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Paper Review: “Global Care Ethics: Beyond Distribution, Beyond Justice”

Vidhi — Tue, 19 May 2020 12:31:33 +0000

Introduction

The article “Global Care Ethics: Beyond Distribution, Beyond Justice,” published in the Journal of Global Ethics (2013), by Fiona Robinson, sets out to critique theories of distributive justice and the workings of hegemonic masculinities, and replace it with an ethics of care approach which would actually work towards diminishing unequal power relations between individuals and groups. Robinson introduces a new model of thinking about global justice, not in terms of currently existing theories, which assume autonomous and impartial subjects, but in terms of an ethics of care approach that starts with an ontology of the subject as embodied and relational.

Robinson’s article begins with the question of ethics itself and lays out definitions of central concepts of ethics of care and distributive justice. She points out that this ideal theory that talks about ethics as if it came before lived experiences is deeply problematic and should not become an abstracted principle in a systematised manner. She takes care to define terms like theory and justice, by analysing the concept of global justice. Care is at the very core of global justice, and is not the same as distributive justice. She reiterates that distribution of primary goods is not the issue, and by revealing the causes of injustices, for which she provides empirical data, following a bottom-up approach, the issue could perhaps be solved. Thus in the first part, she present a critique of the global distribution by providing empirical accounts of injustices, and draws attention to the fact that justice theories have narrow focus and only concerned about primary goods when there is a whole economy of care that needs to be talked about. She clears her position and makes a shift from ideal theory to embodied subjects in relation with one another.

In the second part of the article she presents empirical data. She discusses the effects of Neoliberalism, which is a myopic idea, on those who do not even have access to it, like working women from poor nations who migrate to the global north in search of work. She also discusses the idea of hegemonic masculinity which leads to care work being ascribed only to women.

In the final section, she talks about all discourses intersecting at an individual, national, and international scale. The same injustice is perpetuated when women in income-rich countries who want to work outside of home, hire women from poorer nations to do care-work in their place, do not care about their well being and relegate that responsibility to the state.

Critique of Hegemonic Masculinity and Neo-liberalist Conceptions of Individuals’ Autonomy

She states that when we think of distributive justice, we only think of it terms of people having unequal access to the same material things and their financial disparities are the cause of the problem. She does not deny that this issue does not exist, but she points out that this is not the root cause of the problem. She then presents an alternative approach, that should be the core approach, which is that people’s lived lives have problems, not because of lack of money, but because their lived relations are not how they ought to be.

She argues that one of the reasons for this is hegemonic masculinity that lets care work fall on women, more specifically on racially identifiable women who due to the stigma attached to their kind of work, continue to be marginalised and underprivileged. This marginalisation has a flip side as well, for example there is a heroic status instituted by the Philippine state to these migrant workers who bring back foreign currency.

Another way in which hegemonic masculinity perpetuates injustice is when poor people who are forced to take care of their sick children lose wages and become poorer still. If men and women were equally responsible for children the they wouldn’t need to outsource domestic help that leaves those women underprivileged. It could be argued why the global north feels the need to help the impoverished global south in the first place, when really it creates more problems than it probably solves. It praises accomplishments that happen in confined spaces but tosses out care and increases global injustices for which solutions exist, solutions that have been employed by countries like Honduras, Vietnam, and Mexico. Moreover, the labour of care itself is undervalued. Since all household work is unpaid work, it is not seen as valuable.

Thus critiquing the idea of distributive justice, Robinson clears her position, which is a very embodied idea of ethics emerging from people’s lived realities, and not ethics as an abstract discipline. Campbell and Shapiro differentiate between ethics as a noun and ethics as an adjective, that is, ethics as an abstract discipline as opposed to the ethical. The ethics-first approach is different from the literature on global justice.

Further, Robinson critiques Rawls’ distributive paradigm since his theory of justice restricts the meaning of social justice to “benefits and burdens.” Rawls focussed on the state while, as previously mentioned, care should be at the core of every idea of society. Care is often dismissed because it is subsumed by the larger liberal distributive paradigm. This is why Robinson takes a completely different starting point: the ontology of subjects / groups rather than abstract top-down model. This means that we need to critically analyse institutions and structures to find out the root cause that gives rise to these injustices. This is also where she brings in a feminist ethics of care that is inherently critical of the analytic, top-down approach and always takes the embodied lived experiences of women into account.

Existing theories of distributive justice are also primarily procedural and neutral, while Robinson is of the view that nothing is neutral. The distributive justice model is a rational model that advocates a theory where people’s vulnerabilities are not to be concealed, and are instead the source of this alternative theoretical paradigm. From this vulnerability emerges ethics of care and shows problems of distributive justice. This of course, goes back to Enlightenment project where the focus was on hiding and concealing vulnerability and only speaking of its extreme — human potential.

Robinson explains that the heart of care ethics is that people do care, it constitutes us, makes us who we are. She is also cognisant of the fact that caring activities and labour are not evenly distributed, that carers are flawed.

The last paragraph of this section which talks about the need for descriptive and empirical analysis, for thinking about actual lived realities, is a summary of the section which clearly underlines her points.

She talks about Simon Caney’s work on global justice that ignores the issues a global political theory should address. Her approach provides a critical lens and a “weak normative basis” for policy making. Her position is that, the moment you become prescriptive, you move away from realities, from the “contingencies and complexities of the ethical.”

A defining feature of global political economy is that care is commodified and is transnational. She states: “The rise of the ‘competition state’ and the opening up of financial markets for foreign investment has led to a dramatically altered environment for work and care.” This means that if cheaper labour is not found, factories will move elsewhere, which will force workers to accept low paying jobs, which in turn would lead to job insecurity and informal work culture. This also means that the social spending of already impoverished families’ conditions will worsen. All these intersecting issues affect the other.

Another negative effect of this is that individuals in income-rich countries that outsource their own care-work, lose the ability to focus attention on others, thus proving that morality is not about actions. Without engaging in care-work, the moral fabric is harmed in some way.

Further, globalisation’s face becomes masculine when all care-work becomes feminised. The public private dichotomy always remains the same because care-work is still understood as feminine, it is only the women who remove themselves from that a masculinised work space.

Lastly, Robinson argues that morality is experienced relationally, which means that we always already care, it is part of our moral being. She writes “the way we think and act morally emerges out of the thick context of our relations and responsibilities for others,” which points to the fact that it is a rich context. She discusses how unjust structures and institutions exist and power operates on intersecting basis.

Robinson, in her conclusion writes “[c]are ethics continues to be widely resisted by the ‘global justice industry,” wherein she seems to use the word “industry” ironically. She also introduces the term “emotional imperialism” for the first time here which may throw the reader off-balance. What she means here is that migration from global south to global north is kind of an imperialism whereby people’s emotion becomes a commodity— emotional labour for which they are not paid extra.

Towards the end, Robinson says that “neoliberalism ignores and de-politicises care” which is now changing with the actual realisation that caring is not a sign of weakness.

She also uses the words “natural features of human social life and emphasizes the moral importance of the values and practices of care in the effort to achieve greater well-being across the globe,” which can be critiqued and may her be replaced with the word “naturalised.”

Conclusion

This paper noted how Robinson critiques the theories of distributive justice and the workings of Neo-liberal and hegemonic masculinities, and replaces it with an ethics of care approach, which is a bottom-up approach, which would help rectify the unequal power relations between groups. This ethics of care approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of rights and duties, by changing the paradigm in which we think about duties. Duties are not about distributive justice (“benefits and burdens”) but about accounting for people’s vulnerabilities and the need for giving and receiving care.

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Heraclitus’s Theory of Opposites

Vidhi — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 18:30:54 +0000

B48: the bow’s name: life; its work, death

B80: One must know that war is universal, justice strife, and everything happens by Strife and necessity.

Heraclitus, famously called the ‘riddler’ and ‘the obscure’ lived in 500 BC. His surviving fragments prove to be difficult to understand because, as his nickname suggests, they are highly obscure and puzzling. They’ve been described more as poetic utterances rather than pronouncements that can be analysed into arguments. His fragments are known to be paradoxical and open to interpretation which is undoubtedly his personal style of writing. Here, his writing style is appropriate since the content itself is abstract. Thus, as mentioned in Ancient Greek Philosophy by Vijay Tankha, one can draw a parallel between his paradoxical language and a paradoxical world.

His fragments use metaphors to point to a variety of topics that can be loosely tied together to explain the worldly processes. He developed sets of opposites and the idea that things are in a state of flux.

Theory of Opposites

According to Aristotle, “all things that come into existence in the course of nature are either opposites themselves or compounded of opposites.” Heraclitus deals with the tension of opposites and gives instances of opposition. He generalises the nature of opposition and includes elements with correlated powers, natural processes and abstract terms like justice. As stated in Ancient Greek Philosophy, the fact of opposition is generalised by him into a principle but he doesn’t articulate this principle himself.

To further his Doctrine of Opposites, we will take into account other prominent philosophers’ take on the same and note the disparities between their ideas. For instance, Aristotle understood pairs of opposites like waking/sleeping, birth/death and good/bad, most opposed within the same genus, one of which lacks the other positive term. Milesians on the other hand focused on elements which seem to be naturally opposed, as explained through the above mentioned examples.

Plato too believed that opposites exclude each other, which means if one is present the other must necessarily be absent. However, an important point here is that opposed predicates can characterise the same subject successively if not simultaneously. This can be explained with the help of fragment B67 that states, “God: day night winter summer war peace satiety hunger. It is altered, just as when (fire?) mixed with incense is named according to the flavour of each.”

This just points to the fact that opposites aren’t always opposed to each other in the sense that they are mutually exclusive. Sometime ‘opposites’ prove to be part of the same process and become contraries by way of occurring at different points of time. So from B67 we can conclude that incense differs from fire in terms of its smell and smoke giving quality, but is part of the same genus. This similarity of opposites of the same subject constitutes the paradoxical part of Heraclitus’ philosophy.

Further, there is a claim that opposites are identical. This can be explained using B60, “road above and below one and same”. Here, Heraclitus suggests that the road up and down is the same but is described differently depending on the perspective of the observer. The opposites become identical in the sense that they’re different aspects of the same thing. Up and down are opposite but not entirely because it is the same road one is travelling.

Significance of Harmony

Now as mentioned before, Aristotle gives a systematic analysis of the concept of opposition, which eventually led him to believe that Heraclitus violated the principle of non-contradiction. Plato uses Harmony and quotes B51 that states “they do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself: a reversed harmony as of bow and lyre”, and takes sides with Heraclitus. He defines harmony as consonance, agreement and rhythm produced by fast and slow which was at variance initially but later came to agree. W. K. C. Guthrie in his book A History of Greek Philosophy talks about how Heraclitus makes use of Harmony in music to speak of a concord being in discord, factors which are in discord when they are composed but subsequently in concord. If we look at the example of the bow and lyre, the bow appears to be a static object but in actuality there is a continuous effort being put which will become evident if the string is not strong enough or is allowed to perish. A similar state operates in a tuned lyre. A smooth functioning of both the instruments is therefore dependent on this balance of forces which is therefore ‘good’. This bow and lyre symbolise the whole cosmos which without this struggle would disintegrate (B48- the bow’s name: life; its work, death). We will return to this point.

Despite several arguments, Aristotle sticks to his ideology and asserts that contraries cannot belong to the same thing at the same time and continues to accuse Heraclitus for violating the law of non-contradiction. Heraclitus rebuts this by putting forth the same theory of opposites even as contradictories, may transform from one to another or replace each other. In fragment of B49a “into the same rivers we step and do not step; we are and we are not.” Here, re-reading would take away the claim of violation of this principle. Aristotle’s further analyses of the same states that if the opposites of the same subject exist in same respect then it defeats the purpose of questioning and renders all statements true.

We can summarise the above arguments using B88 that says, “the same in (us) living and dead and/ both the waking and the sleeping and young and old, for these turning around are those, and those again turning around these”, Vijay Tankha, in his book goes on to explain that static and stable condition “conceals a dynamic condition and what is changing reveals order and harmony, where one condition passes into its opposite and then perhaps back again.”

Coming back to war serving as a metaphor for the opposition inherent in things, war is the universal creative and ruling force. The significance of this term can be explained by using bow and lyre again. It goes beyond the understanding that tension between different parts contributes to the functioning of the whole to include, that their functions are also opposed. Bow stands for war while lyre stands for peace. In addition to this, opposites come together at the level of phenomena and are held together by harmony that is hidden to the ordinary observer. Here we may use the fragment B80 that states “one must know that war is universal, justice strife, and everything happens by Strife and necessity”, because opposition is perpetuated to natural processes along with manufactured objects. Such opposition is mandatory for the proper functioning of both animate and inanimate objects on one hand, and whole that is constituted of them on the other. The “war and Strife” of the fragment provide the metaphor that captures this dynamic opposition.

To conclude the above stated ideas, we link them to the cosmos in which there is high need for things to be in opposition for only when the warring sides reach a state of continual tension do we find harmony.

Doctrine of Flux

Closely related to the identity of opposites, specifically from B88, is the doctrine of continuous change or the doctrine of Flux. One of his most famous sayings is “you cannot step into the same river twice”, which is easy enough to gather since water isn’t constant. Another fragment B12 states, “everything is moving like a river, nothing stays still”, and other fragments B91 and B49a (above) connect rivers with change. With the help of these fragments we arrive at the statement “all things are always changing”. Further translated as “on those who step into the same rivers, different and then different waters flow”. If we were to instead put emphasis on the human element, it would translate as “on those same persons who step…”. Following this we can claim that both rivers and persons are subject to the same process, continuous change.

B12 is a statement of coincidence of opposites but also specifies rivers as same. Though the statement is paradoxical, it isn’t necessarily false. A body of water (river) consists of changing waters and if it ceases to flow, it would just be a dry streambed. Thus, river becomes a constant existence that changes what it contains. Coming back to “all things are always changing”, we can positively conclude that some things stay the same by changing. Persons too then, can be understood in the same way, as living and continuing by virtue of constant metabolism, according to Aristotle. Based on this Heraclitus believes in flux, paradoxically a necessary condition of constancy, similar to the tension operating behind the bow and lyre.

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