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3.2.3.3. Expanding Ethics of Care into Political Domain
―I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice‖ —Albert Camus
―What is justice? It is the constant care for the common good.‖ —Giambattista Vico
Postulation of ethics of care must move beyond private sphere because of its relevance in social, political and economical life. Ethics of care, as proposed by Held, are important
, ―to transform society, politics, law, economic activity, the family, and personal relations away
from the assumptions of patriarchy and toward the world of caring and the kind of justice caring calls for.‖
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Hence, Held claims that ethic of care is not only personal ethic, but also political ethic.
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Care should be seen as public values and practices, political issue and important feature of contemporary citizenship, while at the same time recognizing care as
personal and private. As political ethic, Held asserts that ethic of care does not only aim to achieve equality
for women in existing societal structures, but it also aims on equal consideration for the experience that reveals the moral significance and values of caring throughout society.
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Held argues that the prevailing contractual model of human relations must be transformed because
it creates society dominated by conflict restrained by law and preoccupied with economic gain.
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However, Held does not imply that contractual model must be totally rejected and eliminated from our economical and political vocabulary, but she calls for the reinterpretation
and restructuring of current societal arrangements under the light of ethics of care. As ethics of care are the powerful resources for dealing with power inequalities and violence, Held
158
Held, Virginia. ‗The Ethics of Care as Normative Guidance: Comment on Gilligan‘. Journal of Social Philosophy, 45.1, Spring, 2014: p. 109. Ebsco. Web. September, 16. 2015, p. 108.
159
Held, Virginia. ‗Care and Justice in the Global Context‘. Ratio Juris. 17.2 June, 2004: p.148. Ebsco. Web. 16 September. 2015.
160
Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global. London: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 23.
161
Held. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global, p. 18.
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claims that it is important to think about how society should be reorganized to be more caring, rather than continuing to marginalize and privatize it.
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In other words, care should be a primary concern of society to enlighten and enrich human lives.
Joan Tronto develops further the centrality of care as public ethics. She claims that public conception of care is the constitution of democratic society.
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Based on this notion, she develops her concept ‗demoractic caring‘. Tronto states that democratic care should be
placed within co llective deliberation and decision making, ―democratic politics should center
upon assigning responsibilities for care, and for ensuring democratic citizen are as capable as possible of participating in this assignment of responsibilities.‖
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Without democratic caring, Tronto believes that social equality and justice cannot be achieved. In developing her concept
of democratic caring, Tronto proposes five phases of care: 1.
Caring about At this first phase of care, someone or some group notices unmet caring needs.
2. Caring for
Once needs are identified, someone or some group has to take responsibility to make certain that these needs are met.
3. Care-giving
The third phase of caring requires that the actual caregiving work be done. 4.
Care-receiving Once care work is done, there will be a response from the person, thing, group,
animal, plant, or environment that has been cared for. Observing that response and making judgments about it
5. Caring with
This final phase of care requires that caring needs and the ways in which they are met need to be consistent with democratic commitment to justice, equality, and
freedom for all.
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According to Tronto, democratic caring can be achieved not by generalizing care, but it requires a more particular kind of care wh
ich she calls as ‗caring with‘. From the definition of ‗caring with‘ above, it can be seen that democratic caring requires caring practice to be
consistent with justice values, equality and respect of freedom. To perform caring practice
162
Held. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global , p. 18.
163
Tronto, p. 18.
164
Tronto, p. 7.
165
Tronto, p. 22-23.
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that is consistent with justice, equality and freedom, as proposed by Held, care practices does not only incorporate care values, but also the standards by which the practices of care can be
evaluated.
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It is the function of ethics of care to formulate normative standard to evaluate the practice of caring to be consistent with justice, equality and freedom.
Ethics of care are commonly criticized by liberal exponents as inadequate to govern public life because caring is grounded on unequal and dependent relationship between the
care-giver and the cared-one. Moreover, care tends to lead to excessive empathy that eventually intrudes individual autonomy and free will. Care even can lead to paternalism,
nepotism, parochialism, favoritism and other biases. It is seen as incompatible with principles of freedom, equality and justice that assumes autonomy and independence. Tronto criticizes
these liberal assumptions because they set the existence of independent and atomistic autonomous individual as the starting point for democratic principles of freedom, equality and
justice. It is due this false assumption that ethics of care are marginalized from socio-political life. The primacy of atomistic autonomy and independence leads to denigration of human
vulnerability and dependency as flawed condition or problem.
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Further consequence of this denigration is that the equality of all humans of being needy and to voice need is violated.
Tronto proposes that this dominant liberal view has to be revised. It is important to acknowledge that all humans are fundamentally relational, dependence and vulnerable at least
at some points in their lives.
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However, this fact does not hinder individuals to exert their free will and agency. Relational self means that persons and their identities are inevitably
socially embedded or situated and constituted within the context of social relationships in which there is a complex of intersecting social determinants, such as race, class, gender,
ethnicity, and so on. Individuals are relational and interdependent with others in fundamental
166
Held. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global, p. 38.
167
Tronto, p.31.
168
Tronto, p.31.
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ways throughout their lives. Nevertheless, it does not mean that individual cannot perform agency to resist various social ties and reshape any relations one maintains. Held explains that
[t]he ethics of care works with a conception of the person as relational. It does not suggest that we are composed entirely of the relations we are in and virtually stuck
with them …the goal for persons in an ethics of care is not the isolated, autonomous,
rational individual of the dominant, traditional moral theory. It is the person who, with other persons, maintains some and remakes other and creates still other morally
admirable relations…Such persons can and should evaluate and shape these changing
relations autonomously, while recognizing that they are part of what we are. This conception of the person is compatible with the priority of care.
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One can still be a free moral agent, despite one‘s embeddedness to social relations.
Therefore, Held proposes that concept of autonomy in ethics of care has to be understood as relational autonomy that requires the awareness that there are material, psychological, and
social prerequisites for achieving individual autonomy.
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As stated by Tronto, ―human autonomy is an achievement, not a starting premise, and it is an achievement that requires
many years [of care].‖
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Accordingly, autonomy is exercised within social relations, not by abstractly independent, free, and equal individuals as proposed by the liberal exponents. The
concept of relational autonomy has to replace liberal notion of atomistic autonomy. According to Tronto negative excesses of care, such as paternalism can be overcome
by reducing the power differentials in caring relationship as much as possible. The power differentials can be reduced if the notion of equality is redefined within the frame of ethics of
care. Equality, as proposed by Tronto, has to be understood not as equality of opportunity, but equality of standing in a sense that all have equal rights to be heard, about their status and
concerns in assignment of caring responsibility.
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Tronto explains further the concept as follows:
169
Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global, p. 135.
170
Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global, p. 84.
171
Tronto, p. 125.
172
Tronto, p. 108.
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It will not be enough to say that if person X had a choice and person Y had a choice, then the two are equal. If they had no equal standing at the beginning, then they do not
have equal standing through the offer of ―choice.‖
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To achieve equality of standing, Tronto states that it requires three steps:
First, when people are young and in a state of dependency, they need equal access to adequate care in order to grow into fully capable adults. Second, when people are
adults, they need to be able to exercise their voices equally and independently, and provisions need to be made to guarantee that their voices are not silenced or drowned
out by others. Third, when people are ill, elderly, or disabled, institutional arrangements need to be made to ensure that their voices are also heard.
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From the above explanation it can be seen that equality of standing presumes the starting point of equality in the equality of being care receivers.
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It acknowledges that all citizens‘ need of care, and consequently, care practice has to be performed from the
standpoint of the care receivers.
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Therefore, caring practice becomes inclusive. The assignment and judgment of care is not accomplished from a singular perspective of the
caregiver as happens in paternalism, but it is highly participatory, in a sense it includes everyone‘s perspectives affected by the decisions. Consequently, caring becomes democratic
instead of paternalistic. Held further argues that ethics of care should be the basis of human morality and
uphold the wider network of relations within which issues of justice and rights should be raised.
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She states that [c]are is probably the most fundamental value of all. There can be care without justice:
There has been little justice in traditional families but care has been provided. There can be no justice without care, for neither persons nor societies could exist without the
enormous amount of care, with its associated values, involved in raising and educating children.
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Ethics of care are important as the precondition for respecting rights and upholding
justice. Held claims that ―society must care enough about one another and trust each other
173
Tronto, p. 108.
174
Tronto, p. 108-109.
175
Tronto, p. 29.
176
Tronto, p. 29.
177
Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global, p. 136.
178
Held, ‗Care and Justice in…‘. p. 147.
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sufficiently to recognize them as also members of the same society‖.
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Without ethics of care as the basis of moral system, society will not cohere and any forms of domination or
oppression cannot be eradicated. Enforcing justice and rights without considering ethics of care is inadequate and not
advisable. In liberal rights-based ethics of justice impartiality must be sought above all. Different from the concern of particularities and interconnectedness in ethics of care,
impartiality abstracts from concrete relational of the selves. This notion of impartiality is inadequate. Distributive justice without recognizing the particular identities, circumstances
and resources of the subject involved maintains hierarchical power relations and leads to paternalism. Moreover, the fact that social situation is still dominated by social inequality and
oppression makes advocacy of impartiality becomes ineffective. In this kind of condition, ethics of care are needed to replace hierarchies and any forms of domination and oppression
in the society. Genuine respect of justice and rights require the attentive and particularized approach to the particularities of the moral problem and direct engagement through active
communicative interchange with others who are able to speak their own minds, situations, and needs freely. Justice and rights have to be reconceived along the lines of ethics of care.
Ethics of care proposed by Gilligan, Noddings, Held and Tronto is important to understand the underlying contesting ethical principles that govern Gaskell‘s North and
South. The concept of ethics of c are illuminate Margaret‘s and Thornton‘s dialogic encounter
on the issue of master and worker relationship. By using the concept of ethics of care, the subversion of the novel in extending mothering into public realm can be better interpreted as
the advocacy of expanding ethics of care into the wider spectrum of social, economical, and political life.
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Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global, p. 135.
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3.3. Polyphonic Novel: A Site for Challenging Patriarchal Textual and Sexual Authority