Carol Gilligan wrote an article in 2014 “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences” and it has stayed with me. An ethic of care is a core tenet to my next project, and I would hope the next stage of my academic career. So I was more than pleased to see this book published in 2023, updating her thoughts.
page 9 (paraphrased): an ethic of care complements an ethic of justice by starting from an assumption of connectedness rather than separateness.
page 11: (explaining the origin of the book) concerns about oppression (using power unfairly) and concerns about abandonment (failing to care) are human concerns, built into the human life cycle.
I see this as, in an ethic of justice, to prove that there was an injustice one needs to prove that there was a responsibility to care, that there was power which included the responsibility to care. You HAVE to care, like the fox told to the little prince.
I see that as patronising. You’ll get cared for whether you want it or not, and you will want it because you have no other options.
And then I return again to what Candice said long ago. Tame is not sustainable.
In an ethic of care it’s about connectedness. If you don’t care you abandon the other, but it’s not because you HAVE to care that you do, it’s because you are in a relationship, you are connected. At any point either of you can leave. Of course that has consequences. In a caring world, however, those consequences are bearable.
page 12: Carol considers growing up in a patriarchal system as having to undergo
a process of initiation that had been mistaken for development.
There is a crisis of connection, where you can’t say what you really want to say, because of loss of connection – think about biting your tongue at work, for fear of losing your job. Not speaking your mind for fear of being shunned by your friends. Not speaking out against an abusive partner because you are financially dependent on them. Not speaking out against corporates or billionaires because you don’t see an alternative and the bills still need to get paid.
Could this also hold for science? Where teaching the scientific method is mistaken for developing critical thinking but is really an initiation into a … colonist? Way of thinking?
Esther Turnhout said this in her lecture as well:
page 6: “the domination of people and nature operates not just through physical or material processes, but also through ideas.” I also agree with this. We are in a battle for ideas, and this links to her mention of story later in the lecture and my desire to build an emergent game.
page 8: “taking the planet as the object of knowledge production risks injustice.” I think this relates to our approach of “mining for knowledge” as a process of extraction. Science is not neutral.
page 12:
In the 1990s, the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio had a growing realization of error. On the basis of research evidence, he recognized that the separation of thought from emotion, long taken as a milestone of cognitive development, the sine qua non of rationality, was a manifestation of brain injury or trauma
Psychologists studying development had reached a similar conclusion: the separation of the self from relationships was, rather than a sign of maturation, a residue of trauma – a response to the experience of having been overwhelmed.
So, is this true of science too? Our hallowed scientific method, following the facts and nothing but the facts. Is it more a trauma response, of being overwhelmed, than a neutral wise stance? Us in our ivory towers?
page 14:
By splitting reason from emotion, the mind from the body, and the self from relationships, the binaries undercut our ability to think about what we are feeling, to know what is happening in our body, to stay in touch with other people, and thus to navigate the human social world. By doing so, this sets the stage for and justifies the hierarchy that privileges reason over emotion, the self over relationships, justice over caring. At once idealized and devalued, the human side falls, in effect, off the map of human experience.
(I took out the masculine feminine subtext, I don’t find it useful and it triggers the man vs woman stuff – but there is a complementary post here that focuses more on that. It is what the book is really about, after all)
page 16:
“… I find too often, in various parts of my life, I have not trusted my own intuition, or stopped short of coming to conclusions that I have the evidence for, and haven’t known why.”
But now my warning lights go off. This “alt-facts” movement are a problem exactly because our own intuition is unreliable. So I am cautioning against the binary of reason-emotion. We need BOTH. We need the scientific method, we need critical thinking, but we need it in a new context, a context of care, of relationship, of interdependencies. This is complex, and which is why I think digital tools – even extending to responsible use of AI, is required.
page 21:
A not knowing was culturally inscribed and socially enforced. What I had learned to think of as steps in a developmental progression – the separation of reason from emotion, of the mind from the body, and the self from relationships – milestones on the march toward rationality, autonomy, and maturity, held this not knowing in place. Because if we cannot think about what we are feeling, if our mind doesn’t register what is going on in our body, and if our self becomes like a mighty fortress, defended and boundaried rather than open and engaged in relationships, then we cannot know what otherwise we would know. Because it is only when our thoughts and our emotions are connected, when our minds and our bodies are joined, and when we are living in relationship with others rather than standing apart from them, that we can make sense of the human world.
In other words, we cannot be curious when our thoughts and our emotions are disconnected. And we need to be curious to get back to science:
“Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not.
Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not.
https://timharford.com/2017/03/the-problem-with-facts/
page 23: Radical listening is about the conversation beneath the conversation
Radical listening holds the potential for transformation because it starts from a place of not knowing and develops the muscle of curiosity.
As a practice of listening, radical listening begins with asking a real question – something you don’t know and want to know. It hinges on replacing judgment with curiosity.
the need for a radical practice of listening, where one listens both for an initiated voice and for a voice that resists initiation – the voice of what I really think
(This could fit well with the mirror world game. Where to solve a puzzle you need to give the surface answer, but also the subsurface answer)
page 26
the human world is far more transparent than is commonly assumed. In essence, we learn not to see what is right in front of our eyes, not to know what in another sense is obvious.
page 27
a split not between appearance and reality, but between experience and what was socially constructed as reality.
page 33
Since moral dilemmas arise in situations where hurt is inescapable, there is no “right” or “good” solution. Rather than seeking justification, the moral imperative becomes “an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the ‘real and recognizable trouble’ of this world.”
the thought of care emphasizes responsiveness to particular situations
page 34, quoting Laugier:
the very definition of ethics in philosophy is achieved by … the massive denial of the work done to guarantee the functioning of the world.
The book is about women, and people of colour, but I want to include the natural world here too, the ecosystem services we rely on.
Perspectives of care, or an ethic of care, contain the fundamental claim about the importance of care for human life – and again, I would extend that to the greater natural world, as it sustains us, and then extend it even further to place us outside of its centre, care of the natural world to take care of itself, with us being one component in that.
(paraphrased) Care work, for the most part underpaid and undervalued, has been burdened by the gendering of caring as “feminine,” … are considered lesser. In reality, this is the lion’s share of care work, including for people who claim to be independent and thus not to need care. Hence the people who care for them must be invisible, and do their work in silence.
which then begs the question, What is the nature of a democratic conversation that excludes that which makes it materially possible?
And this, all of a sudden, strikes me as at the hart of my journey of transforming democracy. Yes, it’s about a transformation of expertise, but this is the big why. It’s not really democracy if we have this very dimly lit, blinkered view of what we’re talking about.
page 35 – an ethic of care, a different voice,
challenges what had been taken as fundamental or foundational – the opposition of egoism and altruism, selfishness and selflessness – on grounds of ignoring fragility and vulnerability and overlooking the reality of interdependence.
I understand this to mean, it challenges the binary good/bad: ego=bad and altruism=good? What if the altruism is fragile? What if the ego drives stronger interdependence?
page 15 (but I feel belongs here)
Selflessness, which had been valorized in the name of care and caring, was in fact careless. Carelessness masquerading under the guise of goodness.
(that’s as far as I am with the book so far)