Towards Relational Ethics of Care

Discussion

(this seems like a very good overview of the current discussions between various schools of ethics, and how the way is being prepared for a relational ethics, so I recommend reading the whole article - mb)

Monica Belevan:

"To overcome ethical individualism and develop an ethics that will provide a view of a good life and good deeds (i.e., ethics that answers both questions: ‘who am I to be?’ and ‘what am I to do?’) beyond self-help recipes for the individual, we must begin instead with the assumption that we are, first and foremost, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, friends—relations. We start with the assumption we belong to our communities and are inseparable from the people we love and care about. If our ethics is to do justice to our inherently social human nature, it must focus not on us as individuals with wants and needs, but on the people we are close to as the most important aspect of our identities.

In short, we need a post-Enlightenment ethics. To a certain extent, such a ‘relational’ (as opposed to ‘individualistic’) ethics can be found in the newly proposed ethics of care (e.g., Noddings 2002). The ethics of care starts with the understanding that we are born and raised within a network of relationships, so caring for one another is something that comes naturally to us. We do not need additional reasons to care, and what we are to do in a particular situation must be determined by those whom our care affects. This knowledge cannot be derived from some universal principle, in which sense the ethics of care is particularistic, not universalistic. It is, moreover, one of the rare ethics that emphasises the relationship between two or more people, by insisting that ‘care’ is not located in the moral actors only, but the matter of the relationship."

(https://covidianaesthetics.substack.com/p/a-post-enlightenment-ethics-of-the)