodily care. Defining them as subordinates helps elude the centrality of care-giving and care-receiving. Nevertheless, in our interdependent world, the performance of some would be impossible to achieve without the care provided by others. At the same time, care is permeated by relationships of dominance, which has led Tronto to gather care-givers and -receivers under a single term, that of “outsiders.” Excluded from all important decisions, outsiders make up an isolated social group which must at the same time negotiate with the powerful and achieve an understanding of themselves that is consistent with the terms and values of those

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who hold power.81 The possibility of ignoring care lies in a form of privilege – “a privileged irresponsibility.”82 In the neoliberal world, two circuits of care coexist: an informal circuit in which care is handled internally as a private means to persevere in social life, generally to the disadvantage of women; an external circuit in which care is externalized or carried out by often underpaid outside professionals. In both cases, care is mainly carried out by women, but not by all women. First, there are the women who live in a “double city”: a domestic city and an economic city. There are also female care professionals. Finally, some women have the capacity to delegate care tasks to others, in general other women. But care practices, and bodily care in particular, are also attributed to migrants, and to the working-class poor. Gilligan has argued that care is dealt with according to a gendered division. Tronto has contended that this division also runs parallel to lines of race and class.83 In this social critique of care, the direction that the ethics of care takes is fundamental. How should we envision the world of care? On the one hand, should care be approached as a critical model of society, with regard to current global policies built on the authority of an all-encompassing market rationality that permeates all fields, the economy and politics, the social and intimate alike? The issue is to imagine radical transformations, a different way of organizing social relations, and a concept of work mindful of the needs and fulfilment of individuals. On the other hand, is care only a humanitarian reason aimed at protecting the world by improving the way we address vulnerable individuals, both within institutions and in informal spheres such as the family or other intimate social groups? The role of a human service economy and the value of solidarity must be enhanced. This approach also holds the key to the creation of new jobs and a shift in public policies.

Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 90 Ibid., p. 121 83 See Mary Zimmerman, Jackie Litt, and Chris Bose, eds., Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 81 82

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The literature on care harbors a tension between these two possibilities: the radical and the moderate. The first possibility seems undeniably more consistent with the need to acknowledge care practices, to establish care for the most vulnerable as a right and a duty, and to break with the gendered division of these activities. This conception of care means affirming that care does not only reside in dyadic relations through which an activity is carried out in a particular emotional state that expresses one’s capacity to care about others. Care cannot be reduced to relations between individuals, as this is to eliminate the issues of care-based institutions and collective responsibilities. The uses of care are manifold and must be considered within the framework of a philosophy mindful of the social world and its transformations, as part of a particularistic turn of moral philosophy that advocates a social world which thrives on its differences. The theory of care does not merely describe attitudes of concern or care for others, defining a behavioral normativity. It does not only deal with individual practices built on asymmetrical relations, but calls for a work-based analysis which focuses on caring occupations in the broad sense. This implies tackling issues such competence and the care economy, which in turn entails focusing on family transactions, and on the role women play in this realm that is often regarded as private and naturalized, as opposed to the relations that take place within the public space which revolve around supposedly emancipated individuals. As a descriptive category, care refers both to the recurring daily work of caring for children or dependent adults, to personal assistance programs, and to factors pertaining to social safety in welfare states. It points to practices, to the more or less institutional frameworks that make them possible, and to public policies. To reconcile these different aspects, Jane Lewis has offered the following definition of care: care brings together “the activities and relations involved in meeting physical and emotional requirements of dependent adults and children” and “economic, social, and normative conditions [in which] caring [is] carried out.”84 It is necessary to show the different 84 Jane Lewis, Gender, Social Care and Welfare Sate Restructuring in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 8.

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sides of care, the richness of the term, and the manifold issues it conveys: the work/family balance, the treatment of dependency, various social safety net programs, the expression of power within gendered relationships and modern forms of patriarchy, the issue of direct and indirect costs. Moreover, the social and political impact of care is emphasized within societies that demand increasing autonomy on the part of their subjects, while vital, social and environmental risks have revealed a growing number of individuals faced with a brutal loss of autonomy – individuals for whom care is a way to restore their agency, to promote other life dynamics, or at least to maintain decent living conditions. Care is also a key concept in the new partitions between the public and the private, and it calls into question the historical organization of the domestic and productive spheres which has assigned care practices to a specific gender. When care is considered to be the sole concern of women, it is consistently associated with the private sphere, affectivity, and proximity. This naturalization hinders its recognition as a type of work. However, current ways of living have threatened this model and the whole ideology it conveys. Indeed, the increasing and persistent development of female professional activity is an obstacle to women’s traditional availability for care tasks. In a world where the demand for care has become increasingly important, women’s participation in the workforce, an aging population, and the fragmentation of the welfare state raise the question how can we organize care while taking into account the growing problem involved in considering it as a set of gendered practices, partly assigned to the private realm or to informal spheres of society?

II. – Caring within the family To consider care as a social issue requires that we acknowledge its connection to a sphere of relations considered to be private, grounded in our societies in a separation between civil and domestic society as well as in a repressed “sexual contract,” according to Carole Pateman’s very accurate expression.85 In other words, barriers between 85

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).

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the family and the professional world, mistakenly regarded as intangible, are the result of historical construction. Not only do these barriers subject women to men through reference to sexual difference, but they also allow men to choose a path, a journey, and an aspiration in life, while women have no choice but to preserve a domestic order imposed upon them. Women often still spend most of their lives within the basic social structure of the family, a space of cooperation in which individuals build a common life or lineage, maintain a name or a history. In general, the family is a site of conflict because it is a place where resources are shared, where people assert themselves, claim their rights, and ask to be loved. The family is a very intense type of society contained within a specific space, in which legal status and the duty of parents to care for their children, to love them, and to help them fulfill themselves coexist. 1. Parental care: care and concern. – In this account of the family realm, care is linked to attachment as a first point of entry in a socialized form of care. The infant’s relationship to the world places its relatives within the realm of care. Indeed, the infant can only develop properly within an emotional system in which those who provide care constitute a center of gravity. Winnicott has supported the thesis of the infant’s attachment to the care it receives: attachment is a basic need, a more or less successful securing process by which an extremely vulnerable being achieves its development. Concern for vulnerability and the availability of adequate care are constitutive of the family sphere. The point of analyzing attachment is to insist on the constitutive power of one’s immediate environment in the development of one’s identity, and on the extreme vulnerability of the infant who has to receive as much affection as possible. The child sees itself in the loving attitude of its parents, which can also, in certain cases, be an attitude of hatred. Attachment is grounded in the experience of the indistinctness or non-separation of the self. The possibility of development relies on the care-receiver’s absolute dependency on his or her care-givers.

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The genesis of the self is based on interdependency, non-differentiation, and the prominence of a protective and loving other. Such a conception of the other is important for human development. Of course, the other may also be violent or indifferent. Attachment can then backfire and compromise the development of that which requires attention and care. The development of one’s identity always begins in the realm of care, which is often the space of the family (opposite-sex, same-sex, or single parent families). At an early stage of their lives, children’s experience of themselves is grounded in their assimilation of their parents’ egos with which they identify through care.86 The loving relationship which may develop, or not – parents may also be unable to care, violent, indifferent, overbearing, etc.  –, is an essential one since, as Winnicott has argued, it extends into a more complex care he has called “concern.” What is care as a form of concern, a model for parental care that entails the elaboration of a separate self for the child, and a sense of responsibility for parents? “Concern refers to the fact that the individual cares, or minds, and both feels and accepts responsibility.”87 Caring cannot be conceived without the dimension of concern or preoccupation involved in the experience of responsibility. Accepting to feel responsible for another life means grasping the relationship of care in all its consequences, especially the possibility for an utterly dependent being to acquire independence. The infant becomes an established unit, increasingly aware of its environment. The construction of a sufficiently complex self relies on care and on the development of a capacity for concern that plays out in the parental bond. Thanks to the care it receives, the small child is able to experience “a relationship between three persons.”

See Donald  Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), pp. 15-16. 87 Donald Winnicott, “The Development of the Capacity for Concern,” lecture presented at the Topeka Psychoanalytic Society, 12 October 1962, in The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 6, eds. Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 86

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2. The coded space of parental love. – Care as an attachment, and further still as a form of concern, allows us to better understand the connection between care and love in highly asymmetrical relationships, which can nevertheless lead to reciprocity through one’s capacity for concern, or one’s attentiveness to the development of a vulnerable human being, considered as someone who can gain access to speech and independence, and thus as someone free to respond, or not, to the care they receive. The constitution of the self through care allows the expression of freedom, which may consist in the refusal to be cared for or in ambivalence towards care. The parent/child relationship develops within a family space which is socially constructed as a private and domestic space generally assigned to women. How could the loving bond linking parents to their children escape the social rules in which it unfolds, built on the marital model of the family? Ever since Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know, it is well-known that the hypothesis of sexual repression as related to the bourgeois order must always be set within the general framework of the discourse on sexuality that modern societies have developed since the 17th century. All forms of sexuality are constructed within a culture made up of an interweaving of norms fulfilling a need to know and to discipline humankind. Therefore, heterosexuality is no more natural than other sexualities: it is part of a theoretical apparatus aimed at elaborating a truth and establishing a difference between the normal and the pathological. The dictate of a “truth” of sexuality, the control over intimate lives, and the will to know how human beings deal with their sexuality are largely tied to the emergence of a new kind of connection between systems of alliance and sexuality in Western industrialized countries during the 18th century.88 The family then became the crux of a social system which introduced juridical and legal dimensions into the sexual mechanism, merging the economy of pleasure with alliances provided for by the law, such as that of marriage. Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 88

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By this account, the sexual contract, which implements the subordination of women to men through the former’s obligation to remain in the private sphere, plays a crucial role: the sexual divide constitutes a covenant between two parts of humanity which are no longer equal. It determines roles for women pertaining to care, education, and concern for others. Carole Pateman’s theses, which analyze theories of the civil contract in modern philosophy, are particularly enlightening with regards to the problematic role of women within these legal and political arrangements. Pateman has especially shown how contract theories, characterized by an original pact through which individuals leave the state of nature in order to create a just political order, omit to mention women. This great silence can be seen as a repression of that which lies behind the civil contract, namely the sexual contract. Sexual difference is at the heart of these theories. While the contract can be viewed as a model of free agreement, this agreement can only be concluded by men, since women are not born free but subjected to men. According to Pateman, while the classical theory of the social contract included the possibility of subversion and of freedom for all humans regardless of their qualities, it has led to a justification of gendered subjection disguised as a form of freedom: “Rather than undermining subordination, contract theorists justified modern civil subjection.”89 The conventions that underpin political law do not affect the two genders in the same way. Only men possess the attributes of free and equal human beings, and many contract theorists support the notion that the rights of men over women is grounded in nature. This sexual contract of subjection is at the same time subtly concealed: “The fact that ‘individuals’ are all of the same sex is never mentioned; attention is focused instead on the different conceptions of the masculine ‘individual’.”90 What materializes the absence of women’s freedom is the radical distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere, the first being declared irrelevant from the standpoint of political freedom. 89 90

Pateman, The Sexual Contract, p. 40. Ibid., p. 41.

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The family then adopts the marital model, rooted in the bonds expressed by the marriage contract. On the one hand, functions of production, reproduction, consumption, and residence are merged. On the other hand, the assignment of women to a highly-coded domestic sphere is materialized: the spatial mobility of women is reduced, with little circulation left between the private and public spheres, independence is stymied, and activities are limited to a space that is condemned to be socially invisible and secret and is designed to respect men’s civil freedom. The marital contract is a kind of work contract that turns the wife into a housekeeper and caregiver, without granting her any salary in exchange for her work. According to Carole Pateman, patriarchy in its modern form no longer relies on a natural fact of dependence on the paternal order or on reference to a paternal power that can be traced back to the biblical account of Genesis. Modern patriarchy is no longer grounded in the procreative power of the father. It is conventional, and conveyed by a contractual order in which the civil contract conceals another contract: the repressed sexual contract, which nonetheless remains operative thanks to a conception of the family that separates the private from the public sphere. This sexual contract is covered up by the construction of the “sentimental family” in which, according to Susan Moller Okin, female concern constitutes a new rationalization of women’s subordination among philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Kant.91 We may add that, within this divide, care falls into a domestic world organized around the wife’s contractual subjection, which involves carrying out an array of practices in the service of the head of the family, without this activity being compensated in return. Wifehood implies the accomplishment of crucial tasks, including those pertaining to care, or to a discreet yet expected concern for others. These aspects fully coexist with housekeeping tasks (cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, etc.). The role of women has undeniably Susan Moller Okin, “Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 11, (1982). 91

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undergone significant changes in many countries thanks to women’s massive entry into the professional world and their access to the same education as men, resulting in greater equality of opportunity between men and women. But a true equality of positions has yet to be achieved. Prejudice and relationships of dominance regarding women’s assignment to the private sphere are well alive, and women are still prey to guilt when they fail to assume the roles imposed on them. Therefore, a feminist approach to the family, as developed by Susan Moller Okin in Justice, Gender and Family, requires focusing on a democratic definition of the family, which means taking the necessary political steps to distribute power within this space where affection and authority are combined. A truly just future would take note of the vulnerability of women and children resulting from the patriarchal history of the heterosexual family. Our collective responsibility lies in the protection of others, and not in the promotion of the asymmetric vulnerability of relationships. Moreover, introducing the topic of justice within the realm of the family involves relieving its functioning of gender issues by implementing “the equal sharing by men and women of paid and unpaid work, of productive and reproductive labor. We must work towards a future in which all will be likely to choose this mode of life.”92 Freedom, for men and women alike, lies in the possibility to freely partake in all spheres of life. Currently, assuming important responsibilities within society generally prevents individuals from dedicating themselves to the raising of children. How could we better distribute family burdens, currently mainly ascribed to women, and organize the participation of all in care tasks, given the fact that productive labor often prevents one’s fulfillment within the private sphere? Achieving a world in which the various realms of life are shared requires transforming many of our institutions and implementing high-incentive public policies promoting these new ways of life. An ethics of care can contribute this as it Susan Moller  Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 171. 92

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pushes us to consider the informal space of care as a space that needs to be formalized and conventionalized according to other models than that of the sexual contract. In other words, as Joan Tronto has argued, it is a matter of shifting the boundaries between morals and politics. On the one hand, this means considering care as an ethics (related to feelings and situations grounded in others) rather than as a morality of a priori rules and principles, and, on the other hand, considering the public and the private spheres in a different way, highlighting the presence of the political within the private – something which is usually concealed or repressed in the name of mechanisms of domination of the masculine over the feminine. In short, the private is permeated by the political, by conventions and contracts that serve a restricted definition of civil freedom, elaborated within a traditional contract that ignored the presence of women, slaves, and servants. To put it another way, the private realm should not be confused with the realm of intimacy, which can be understood as all the relations that an individual decides to separate from the strictly social space in order to freely preserve and work out his or her experience personally. If intimacy means removing a share of oneself and one’s relations from the realm of common visibility, only free individuals in the sexual contract can in fact experience intimacy. Care brings our intimacy into question because it affects relationships in which the extreme vulnerability of some requires others to further penetrate the singularity of what constitutes them, and also because it is a site of confusion between the intimate and the private realms which results from the historical assignment of care to women. The ethics of care is a feminist ethics insofar as it debunks the mystifications of contract societies and of a public culture that serves men’s productivity: we must conceive the interdependency of care and of the productive sphere, change the rules of capitalism which exploits care on behalf of a repressed yet operative sexual contract, and not limit the definition of the family to its heterosexual model. Insisting on the duty to care within the family must happen without reference to gender, through the appropriation of what Winnicott has called concern, that which denotes parents’ “responsibility to love.”

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III. Care practices Care is not the only preoccupation of the basic social structure we call the family. It equally pertains to paid professional activities and volunteer work within associations, aid organizations, neighborhood communities, etc. The aim of an ethics of care is to analyze these care practices, with a particular focus on their professionalization. Furthermore, it appears that promoting a collective acknowledgment of practices by which we express care for others depends on a conception of togetherness, on a certain vision of the stages of life, on the examination of the role of dependency, and on a reflection on vulnerability. All of these issues are cast aside by neoliberal globalization which promotes the extension of commodification to human beings, to their bodies and minds, in accordance with a simplistic understanding of autonomy as individual performance and a definition of public policy whose key words are cost management and competition. As Virginia Held has argued in The Ethics of Care, we need to examine the fact that neoliberalism thrives on the expansion of the human services market, frantically conceived as the standardized privatization of public services: “In the United States, more and more activities that used to be seen as public services are being ‘privatized’ and ‘marketized’; health care, education, and the running of prisons are increasingly the province of for-profit corporations.”93 From the perspective of an ethics of care, the transformation of society entails both a feminist political struggle and a social critique of what has become an all-encompassing market economy. On the one hand, the aim is to encourage women’s emancipation and to take the necessary steps to free them from their nearly exclusive assumption of care tasks. On the other hand, it seems essential to reflect on asymmetrical relationships, often harboring covert forms of subjection, and to find the means to transform these relationships through

93

Held, The Ethics of Care, p. 107.

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a new understanding of the notion of “protection” that does not curtail the agency of those who are being protected. These two possibilities may be explored by reflecting on the delegation of care tasks and on caring professions in a broad sense when they deal with extreme dependency – activities which imply a caring attentiveness to relationships, rather than the sole irruption of the medical as a curing power. Care theories can be understood on two levels: as a particular doctrinal cluster – the various ethics of care – and as particular practical arrangements and modes of governance. I wish to expand here on the second point. 1. The place of care and the ideal of a gender-equal society – Caring and child-rearing practices occupy a strategic role in gender equality issues. The massive arrival of women in the workforce during the 1970s, followed by feminist demands for “equal pay for equal work” did not lead to an evening out of gendered differences. In most cases, women still bear the weight of what we call “double days” on their own: they have developed life strategies allowing them to articulate their work and the care they provide for dependent beings within the family, primarily children. The development of part-time jobs is very much linked to attempts to reconcile these objectives. As Dominique Méda and Hélène Périvier have argued, “The traditional workings of a society based on the model of a resource-providing man and a time-providing woman has not been revised nor reformed to apply to working women and men alike, apt to assume family charges and to face time needs. The issue of working times, and more generally that of social times, should have been the subject, for men and women alike, of a broad debate which never took place.”94 Despite the greater presence of women on the job market, men remain little involved in domestic and family tasks. While new paternal behaviors have emerged, especially when it comes to caring for Dominique  Méda and Hélène  Périvier, Le deuxième age de l’émancipation des femmes (Paris: Le Seuil, 2007), translation ours. 94

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dependent children, “new fathers” are still a minority and the assignment of the domestic family sphere to women is still very much ingrained in mentalities and life habits. Raising the issue of gender equality in the name of justice demands that we reflect on the allocation of care tasks. Caring for dependent others is still predominantly a women’s issue in our societies. In other cultures, the assignment of women to care is even more deeply rooted and imposed by a political and social order that considers them minor beings. Reflecting on care practices does not only mean unraveling the power mechanisms that define care as a women’s issue, and hence an issue of little social importance. It also means promoting more egalitarian care policies. The reference to a de-gendering of care practices can help foster what Méda and Périvier have called, “a profound economic and social reorganization.” The realm of care and the time dedicated to one’s family should enable equivalent social behaviors on the part of men and women. However, more often than not, women are the ones who take parttime jobs to keep a burdensome family life afloat, or who benefit from a parental allowance which often leads to unchosen unemployment. This social critique of early childhood care represents a project for an ordinary feminism capable of reminding us that, at the very core of our democratic societies, dramatic inequalities still persist between men and women, between well-off and modest households, between single-parent families and others. Care tasks are at the heart of these inequalities. Care activities, or the treatment of dependency, without which a society cannot sustain itself, are always ascribed to parts of the population more vulnerable than others, predominantly women. Excessively low wages place these women in situations of impoverishment: these women are housewives who experience unchosen unemployment – invisible to statistics –, individuals stripped of any social status because of the absence of legal work contracts as they are illegal immigrants, and who are exploited by families who delegate domestic and family tasks to them. Impoverished, with no stable professional activity or forced to take care of the children of others

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to the expense of their own, these women nevertheless assume a socially regulating role. Without them, the whole system through which dependency is handled would collapse. An ethics of care permits us to envision a mode of governance which values care practices and allows them to be as much a men’s as a women’s issue. Nancy Fraser has drawn up a political model of care to suit these requirements. She has argued that the sexual order imposed on society by the industrial capitalist era is waning. This order is characterized by a heterosexual nuclear family under the authority of a man who earns a salary upon which all the members of the family depend. Various changes, such as unemployment and precarity, a rise in divorces, the increasing recognition of gay couples, and women’s work have fractured this model, at least in a certain number of countries. We are now experiencing the demise of the old model of the industrial sexual order as we enter an era of postindustrial capitalism, Fraser has argued, in which several incomes and different types of work (full-time, part-time, etc.) constitute a less standardized and more indefinite family order. Former versions of the welfare state, very solemnly expressed in the wake of World War II, in which the family under the authority of the man was synonymous with universal employment, can no longer provide adequate social protections in the face of shifting ways of life and of a severe jobs crisis. We must now institute a post-industrial social state adjusted to the new conditions of the professional world, to new marital and sexual modes, all the while reaffirming the importance of equality and the necessity of social protection for all individuals. In the realm of gender equality, Nancy Fraser has suggested a new social and political model for care based on a reconceptualization of the division of work that is characteristic of the policies of capitalist countries.95 She has identified two approaches. The first rests on professionalized but poorly compensated care work entrusted to 95 Nancy Fraser, “After the Family Wage: a Postindustrial Thought Experiment,” in Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework, eds. Mary  Zimmerman, Jackie  Litt, and Chris Bose (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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institutions, and the second on a political program which considers every care task to be a proper form of work, turning it into a distinct and autonomous sphere. The first approach turns care into a livelihood just like any other, and involves social benefits designed to help working individuals delegate care activities. Though it does not place any gender difference at the center of its policies, since care professions often offer low wages, they are in actual fact often occupied by women who by far constitute the majority of poor workers throughout the world. The second political approach institutes a specific social benefit program for care-givers designed to compensate for the care they provide for children, the elderly, and for carrying out various domestic tasks. By this account, a part-time job can, with the help of social benefits, amount to a full-time job if caring tasks are taken into account. In general, such distributions only affect women, as men do not attach enough value to care to consider it as a part of their work. These two politics of care each have their downside: the first implies a money-distributing state which nevertheless sets care at the bottom of the social ladder – as a mere livelihood –, thereby reinforcing inequalities of gender, class, and race; the second emphasizes the acknowledgment of care, but also poses the risk of leaving it exclusively in the hands of women, so that, absence of any care education policies for men, care-related tasks remain a women’s issue. According to Fraser, we should therefore envision a third model that emphasizes the connection between work and care. In this scenario, work must become less central than it currently is in our societies, for women and especially for men, so that everyone may dedicate more time to caring: care would then be ingrained in the life of each and every human being. The idea is to present a critical theory of care and of the capitalist division of work, thereby proposing an ideal model of care that public policies should strive to achieve. Sharing both care tasks and professional activities supports the rejection of any separation of the spheres of life. 2. Care and the treatment of extreme dependency. – Different practical arrangements relating to care can result in different forms

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of governance. Are we satisfied with the way our societies handle the care of dependent elderly people, people with disabilities – including mental disabilities –, or people suffering from long-term illnesses? Further still, in aging European countries, what conception of old age should be conveyed, and how should we care for individuals at the end of their lives whose conditions require constant care? The treatment of dependency poses the issue of the loss of autonomy and of the impossibility for individuals to get by without help in their everyday lives. Moreover, it encourages us to keep a close eye on deeply asymmetrical relationships through which forms of domination and paternalism readily develop. Old age and disability lead us to reflect on certain often irreversible situations of dependency. But focusing on dependency demands that it be placed at the core of our political action, so that we may guard ourselves against fictitious or heroic conceptions of independence. This perspective may foster new visions of autonomy that are more in keeping with society’s diversity and may help us acknowledge the way in which dependent individuals bring forth a different world. In Love’s Labor, Eva Feder Kittay chose to ground her reflection on care in an account of her relationship with her daughter Sesha, who suffers from a severe mental disability diagnosed when she was just a few months old – at a time when her parents thought they were caring for a baby like any other. Kittay describes how such an experience unfolds, with the discovery of the difference and deficiency of a child hitherto considered normal. She explains how Sesha’s father and she chose to keep their daughter at home rather than in an institution. They organized Sesha’s care in a way that involved the recruitment of an in-home care-giver who was still taking care of Sesha at the age of 30. This poignant autobiographical reference leads Kittay to argue that, in Sesha’s case, it was important to start by understanding this particular child’s specific performativity, what she could do, what she could give emotionally, how she enjoyed listening to singing and music, rather than focusing on what she could not do, on the forms of intellectual and social life she would never achieve. It is only by taking into account her capacities that her disability could be

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addressed. The relationship between the care-receiver and the care-giver (both in child/parent relationships and in professional relationships, at home or in an institution) must be grounded in the idea that caring for, or supporting extremely dependent beings involves an ethical approach: supporting the disadvantaged means valuing their dignity and their capacity to live and establish a world that resonates with ours all the while displaying other norms. From the standpoint of an ethics of care, the principle of difference represents an acknowledgment of the singularities of the living against any standardization or idealization of individuals in society, who are expected to be fully able to meet all the demands of political and social adult life. Being a care-giver, in the framework of extreme dependency, requires setting oneself within the reach of the carereceiver and avoiding any position of superiority. It is important to introduce horizontality into these relations, which risk remaining essentially vertical if no attention is paid to the needs of these particularly vulnerable beings. While caring means setting oneself within the reach of a disabled individual’s capacities, it also means developing the capacities to provide care. But in order to provide such care, one must develop interpersonal relationships of care, leave enough time for satisfying relationships to emerge, and recognize the vast diversity of individual paths in life that can be narrated and unfurl in a continuous manner. This way of handling dependency entails what Serge Guérin has called a “dynamic of solidary support:”96 a form of social togetherness in which public policies go hand in hand with initiatives stemming from civil society. Informal solidarities, which represent a personalized form of care, must be acknowledged and combined with state-implemented policies: they foster possibilities for the development of social ties, provided public authorities continue to guarantee the necessary resources for care.

96 Serge Guérin, “Les révolutions de l’âge, un levier pour rajeunir l’action publique,” in Pour changer de civilisation, ed. Martine Aubry (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011), p. 231.

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Confronted with the necessity to give dependency its full dignity, should we not view interdependency as our duty to live out a shared destiny with all of the individuals who make up society, including those farthest removed from the current frame of reference of economic performance and personal achievement? Subscribing to this vision means calling into question the divides set up by our societies to satisfy the demands of productivism and the tyranny of the professional world, especially when it comes to the places to which we confine those with whom we do not know what to do: the elderly, those suffering from mental illness, the disabled, the sick, criminals. By this account, care is an ethics that challenges market society and the ideology of the performing/consuming individual: “a different voice is a voice of resistance,” as Gilligan has written.97 This voice of resistance helps acknowledge differences, support other life dynamics, and deal with concrete material inequalities to promote greater justice between human beings.

IV. – Social Work Social work may also be examined from the perspective of the ethics of care. Many people are currently demanding that care become a full-blown instrument of social policy making, paving the way for a caring democracy capable of reintroducing the most vulnerable lives into the social bond: lives which the excessive difficulty of social integration has led to depend on social benefits. Social workers are expected to protect individuals from marginalization, primarily by improving their well-being: they take care of adults, children, or entire families, and act in their favor if they cannot or no longer take care of themselves, or if they lack decent living conditions. Thus caring, assisting, and supporting are actions meant to express a benevolent care in support of those whom caregivers help achieve a better life, or simply to survive in a social world which has become incomprehensible and from which these individuGilligan, “Une voix différente. Un regard prospectif à partir du passé,” in Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du care, p. 20. 97

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als have in some way departed. Care is always practiced upon contact with vulnerability and life situations ranging from precarity and unemployment to exclusion and the bare necessity of survival. In Humanitarian Reason, Didier Fassin has argued that this type of work faces specific challenges brought on by the crisis of the welfare state and what appears as the personalization of social assistance. Social work must increasingly cope with the infusion of the state by a “humanitarian reason,” in which moral sentiments are supposed to justify operational policies. Didier Fassin has argued that public authorities have favored compassion over repression in their approach of social reality since the end of the 1980s. What appears is the development of a clinical approach of exclusion, parallel to the emergence of the category of “suffering” in social sciences, meant to better account for experiences linked to unemployment and precarity. This “humanitarian reason” has pervaded the way we treat social issues, down to the social workers themselves: “Thus it was established, first, that the social could make people suffer without it becoming a pathology, and second, that this suffering affected both users and providers of services.”98 The social bond is an object of suffering: this new reality results in the development of a clinical psychosocial approach. In Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, Guillaume le Blanc has described the conditions of a clinical approach to care, in which support for lives impoverished by professional situations goes hand in hand with the art of not governing these lives too much.99 Now more than ever, the loss of social bearings resulting from exclusion calls for an ethics of care. It can be combined with analyses of social suffering, thus examining the increasing exposure of the intimacy of people whose subjectivity is confronted with impossibilities to speak or act. It leads to a vision of social work based on the distress and the unmet needs of these subjects, all the while protecting them from abuses of power or the manipulation of their life 98 Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), p. 35. 99 Guillaume le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires (Paris: Le Seuil, 2007), p. 256.

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stories. At the same time, in its proximity to a clinical approach, care denounces the insufficiency of contractual, procedural, and often bureaucratic assistance, which acknowledges people’s dependence on social action and on the disappearance of social ties without trying to grasp the singularity of these paths in life and how they can be repaired. Introducing singularity and taking into account narratives and experiences is only relevant if we take the necessary steps to implement adequate forms of support, helping to restore individuals’ capacity to act and speak freely. As opposed to an impersonal social approach, unmindful of individuals and their paths in life, care is a type of support that allows individuals to restore a connection with themselves and with others by letting them reacquire self-esteem, a desire to act and to be. Care partakes of what Didier Vrancken has called a “new protectional order,”100 pertaining both to outside support and to individuals’ own capacities, their vulnerability and performativity. However, nothing in the making of public policy is ever definite. The sacred conception of the political tied to a voluntarist conception of citizens who settle on a contract designed to found the social order is still very much present in our notion of the state. At the same time, without encouraging any transformation of the political and social order, the state introduces psychology, a clinical social approach, and biographical narratives into its public policies. The treatment of social reality is based on fragmented practices deprived of political reflection. According to Vrancken, the biographical order, the recognition of plural identities and of extreme vulnerabilities, through which care offers a possible restoration of one’s capacities, are too much infused with indecision, contradiction, and manipulation. We could add that these makeshift social policies, elaborated in close connection with our life paths and trajectories, are nothing Didier Vrancken, Le Nouvel ordre protectionnel (Lyon: Parangon/Vs, 2010), introduction and chapter 1. 100

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more than an exemplification of the biopolitics described by Michel Foucault:101 the tight grasp of the authorities over our lives and bodies in an all-encompassing society of control. However, examining social policies within the framework of an ethics of care should not lead to biopolitics but to radical transformations of the social state. It requires that we abandon the dominant ideology of self-enterprising individuals who, when they fail, can morph into subjects who narrate their own experience. Care is not represented by an autobiographical approach or a form of social biography, but lies in the possibility to be cared for in accordance with one’s needs and capacities so as to regain access to social expression. By this account, social workers are not the agents of a state that is using them to maintain the social bond by sprinkling various types of aid, they are not representatives of a “humanitarian reason,” nor benevolent actors in a troubled social world. They are not here to monitor every misstep committed by those who benefit from social assistance. They are professionals who, throughout their professional experience and training, develop competences, promote values, and act to improve the social well-being of vulnerable populations largely left in their care. Social workers work toward the reinforcement of the social bond and strive to establish relations of trust with those in their charge. Nowadays, social work contains conflicting logics: a logic of management (with the risks pertaining to control), a logic of subjective narratives, and a logic of project-making (which favors social action over assistance102). But these logics leave little room for care work, either reduced to a naive benevolence toward others or considered overly entangled in particular or dyadic relationships. They leave aside what is at the very core of an ethics of care: care for the increasingly wide-ranging vulnerability affecting not only the individuals who depend on social welfare but also the social workers themselves 101 Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, last chapter, and Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003), last lecture. 102 Michel Autès, Les paradoxes du travail social (2nd edition, Paris: Dunod, 2004).

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(who are on the front line when it comes to dealing with the different social margins, confronted with the erosion and ineffectiveness of management policies that are blind to social justice). The ethics of care helps us free ourselves from the current contradiction between the exercise of a humanitarian reason and the procedures by which we control and shame populations in need. Social workers’ competence lies in an “art of the relation”103 made up of a combination of techniques (cleaning, conducting group activities, etc.) and social skills (finding the proper distance: neither too close nor too far). This competence must yield a form of freedom for the care-receiver (if only the minimal freedom of resisting or continuing to consider oneself on the margins of society). Promoting this form of interdependence and this mediated form of reciprocity, which takes into account patterns of vulnerability and dignity, means instituting an ethics of care. The ethics of care involves a project for a decent society similar to that envisioned by Avishai Margalit: “A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people.”104 Margalit has argued that, whereas a civilized society rests on pacified relationships between individuals and attaches great importance to interpersonal relationships, a decent society mobilizes a more archaic level of social reality: that of institutions. The idea is not to promote a social model grounded in a humanitarian and compassionate conception of the other, but to structure the social bond so that each human being may consider every other person as a human being rather than as an inferior (colonialism) or invisible being (migrants, illegal workers). While the ethics of care can help us reflect on social work through concrete care for human lives, it should not let us forget that the objective of a social state is to open the way for the possibility of leading non-demeaning lives in general: this involves learning to read and write, as well as acquiring fundamental technical skills, having Ibid., pp. 237-239. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 1. 103 104

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access to health care, to an income, to decent housing, and to common goods. The ethics of care can serve as a basis for public policies, provided that it is not confined to moral sentiment and to the glorification of proximity as opposed to distance. Why should we introduce care in the social field? It helps promote a conception of vulnerable social individuals who possess their own agency. While the welfare state relies on service provider individuals whose identity depends on their belonging to the professional world, a state inspired by care takes every individual into account, including the most invisible populations who currently fall outside the range of standard welfare provisions. A politics of care starts by making the infra-political political.

V. A caring democracy in France Is the French government inspired by care and ready to introduce care in the social field? Beyond the various practical arrangements through which a politics of care can be envisaged in situations related to early childhood, disability, long-term illness, old age, and social urgency, the type of democracy which care may foster in a country like France could follow two directions. The first direction rests on the notion that politics cannot ignore the social prospect of a type of care capable of bringing back into the social bond populations who have been rendered invisible or stigmatized (as was the case in France for Roma during the summer of 2010). The issue is then to find the means to restore their agency by offering support for these disdained and impoverished lives. Politics consists in promoting, through state-funded social work and local policies, institutional forms of support for vulnerable people. This means that the enforcement of rights is not enough if it is not completed with the necessary resources to revive the autonomy of these individuals, as well as negotiations between public authorities and these populations (on behalf of a democracy of equal voices, which implies that these populations also respect the rules of the Republic). Care is a redistribution principle whose aim is to turn forced dependence into accepted interdependence. When the

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French government in 2015 terminated the payment of family allowance for the better-off, ending a universal system that had lasted for over 70 years, this could be considered as a politics of care. It is important to protect the most vulnerable people and it is right that wealthier people should contribute more to the welfare system. But this move was presented by President François Hollande as a way to save 700 million euro per year, as part of efforts to reduce the budget deficit to levels set by the European Union. This means that the social field is totally dependent on the rules of neoliberalism. A caring democracy would imply engaging in real social reforms, coherent public policies for people who need to be supported, not only because this complies with the diktat of economic principles. The second direction is based on the promotion of a new mindset for public policies which claims that reviving a productive economy and focusing on a conception of well-being reduced to growth rates is not enough. Implementing a politics of care means granting new rights: the right to receive care and the right to be fully recognized in a relationship turned toward others, paving the way for a truly functioning society. Further still, we must go against the current mindset of evaluation inspired by private management, which favors the quantitative over the qualitative and privileges figures over the actual skills of working men and women. We may then promote a conception of public service based on actual uses, on their democratization, and on preexisting practices across the national territory. This involves expanding the public allocation of resources to associations, aid agencies, and citizen participation bodies in the general interest. Today, the French welfare system is in danger. President Emmanuel Macron has explained that the system is wasteful, and he has urged reform. He has promised to give France a welfare system fit for the twenty-first century. During his second state-of-the nation address from Versailles in 2018, he presented himself as a “caring protector”. But for a part of the French people, he is the “president of the rich”. Will France be able to transform the social world against the power-

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ful laws of social reproduction described by sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu? Confronted with an increasingly vertical and authoritarian state, citizens need public policies attentive to the expression of their agency, both collectively and individually. Public services must return to a form of proximity with regard to their various practices, instead of being devastated by diktats from on high and by expensive organizational modes resulting from perpetual deconstruction and reconstruction that is contrary to the interests of its very agents.105 A caring state cannot do without the civil society, understood in all its multiplicity. Starting from our differences without giving up on the construction of a common world means giving society its creative power back, thereby avoiding the risks of a standardized society stifled by norms and rules of social reproduction. The ethics of care aims at transforming the social world, at inventing a pluralistic society against a status-based society. Its aim is to promote real emancipation in these times of crisis and segregation.

Laurent Bonelli and Willy Pelletier, eds., L’État démantelé (Paris, La Découverte, 2010), especially “Le nouveau management public.” 105

Conclusion

The ethics of care, both as “caring about” and as “caring for,” deconstructs the possibility of a collective master narrative involving each and every individual in an impersonal and indiscriminate way. The assertion of our freedoms and of a spirit of autonomy must be reassessed in the analysis of forms of vulnerability and the injustice they entail in an interdependent world. Moreover, the aim of care is to focus on the realm of the ordinary and on the concrete relational subjects that we are. An ethics of care can also be a form of politics by guarding us against the simultaneously market-driven and bureaucratic drift of our societies. By collectively acknowledging the need to interact with other concrete beings, by supporting the political implementation of more social justice, it constitutes an alternative to globalized and standardized neoliberalism which leaves a growing number of people behind. Caring for those who cope with vulnerability means taking the necessary steps to practice a form of distribution of wealth and power that goes against all types of oligarchy, and concretely instituting a shared world between men and women, the rich and the poor, migrants and nationals, the North and the South. Developing an ethics of care helps to reaffirm the idea that no vision of society can involve only individuals who thrive on individual performance, money, and power. It must also consider different paths in life which express a desire for other forms of accomplishment. It must allow for support for individuals in the name of a

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collective and individual well-being, and for the consideration of both subjects of rights and subjects of needs. The ethics of care leads to a politics of care, and to a reform of the social state which can result in the reinforcement of public policies in the face of current transformations.

References Key Texts Baier, Annette, Moral Prejudices. Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). Bourgault, Sophie, and Julie Perreault, Le care. Ethique féministe actuelle (Montréal: les editions du remue-ménage, 2015) Brugère, Fabienne, Le sexe de la sollicitude (Paris, Le Seuil, 2008). Collins, Stephanie, The Core of Care Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Ferrarese, Estelle, La fragilité du souci des autres (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2018) Fineman, Martha A., and Anna Grear, ed., Vulnerability. Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013). Fraser, Nancy, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”, in New Left Review (100, JulyAugust 2016). Garrau, Marie, and Alice le Goff, Care, justice et dépendance (Paris: PUF, 2010). Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1982). Heijst, Annelies van, Professional Loving Care. An Ethical View of the Healthcare Sector (Peeters, 2011) Held, Virginia, ed., Justice and Care (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1995). – The Ethics of Care (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Kittay, Eva Feder, Love’s Labor. Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (New York, London: Routledge, 1999). Krebs, Angelina, Arbeit und Liebe. Die philosophischen Grundlagen sozialer Gerechtigkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). Laugier, Sandra, and Patricia Paperman, Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2005). Leget, Carlo, Chris Gastmans, and Marian Verkerk ed., Care, Compassion and Recognition: An Ethical Discussion (Peeters, 2011). Molinier, Pascale, Le Care monde (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2018). Noddings, Nel, Caring. A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). Nurock, Vanessa, ed., Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du care (Paris: PUF, 2010). Okin, Susan Moller, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York, Basic Books, 1989). Paperman, Patricia, Care et sentiments (Paris: PUF, 2013). Pulcini, Elena, and Sophie Bourgault ed., Cura ed emozioni (Bologna: il Mulino, 2018). Robinson, Fiona, Globalizing Care. Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations (Colorado, Oxford: Westview Press, 1999).

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The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Tronto, Joan, Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York, London: Routledge, 1993). Caring Democracy. Markets, Equality, and Justice (New York, London: New York University Press, 2013).

Special issues on care in French journals “Les nouvelles figures du soin.” Esprit (January 2006) and “La vie dans le grand âge.” Esprit (July 2010). “Féminin invisible : la question du soin.” Pratiques. Les cahiers de la médecine utopique (January 2011). “Le care : entre transactions familiales et économie des services.” Revue française de socio-économie (2nd sem. 2008). “L’amour des autres. Care, compassion et humanitarisme.” Revue du MAUSS, vol. 31 (2nd sem. 2008).

Fabienne Brugère is currently researching care ethics and politics, hospitality, and the way artists develop the themes of migration and gender in an attempt to connect logos and iconos. More generally, her main subjects are the philosophy of art, and ethical and political philosophy. After working as a professor at Bordeaux-Montaigne University, she has been a professor at Paris 8 University since September 2014. She is a director of the LLCP (Laboratoire des logiques contemporaines de la philosophie) philosophy research team. She is an editor of the « Diagnostics » series by Éditions Le Bord de l’eau (with Guillaume le Blanc), and of the « Perspectives du care » series by ENS Éditions (with Claude Gautier), and is a member of the editorial board of Esprit. She has been an invited professor at the Universities of Hamburg and Munich in Germany, and Laval in Quebec. She has published on liberalism, art, taste, and beauty, and on philosophers such as Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, Kant, Foucault, and Judith Butler. Her three key publications are: L’expérience de la beauté, Vrin, 2006; L’éthique du care, PUF, 2011; La politique de l’individu, Seuil/ La République des idées, 2013. She has recently published La fin de l’hospitalité, Flammarion, 2017, with Guillaume le Blanc.

Ethics of Care

1. C. Leget, C. Gastmans, M. Verkerk (eds.), Care, Compassion and Recognition: An Ethical Discussion, 2011, IV-250 p. 2. A. van Heijst, Professional Loving Care. An Ethical View of the Healthcare Sector, 2011, VI-212 p. 3. G. Olthuis, H. Kohlen, J. Heier (eds.), Moral Boundaries Redrawn. The Significance of Joan Tronto’s Argument for Political Theory, Professional Ethics, and Care as Practice, 2014, IV-232 p. 4. I. van Nistelrooij, Sacrifice. A Care-Ethical Reappraisal of Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice, 2015, X-302 p. 5. R.J. Lynch, Care: An Analysis, 2016, X-305 p. 6. S. Bourgault, E. Pulcini (eds.), Emotions and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2018, VI-262 p. 7. F. Brugère, Care Ethics, forthcoming