Ethics of Care

Nursing Ethics has published several pleas for care ethics and/or relationality as the most promising ethical foundation for midwifery philosophy and practice. In this article, we stand by these calls, contributing to them with the identification of the structural form of violence that a care ethical relational approach to reproductive care is up against: that of "maternal separation". Confronted with reproductive and obstetric violence globally, we show that a hegemonic racialized, instrumentalized, and individualized conception of pregnancy is responsible for a severance of relationalities that are essential to safe reproductive care: (1) the relation between the person and their child or reproductive capabilities; and (2) the relation between the pregnant person and their community of care. We pinpoint a separation of the maternal relation in at least two discursive domains, namely, the juridical-political and the ethical-existential. Consequently, we plea for a radical re-imagination of maternal relationality, envisioning what care ethical midwifery, including abortion care, could be.

Inspired by classic feminist scholarship as well as the more recent developments
in critical theory, this essay explores the limits of fictional depictions of female
characters deemed ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’, who resist the oppressive systems of representation
and try – with varying levels of success– to function outside the parameters of heteronormative,
non- neurodiverse, patriarchal structures. The aim of my presentation is
to discuss the possibility of challenging and escaping the overlapping discriminatory
apparatuses of ableism, carnism, and sexism, and representing such a scenario in literary
fiction. I use the example of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of
the Dead (2018). Laura Restrepo’s Delirium (2008), in turn, will serve as an example of
fiction in which the idea of madness is related to political reality and is imposed on the
character (in contrast to self- recognition) who never gains a clear voice. In both examples,
femininity and madness are interchangeable, albeit in different ways: one with an aim of
empowerment (Drive Your Plow), the other with an end of reducing the character to the
position of the silent other (Delirium). What emerges from this contrast is a multifaceted
representation of the fictional madness which can be used to either empower or demean,
and thus it shows the bipolar understanding of femininity in fiction and in culture.

This article explores the temporal entanglements of care and precarity in Vietnam by unpacking the condition of “hectic slowness” experienced by mothers who sell food on Facebook against the widespread fear of dietary intoxication. Unlike the common association of “slowness” with an absence of activity, these trader-caregivers’ experience of “slowness” is defined by an overwhelming pressure of childcaring chores, casualized jobs, and intensified insecurities. At the center of this frantic inescapability is the caregiving “heart” [tâm] in the digital race, when a mother carries multiplied burdens while trying to move forward at the screen scrolling speed. Young mothers’ hectic slowness, however, is wired into an alternative temporality of the grandmothers, who effectively offer their care but remain largely out-of-sync with both the digital race and the stigma of “backwardness.” The continuities and mutations of precarized care across generations prove the need to learn from the long history of care agencies and vulnerabilities on the ground of the Global South.

Abstract
As John Stephens asserts in “Retelling stories across time and cultures”, few retellings are a simple replica of the previous textual layer on which they rely. Shaped by well-known stories, her social and feminist preoccupations and her preferred textual mode, poetry, Mistral subverts four cautionary tales. In this article I engage in a comparative reading of Gabriela Mistral’s poetic retellings of Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. These poetic appropriations were composed between 1924 and 1928, revealing Mistral’s avant guard understanding of children’s rights and, particularly, girls’ undermined position in society. I contend that far from a romanticized idea of childhood, Mistral’s poems reproach child labor, adult neglect, abuse and abandonment, revealing the poet’s ethics of care and radical understanding of children’s status, especially that of Latin American girls’ in early XXth century. Besides, by exposing previous layers of orality, by changing the narrative mode into poetry, by revealing the multilayered cultural compost on which these retellings depend, Mistral appropriates these tales to make them culturally relevant for Latin American girlhoods.
Key Words: Fairy tales, Gabriela Mistral, retellings, picture book

La référence à la personne vulnérable s’inscrit dans l’évolution conceptuelle du droit international à partir des deux guerres mondiales sur la place de l’individu et sa protection. L’issue de la guerre froide permet une réflexion nouvelle sur la théorie de la sécurité internationale, désormais axée sur l’individu. La notion de personne vulnérable constitue l’aboutissement actuel de cette évolution. Elle interroge sur la façon dont le droit international parvient à s’en saisir et sur les conséquences de cette appropriation.
Si la vulnérabilité qualifie aujourd’hui des objets disparates (Etat, zone rurale, système informatique, espèce animale), une étude centrée sur la personne physique permet de confronter à la sphère juridique internationale la dimension ontologique de la vulnérabilité de la personne, dont l’étude est issue des sciences humaines. Le droit international parvient-il à protéger l’individu en tenant compte de sa complexité particulière, mise en lumière par la référence à sa vulnérabilité ? A cet égard, le fait que le recours à la notion par le droit international puisse devenir un facteur de vulnérabilité de l’individu justifiait une étude centrée sur celui-ci.
Cette étude nécessitait de retenir une définition la plus précise possible de ce que recouvre la notion de personne vulnérable. Or, c’est précisément son caractère flou qui constitue son intérêt juridique : son utilisation vise à apporter une protection là où elle est absente ou lacunaire. Le danger, qu’on semble d’ailleurs observer actuellement, est alors un emploi exponentiel et inconsidéré de la notion, qui nuit à son efficacité. Pour conserver son effectivité – d’ailleurs en construction –, la notion nécessite d’être encadrée.

La démarche analytique s’est organisée en deux temps.
Le premier objectif consistait à déterminer la signification de la notion, d’un point de vue conceptuel et d’un point de vue pratique. Qu’est ce qu’une personne vulnérable en droit international et comment l’identifie-t-on concrètement ? Une définition matérielle a ainsi été dégagée : la personne vulnérable désigne la personne dont la faiblesse particulière la prédispose à la réalisation d’un risque. La notion se définit par la corrélation de deux critères permanents : sa faiblesse particulière et le risque qui pèse en conséquence sur elle. Ces critères indispensables à la qualification juridique sont cependant variables en eux-mêmes : tant la faiblesse que le risque peuvent adopter des formes nombreuses, et une sélection est alors nécessaire. En l’absence de statut, aucun régime juridique déterminé ne peut être systématiquement appliqué aux personnes identifiées comme telles. Le traitement juridique de la personne vulnérable est donc nécessairement contingent.
Le second objectif consistait ainsi à étudier le traitement accordé à cette personne à travers les moyens de protection dont dispose l’ordre juridique international, mais aussi à questionner plus globalement la capacité du droit international contemporain à assurer la protection de la personne vulnérable dans la complexité qu’implique cette notion.
La personne vulnérable suppose une extension du champ d’application du droit international. Se pose alors la question de la capacité de celui-ci à assurer une protection par hypothèse sans cesse renouvelée. L’utilisation de cette notion soulève en réalité certains dangers pour la structure, voire la légitimité du droit international. Ces questionnements poussent à une réflexion sur les soubassements de la protection juridique de l’individu. La vulnérabilité est en effet une donnée complexe qui suppose de repenser les concepts d’égalité, d’autonomie, mais aussi d’intégrer la thématique de l’interdépendance entre les personnes. C’est pourquoi la recherche d’une protection effective invite à le replacer dans un cadre théorique différent. L’étude invite à adopter comme cadre une éthique du care, dans la mesure où le care, issu des sciences sociales, prend précisément pour fondement ce constat de vulnérabilité.

For more than two decades Islamic veils, niqabs, and burkinis have been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal regulations in many Western countries, especially in Europe, and feminists have been actively engaged on both sides of the debates: defending ardently strict prohibitions to ensure Muslim women’s emancipation, or, by contrast, promoting accommodation in the name of women’s religious agency and a more inclusive feminist movement. These recent developments have unfolded in a context of rising right-wing populism in Europe and have fueled “femonationalism,” that is, the instrumentalization of women’s rights for xenophobic agendas. This book explores this contemporary troubled context for feminism, its current divisions, and its future. It investigates how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectionality politics, and the feminist collective subject, and how feminists have been enrolled in the femonationalist project or, conversely, have resisted it in two contexts: France and Quebec. It provides new empirical data on contemporary feminist activists, as well as a critical normative argument about the subject and future of feminism. It makes a contribution to intersectionality theory by reflecting on the dynamics of convergence and difference between race and religion. At the normative level, the book provides an original addition to vivid debates in feminist political theory and philosophy on the subject of feminism. It argues that feminism is better understood not as centered around an identity—women— but around what it calls a feminist ethic of responsibility, which foregrounds a pragmatist moral approach to the feminist project.

E se la singolarità prendesse forma nel trasgredire, nel deviare, nel trascendere, nell’esprimersi? E se all’origine ci fosse la necessità di far fronte all’imprevisto, all’esperienza di una crisi radicale che porta a uscire al di fuori di sé, fino ad arrivare a viversi come una sorpresa? Con «singolarità» Cusinato intende il risultato d’un processo creativo d’individuazione che si concretizza in una forma espressiva unica e irripetibile. Ciò che caratterizza la singolarità non è dunque l’identità d’una sostanza, ma l’unicità d’un percorso espressivo. E tale unicità si costituisce in una conversione periagogica del posizionamento nel mondo che porta a far breccia sugli orizzonti del senso comune, fino a inaugurare un nuovo inizio. Una singolarità può essere un’opera d’arte, un libro, una poesia, un gesto, un evento, una persona.
È a partire da questo intreccio fra singolarità, crisi e autotrascendimento (non dal mondo, ma come diverso modo di posizionarsi nel mondo) che Cusinato delinea una nuova fenomenologia della persona: la persona non è un «centro spirituale» che s’incarna in un corpo e neppure una continuità di stati della coscienza o un’unità assembleare. La persona è piuttosto un ordine del sentire unico e inconfondibile che facendosi contagiare dalla testimonianza maieutica di un'alterità viola la propria chiusura operativa. È un sistema non autopoietico che opera sostituendo il paradigma immunitario con quello del prendersi cura del mondo. La crisi del proprio orizzonte d’intrascendenza non è un evento patologico da neutralizzare, ma ciò che permette l’apertura al mondo. Nella persona la fame di nascere (la fame propria di un vivente che non finisce mai di nascere) si fonde così con la germinazione del desiderio, dal latino "de-sidera" inteso come de-costellazione del destino, che dà forma alla propria entratura excentricità nel mondo.

In a time when the “palimpsest” of ecocriticism is being constantly enriched, and that a “third wave” (Slovic, Adamson) is largely consolidating, it is more and more compelling to re-address the question about the human. 
“Human” is here conceived both as a general category and as an individual: deconstructing the idea of  humanity-qua-normality is in fact a way to question the oppositions between culture and nature, domesticated and wild, center and periphery.
By placing the focus of the dualism not outside, but inside the human being, ecocriticism can contribute to a critical reflection on humanism, in which the category of radical otherness as an attribute of the human plays a pivotal role.
Issues such as madness or disability, for example, both radically challenge and provoke the very idea of human, regardless of social contexts, of race, religion or ethnic group. Madness and disability create in fact a "wilderness zone" inside the tamed area of normality, of humanity-qua-normality, of human as a norm and a measure of itself. Placing the question of otherness within the taxonomy of the human subject, madness and disability introduce a radical fracture in this taxonomy, showing that “the other” is not only nature (as the other-than-human), but it can be the human itself.
Calvino's short novel The Watcher (a political story set in a hospital for mentally and physically disabled) is interesting in this respect. Questioning human “normality,” it questions in fact the totalizing ideology of historismus and linear progress, introducing an idea that could be labelled a “dark enlightenment,” or, an enlightenment based on the awareness of reason’s “tragic” limits and unpredictability rather than on reason’s glory.
I will take this novel as an occasion to reflect on the current trends of ecocriticism and the possible development toward an ecological form of humanism.

In an age where issues like climate change and the unintended consequences of technological innovation are high on the ethical and political agenda, questions about the nature and extent of our responsibilities to future generations have never been more important, yet simultaneously so difficult to answer. This book takes a unique approach to the problem by drawing on diverse traditions of thinking about care (including developmental psychology, phenomenology and feminist ethics) to explore the nature and meaning of our relationship with the future. Demonstrating that many influential perspectives on intergenerational ethics, including positions advanced by John Rawls, Brian Barry, and Ulrich Beck are undermined by problems relating to uncertainty, it shows that an approach based on care ethics can confront the uncertain future successfully and give a viable account of the nature and scope of future-oriented responsibilities.

By proposing the “dramaturgy of caring” as a philosophical framework, this essay elaborates on how dramaturgy and care ethics mutually inform each other, especially in regards to Performance Philosophy and criticism. To speak of caring as a dramaturgical structure foregrounds how the consolidation of meaning depends as much upon particular sequences of experience and thought over time, as it does upon seemingly spontaneous moments of judgment. To speak of dramaturgy as a structure of caring highlights how the organization of aesthetic experience depends upon dynamic negotiations between knowing and not knowing that constitute recognition.

This paper addresses the persistent philosophical problem posed by the amoralist-one who eschews moral values-by drawing on complementary resources within phenomenology and care ethics. How is it that the amoralist can reject ethical injunctions that serve the general good and be unpersuaded by ethical intuitions that for most would require neither explanation nor justification? And more generally, what is the basis for ethical motivation? Why is it that we can care for others? What are the underpinning ontological structures that are able to support an ethics of care? To respond to these questions, I draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty, focusing specifically on his analyses of perceptual attention. What is the nature and quality of perceptual attention that underwrite our capacities or incapacities for care? I proceed in dialogue with a range of philosophers attuned to the compelling nature of care, some who have also drawn on Merleau-Ponty and others who have examined the roots of an ethics of care inspired or incited by other thinkers.

L’étude se propose d’examiner l’apport de la pensée du care à la question environnementale. Les enjeux environnementaux contemporains sont devenus globaux et suggèrent sur le plan éthique un mode de vie délibérément plus sobre. Une éthique du soin, fondée sur la relation à l’autre et la réponse adéquate à ses besoins, ne semble à première vue pas adaptée à de tels enjeux, contrairement à l’ambition affichée de l’éthique environnementale avec l’idée d’une sobriété volontaire. Toutefois, en décelant au fondement du care une vertu morale de la relation à autrui – la vigilance – envisagée à partir de la diversité de ses apparitions (l’homme, l’animal, la plante, le paysage, etc. ), l’éthique du soin apparaît finalement complémentaire à une éthique environnementale non anthropocentrée. Elle invite, en effet, à s’interroger sur les conditions éthiques de la reconnaissance des besoins d’autrui et de la responsabilité. Elle permet de comprendre ainsi que la sobriété volontaire, sans être une vertu, n’en a pas moins une réelle signification morale.

This paper sets out to present a connection between the ethics of care and ordinary language philosophy as represented by Stanley Cavell ; and thus to find in ordinary language philosophy (OLP), often considered to be disconnected from gender issues (except through speech act theory), resources for a reformulation of what for me is at stake in feminism: the inclusion and empowerment of women's voices and expressiveness and attention to their experiences. And to show Cavell's work  on popular cuture (Hollywood comedies of remariage, and melodrama)  as relevant to feminism.

The issue of ethics is gaining increasing attention in both academic and public debates. For instance, ethics is at the core of the discussions of multiple crises the world is facing; academics are more and more concerned of ethics and politics of doing research; and consumers, citizens and business people encounter complex ethical dilemmas in their everyday life. In this situation, there is a pressing need to develop novel forms of ethics that capture these phenomena and to provide alternative ethical foundations for co-existing in our world.
The purpose of this seminar is to enable and foster the multidisciplinary debate on the issue of ethics as a research topic and as a mode of living in the world, both as academics and as citizens. Living in the world not only refers to human co-existence, but also involves living with various forms of non-human entities – e.g. animals, plants, things, matter, houses, soil, water, air – and in various places and spaces from homes to cities, forests and beyond. Ethical everyday life with these human and non-human relations might require that we call into question the things and beliefs that we take for granted right now.

Le terme de management présente cette particularité d’apparaître aux francophones que nous sommes comme un anglicisme, alors qu’en réalité, il tire son origine de la langue française. Parti du français vers l’anglais, il nous est revenu pour désigner ce que certains nomment la gestion des ressources humaines et qu’il serait peut-être plus judicieux d’appeler l’art de diriger et d’accompagner les hommes au travail. Ce terme présente une telle polysémie qu’il peut aussi bien évoquer le dressage des animaux – la ménagerie – que l’administration domestique – la gestion du ménage. D’un côté, il évoque l’exercice d’une autorité qui n’est pas nécessairement bienveillante et qui laisse peu de place à l’initiative et à la liberté, de l’autre, il évoque une forme d’administration – la gestion – qui apparaît comme relevant plus de la prise en considération de données quantitatives que du souci de la qualité de vie des êtres humains dans une organisation à l’intérieur de laquelle ils ont à accomplir des tâches qu’ils n’ont pas toujours le désir d’effectuer.
Envisagé sous cet angle, le management peut être interprété comme une entreprise de manipulation des consciences et des désirs humains dans le but de faire travailler des hommes qui n’en ont pas toujours le désir. Il peut procéder d’une autorité contraignante ou de processus plus insidieux donnant à ceux sur qui il s’exerce l’illusion qu’ils exécutent de bon gré ce qu’en réalité, il préférerait ne pas avoir à faire. Cette description peut paraître caricaturale, néanmoins, même si elle ne correspond pas toujours à la réalité, elle renvoie à une représentation du management présente dans l’esprit d’un grand nombre de nos contemporains.
Or, « manager » peut prendre une toute autre signification. Si ce terme évoque la ménagerie et la gestion du ménage, il se trouve aussi en rapport avec le verbe « ménager » qui peut également signifier « prendre soin de ».
La gestion semble plus concerner l’administration des choses que le gouvernement des hommes, c’est pourquoi le management semble relever d’une pratique d’une toute autre nature. Aussi, est-il possible de développer une nouvelle conception du management envisagé comme l’art de faire entrer en relation des personnes pour les faire travailler ensemble (Mintzberg, 2005) avec la conscience qu’il n’est pas nécessaire pour être efficace de se forger une âme d’acier dans un monde où ne règne qu’une impitoyable concurrence. Bien au contraire, il apparaît que manager devrait plutôt signifier aujourd’hui se percevoir comme un homme vulnérable accompagnant et dirigeant d’autres hommes vulnérables, c’est-à-dire qui dépendent les uns des autres pour se rendre utiles socialement.
C’est précisément sur cette notion de dépendance qu’il importe d’insister aujourd’hui pour proposer une nouvelle approche du management et des pratiques managériales s’inspirant principalement des apports des éthiques du care et plaçant au cœur même des relations de travail la notion de vulnérabilité.
En effet, les relations humaines dans le monde du travail, si elles ne sont pas vécues sur le seul mode de la sujétion du subordonné à son supérieur, sont le plus souvent réduites à une relation contractuelle entre l’employeur et l’employé considérés chacun comme des individus totalement autonomes. Une autre grille de lecture est cependant possible. Il s’agit de remettre en question la notion d’autonomie qui n’est peut-être finalement qu’une fiction pour lui substituer celle de vulnérabilité et d’interpréter et de concevoir de nouvelles manières d’être à travers ce prisme. La question désormais centrale est la suivante : comment penser les relations entre les personnes à l’intérieur des organisations, et principalement dans les entreprises et le monde du travail, en les considérant non plus comme l’ensemble des rapports qu’entretiennent entre eux des individus autonomes, mais comme la rencontre d’hommes vulnérables, c’est-à-dire dépendants les uns des autres ?

Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice.

Two key themes structure the work of French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon: the processes of individuation and the nature of technical objects. Moreover, these two themes are also at the heart of contemporary debates within Ethics and Bioethics. Indeed, the question of the individual is a key concern in both Virtue Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care, while the hyper-technical reality of the present stage of medical technology is a key reason for both the urgency for and the success of the field of Bioethics. And yet, despite its potential for thinking about these issues, Simondon’s philosophy remains largely unknown. Rather than exploring Simondon’s complex ontology for itself, the aim of this paper is to establish what contribution his work can make in Ethics and Bioethics on two essential questions: the relational structure of the self and the nature of the human-technology relation. I argue that Simondon’s re-conceptualization of the individual harmonizes with perspectives in Feminist Bioethics (particularly the Ethics of Care) and points toward what I call an “open” Virtue Ethics that takes relations to be essential. In order to establish this connection, I explore at length the relational approach to Feminist Bioethics offered by Susan Sherwin’s work. I argue that a Simondonian account of technology and of the individual furthers the relational understanding of the self, offers a characterization of Virtue Ethics that is in harmony with the Ethics of Care, and clarifies a notion of responsibility that is implicated in the complex reality of the modern technological milieu.

In this article, I engage the recent debate on transcendence/the transcendental within the anthropology of ethics with the claim that 'How is it between us?' is the most fundamental of all ethical questions. In doing so, I contrast relational ethics with ordinary ethics to show that ethics begins with a demand that emerges from a situation within which one finds oneself with others; a demand that pulls one out of oneself to respond in a modality of concern and care for the between where we dwell together. This attuned response is both an ethical and a political one; a response that opens possibilities for being-together-otherwise. Such possibilities, I argue throughout, can only begin with a relational ethics. I illustrate this with an ethnographic example from harm reduction practice and anti-drug war political activity in both New York City and Vancouver, Canada.

Exploring Judith Butler’s question on whose lives are not publicly mourned and Édouard Glissant’s critique on the “duality of self-perception,” this paper focuses on why the mass deaths in the Mediterranean have not caused a public outcry in Western Europe like the one that followed the terrorist attacks in Paris 2015. The article proposes transversal mourning as a point of departure from which to think about an anti-racist political subjectivity which strives for a caring common and transformative justice. Drawing on the theoretical work of Diego Sztulwark and Amador Fernández-Savater on political subjectivity and engaging with Gillian Rose’s work on the materiality of mourning through her engagement with representation and labour, this paper develops an analysis of transversal mourning on four levels. First, it engages with Judith Butler’s metrics of grievability by exploring mourning as an ethical condition. Secondly, it discusses the logic of the duality of self-perception by examining national mourning and the coloniality of representation. Thirdly, it relates political subjectivity to the mourning for All by engaging with the ontological dimension of the political. Lastly, it focuses on the labour of mourning as the material grounds for forging a caring common. The article concludes with some observations on transversal mourning’s potential for transformative justice.

Because families disrupt fair patterns of distribution and, in particular, equality of  opportunity, egalitarians believe that the institution of the family needs to be defended at the bar of justice. In their recent book, Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift have argued that the moral gains of preserving the family outweigh its moral costs. Yet, I claim that the egalitarian case for abolishing the family has been over-stated due to a failure to consider how alternatives to the family would  also disturb fair distributions and, in particular, equality of opportunity. Absent the family, children would continue to be exposed to care-givers of different levels of ability, investment in child-rearing and beneficial partiality. In addition, social mechanisms other than the family would lead to the accumulation of economic inequalities. Any kind of upbringing will fail to realise equality for reasons that go deeper than the family: our partiality and unequal abilities to nurture.

Inclusive leadership represents a conceptual shift to diversity leadership that is in a position to account for the basic needs for belongingness and uniqueness of all stakeholders involved in organizational processes. Interestingly, there is still a paucity of research that capitalizes on the prospective benefits of inclusive leadership for health care work environments. The present study seeks to fill this research gap by introducing inclusive leadership as an appropriate type of healthcare leadership. Inclusive leadership is invested with a strong potential that promotes sustainable health outcomes; in addition, it allows for more compassionate, humane and caring health care organizations in conformity to the emerging challenges for managing health care in a post-covid 19 world.

There is a paucity of South African literature that uses feminist critical approaches as a conceptual tool to examine intersections of social justice and citizenship. This article aims to address this gap by examining the potential of critical feminist approaches to transform conceptions of citizenship in higher education. It outlines how traditional normative frameworks of citizenship can be contested by drawing onmfeminist approaches. More specifically, the article focuses on feminist contributions regarding ontological constructions of human beings as citizens, the public-private binary, the politics of needs interpretation, participatory parity and belonging, illuminating these concepts with illustrative examples from the higher education context. The article concludes by suggesting recommendations based on the identified feminist conceptions.

For 5 years, we have taught an interdisciplinary experiential environ- mental philosophy—field philosophy—course in Isle Royale National Park. We crafted this class with a pedagogy and curriculum guided by the ethic of care (Goralnik et al. in J Experiential Education 35(3):412–428, 2012) and a Leopold- derived community-focused environmental ethic (Goralnik and Nelson in J Environ Educ 42(3):181–192, 2011) to understand whether and how wilderness experience might impact the widening of students’ moral communities. But we found that student pre-course writing already revealed a preference for nonanthropocentric and nonutilitarian ethics, albeit with a na ̈ıve understanding that enabled contradictions and confusion about how these perspectives might align with action. By the end of the course, though, we recognized a recurrent pattern of learning and moral development that provides insight into the development of morally inclusive environmental ethics. Rather than shift from a utilitarian or anthropocentric ethic to a more biocentric or ecocentric ethic, students instead demonstrated a metaphysical shift from a worldview dominated by dualistic thinking to a more complex awareness of motivations, actions, issues, and natural systems. The consistent occurrence of this pre-ethical growth, observed in student writing and resulting from environmental humanities field learning, demonstrates a possible path to ecologically informed holistic environmental ethics.

Esta investigación busca comprender cómo dialoga el saber disciplinar de la psicología con el saber comunitario durante un proceso de formación en herramientas terapéuticas con víctimas del conflicto armado en Quibdó y Buenaventura (Colombia). Para esto, se utilizó una metodología cualitativa basada en entrevistas semiestructuradas y grupos focales. Se encontró que el proceso formativo crea un espacio de elaboración del sufrimiento propio en el cual se construye un sentido de ayuda a otros, a consecuencia de la experiencia de sanación. Asimismo, la adaptación cultural de las herramientas de formación abre la posibilidad de diálogo entre el saber psicológico y los conocimientos locales y fomenta la participación y reflexividad de los sujetos involucrados.


This study seeks to understand how a scientific knowledge of psychology dialogues with the knowledge of the community during a process of training in therapeutic tools for victims of the armed conflict in Buenaventura and Quibdó. To do that, we used a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The results show that the training process opens up a space for the victims to express their own suffering in which a sense of helping others emerges from the healing experience. Likewise, the cultural adaptation of the training tools creates the possibility of a dialogue between the knowledge of psychology and local knowledge, and encourages the active and reflective participation of the subjects.

«مراقبت» گرچه مفهومی قدیمی و آشنا در اندیشه‌های دینی و اخلاقی بشر است، اما تا چند دهه پیش به طور مستقل مورد توجه نبوده و به آن پرداخته نشده بود. کتاب درباره مراقبت، که این یادداشت قصد بررسی آن را دارد، نوشته میلتونمیرآف، منتشر شده به سال 1971، نخستین اثر فلسفی است که این رسالت را برعهده گرفته است. بازشناسیِ مفهوم مراقبت، معرفی‌ مؤلفه‌های ضروری برای شکل‌گیری رابطه مراقبتی و ویژگیهای زندگی انسانی‌ای  که بر مدار مراقبت سامان یافته باشد، محورهای این کتاب هستند. میرآف«مراقبت» را کمک به رشد و خود-تحقق بخشیِ دیگری( اعم از یک انسان یا یک اندیشه و ایده خلاق) می‌‌داند و مدعی است که مراقبت می‌‌تواند به زندگی انسانها نظم، معنا و جهت دهد . او در این کتاب تلاش می‌‌کند با تعریف و تحدید این مفهوم مدعای خود را ثابت کند. کتاب درباره مراقبت در واقع مراقبت را در جایگاه مفهومی دارای اهمیت بنیادین در فلسفه اخلاق و زیست اخلاقی انسان‌ها از نو متولد می‌‌کند. این کتاب نخستین تلاقی مفهوم مراقبت هایدگر با مراقبت به معنای تیمارداری و سرآغاز راه پرآمد و شد برای تحلیل  مفهوم مراقبت و بسط آن در حوزه نظریه پردازی در فلسفه اخلاق، آموزش و پرورش، اقتصاد و علوم سیاسی است.

The ideal of distributive justice as a means of ensuring fair distribution of social opportunities is a cornerstone of contemporary feminist theory. Feminists from various disciplines have developed arguments to support the redistribution of the work of care through institutional mechanisms. I discuss the limits of such distribution under the conditions of theories that do not idealize human agents as independent beings. People’s reliance on care, understood as a response to needs, is pervasive and infuses almost all human interaction. I argue that the effect of care on shaping the social opportunities of all individuals is huge, although often invisible. Much of the optimism of theories of distributive justice comes from ignoring or downplaying the way in which care influences most factors of social success. Jonathan Wolff distinguished between three types of resources whose fair distribution is important: internal, external and structural. Care, I argue, does not fit well in any of these types. Inseparably interwoven with relational realities, care cuts across these categories and thus poses a challenge to the feasibility of equal chances. I focus on the under-analyzed issue of bad care and show how difficult it is to dismantle legacies of bad care. Their effect on even close-to-ideal social arrangements is too significant to be disregarded, yet very difficult to tackle through institutional mechanisms. A commitment to certain elements of individual ethics – as opposed to merely political institutions – is required in order to bridge the gap between ideal theories of justice and feasible practical aims.

The authors of the exchange now reunite to offer some concluding remarks.  Our comments arise from a few issues that in the words of one of us “have been left hanging” and thus call out for some expatiation as a way to conclude our story of ethics in the new field of leadership-as-practice.  We’re responding in the first-person plural but where we have divergence, we will refer to one another using our first names.  We hope that our approach, veering as it does from the point-counterpoint convention, is consistent with our espousal of collaborative and, where supporting conditions permit, emancipatory practice.

En este artículo proponemos una relación complementaria entre la vulnerabilidad como
categoría ontológica y el despliegue de una ética del cuidado. En primer lugar, presentamos
una conceptualización de la vulnerabilidad a partir de los desarrollos de Emmanuel Lévinas
que, en su propuesta, la concibe como sensibilidad en tanto receptividad articulada con la
respuesta ética. Seguidamente, profundizamos en los aportes centrales de la ética feminista
del cuidado: sus inicios, bases teóricas, características principales y concepción del desarrollo
humano. A continuación, introducimos la dimensión del cuidado de la naturaleza a partir de
enfoques ecosistémicos en torno al tema. Y concluimos este escrito afirmando la necesidad
de conexión con la vulnerabilidad como fundante de una ética del cuidado de sí, de los otros
y de la naturaleza de la que somos parte, esenciales tanto para el desarrollo humano como
para el sostenimiento de la trama de la vida.

In recent years, the issue of effective corporate governance has attracted much attention, especially to promote an ethical business environment to ensure corporate accountability and integrity. In the academic sphere, the mainstream research on corporate governance and ethics has been performed using various ethics theories based on the premise of conflict of interest. This research uses a feminist perspective to analyse the corporate governance practices at BHP Billiton using the lens of the feminist ethics of care, as well as projecting the financial condition of the company using the same principles.
It is argued that the application of the feminist ethics of care will result in a stakeholder model of corporate governance that places more emphasis on women’s interests and maintaining
good relationships with stakeholders. This study also projected that the financial condition will be stable, as the company will put more effort into balancing stakeholder interests while addressing social and environmental risk.
The two issues were answered using mixed methods. For the first one, the analysis of corporate governance practices from the feminist ethics of care perspective was performed using qualitative content analysis of the annual and sustainability reports of BHP Billiton Limited, as the selected sample company for this study, for the period 2006 to 2015. Following the analysis, a financial planning model for the period 2012-2016 was designed using the quantitative optimisation method to answer the second issue and the projection was then compared to the actual data.
The original principles of the ethics of care, as developed by Gilligan (1982), are as follows:
1. The care approach is achieved through perception of one’s self as connected to others. This is translated further as the feminist stakeholder theory.
2. Moral dilemmas are contextual.
3. Dilemmas are solved through inductive thinking.
4. The moral development through stages is sequential and hierarchical.
5. Principle of moral responsibility is reflected in the voices of women.
6. The ethics of care is distinguished by an emphasis on attachments, issues of self-sacrifice and selflessness and consideration of relationships as primary.
This study added two more principles based on the interpretation of the illumination of the ethics of care to the corporate governance practices as follows:
7. The nature of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities should be voluntary or discretionary.
8. Women’s interests in various stakeholder groups are acknowledged.
The results based on the qualitative content analysis showed that BHP Billiton has not consistently applied principles suggested by the ethics of care. The principle relating to the perception of one’s self as connected to others was represented in intensive stakeholder engagement programs and various voluntary CSR programs. The Company also acknowledged women’s interests in the employee group and other stakeholder groups by applying gender diversity and gender equality principles. However, the caring approaches through communications, contextual and inductive problem solutions, and sequential and hierarchical moral development were not consistent with the ethics of care. Therefore, the first proposition was not fully supported by the research findings from the qualitative content analysis.
The projection of the financial condition for the five-year period of 2012-2016 showed that BHP Billiton could achieve an overall positive economic value retained even though negative results exist for 2015 and 2016. Sensitivity analysis was performed by providing two scenarios to show the impact of each on the projected financial condition. It was concluded that the Company’s financial condition would be stable in the future, which supports the second proposition.
Although not all propositions were supported in this study, the use of the ethics of care as a lens to support corporate governance practices and as guidance in financial projection has not been conducted in previous studies. This study therefore offers an original contribution to the literature of corporate governance, business ethics and financial planning.