12.3 The Political and Communal Dimensions of Care Ethics

Care ethics applies not only to individual, interpersonal exchanges. Instead, it offers a dynamic vision for healing societies more broadly.

Care Ethics and Political Relations

Although relational ethicists who focus on personal relationships often emphasize the positive ways in which these constitute us, it is important to remember that families can be places of inequality and various kinds of serious harms. Children are not only in need of care but are extraordinarily vulnerable to abuse and neglect. In patriarchal cultures, wives are often seen as subordinate to their husbands and have their freedom curtailed and their interests and needs overlooked or marginalized. Daughters are often similarly devalued.

These patriarchal views of women extend beyond the home. This makes it more difficult for women to leave abusive domestic situations and find better lives elsewhere because they are frequently seen as incompetent or incapable of filling any roles other than those traditionally assigned to women. Moreover, they may have internalized these patriarchal views so that they see themselves (and other women) as being properly subordinate to men and unfit for anything but traditional feminine roles. Such assumptions make it extremely difficult for women to succeed in various professions where they may be assumed to be deficient in virtues associated with men—such as rationality, morality, strength, and competence. Moreover, because traditional women’s roles—including invaluable skilled care labor, such as growing or obtaining and cooking food, cleaning, and childcare—are devalued or characterized as essentially female, men have often refused to take on these roles, finding them demeaning, or believing they lacked the relevant skills. The feminist slogan, “the personal is the political,” refers to the way in which inequality in our personal relationships scales up to produce inequality in our society and inequality in our society scales down and affects almost every aspect of our daily lives. “Political” in this sense isn’t really about who you vote for but, in the words of a famous political theorist, “who gets what, when, how.”

Early feminist theories addressing the injustices of patriarchy were often criticized for only voicing the perspectives of straight, white, Anglo, settler, middle-class women without disabilities. Many of the women overlooked by these theories pointed out that they often experienced inequality quite differently. For instance, some suggested that poor women enjoyed greater equality with poor men than middle-class women did with middle-class men but greater inequality overall. Poor women did not long for access to the public sphere of work outside the home as they already worked outside the home, albeit often for wages significantly lower than men’s wages. Many women maintained that much of the discrimination they faced had more to do with their racial or ethnic identity, their class, their sexuality, or their disability status than their gender. Moreover, not infrequently, this discrimination was enacted or exacerbated by more privileged women, some of whom claimed to be feminists.

US legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw, coined the term “intersectionality” to capture this idea. Intersectionality is a framework that examines how multiple forms of oppression and discrimination overlap to create unique experiences and outcomes for individuals. It’s a tool for understanding how social identities, such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability, relate to systems of oppression. She recognized that in societies that have multiple axes of oppression—such as racism, colonialism, ableism, hetero- and cissexism, and classism—people who belong to more than one oppressed group often experience oppression in distinctive ways that are highly particular. These patterns of oppression can be difficult to predict and understand from the perspective of those who do not share similar social positionings and experiences.

If we are committed to equality for all, we must pay attention to intersectional issues. This type of analysis highlights the fact that we are all located in complex webs of social power and privilege. While in an ideal world we might be able to treat everyone (outside our friends and family) impartially, in societies that are structured by patterns of injustice and inequality that disadvantage particular groups, we need to take the reality of these political relationships into account when we are making ethical decisions.

Because it is often difficult for those who are privileged in a certain respect to understand the true challenges and restrictions on those who aren’t, it is particularly important to have people who experience oppression involved in decision-making about policies intended to address that oppression. Disability rights advocates coined the phrase “nothing about us without us” to capture this idea. This is not only a call to inclusion but also a call to those allies who wish to support their cause to exercise humility—a warning that well-intentioned paternalism can actually exacerbate harms and inequality and undermine the autonomy of those whom one wishes to help. Understanding how the complex political relationships that we have with each other inform various ethical challenges and dilemmas is key to this relational approach to ethics.

Focus on Communal Relations: Ubuntu as a form of Care Ethics

While political approaches to relational ethics attend to the many social and political differences between us, communal approaches focus on the collective. Let’s consider the philosophical concept of ubuntu as a form of care ethics.

It is quite common in ethical theories outside the European tradition to focus more on the community than the individual. The African concept of ubuntu is a good example, as it both rejects European individualism; it has been employed as a post-colonial ethical anchor for rebuilding more just communities and positive relationships in African societies recently freed from colonial oppression. Michael Eze tells us that Ubuntu philosophy is a phenomenon much broader than a simple definition can embrace. The word itself is rooted in the African oral heritage that encompasses the spiritual, moral, historical, and cultural aspects of a person’s identity beyond themselves. To experience Ubuntu is to have a sense of self beyond one’s own goals and instead view themselves as an integral part of the community with the common goal of working toward group harmony and humaneness. What is good for the group will be good for all because what is good for the group is good for the individual. In South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process—set up to document and deal with the appalling human rights abuses that happened under apartheid—ubuntu has been an important principle that has shaped how this process of restorative justice has been understood.

Group solidarity, conformity, compassion, respect, human dignity, humanistic orientation and collective unity have, among others been defined as key social values of ubuntu….”[I]to value has also been viewed as a basis for a morality of co-operation, compassion, communalism and concern for the interests of the collective respect for the dignity of personhood, all the time emphasizing the virtues of that dignity in social relationships and practices.”

Thus, ubuntu, like other expressions of care ethics, not only emphasizes a strong relational ethics that focuses on the community, it is also deeply humanist. Ubuntu recognizes that one’s own humanity is inextricably bound with the humanity of others.