An ethics of care can serve regressive as well as progressive ends

Evidence

However, an ethic of care speaks not in one voice but in a number of different political voices, both particularised ones of concern for family and immediate others, and more general forms voicing concern for nature and wider social groups. These voices will not necessarily be in harmony. To expect that they would be so would be to mistake what such voices have to offer us. The voices of care are noninstrumentalising voices, but they can carry widely different political messages. There cannot be a single answer to the question of whether the ethics of care is socially progressive or socially regressive—it is a determinable whose determinates can be either. The care which women provide in the context of the family in market society typically has an incompleteness and an ambiguity, the more so to the extent that it is controlled and structured by its larger context. Often the ethics of care is contained and adapted to a supportive role, that of supplying the care and the human values omitted from the public sphere and so making life tolerable or possible, or that of providing the co-operatively socialised individuals on which the public sphere relies but which it could not itself provide. Thus familial care can support a conservative value system resisting extension of care to non-familial or ‘undeserving’ others or working to disadvantage women by denying them equal participation in the public arena (Bacchi 1990:244–5); the mother working in the munitions factory can give care for ‘the boys’ as the justification for work supporting militarism (Ruddick 1989:87). Or, in the ecological case, a woman can give care for a husband’s or son’s welfare and employment as the reason why she thinks a logging practice, which will destroy an endangered species, should continue. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 716

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ecofeminism thread and to the chapter on duality within subordinated identities — care ethics is not automatically anti-dualistic when contained by market society. — connects to: Virtue ethics of care extends to nonhumans more readily than universal rights — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 649; Women cannot safely let themselves be defined by the caring voice — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 787; Imperial ethics operate by granting exemptions from care rather than lacking morals — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1390
• SEED: Essay angle for Eco-Justice: care ethics as ‘custodian story’ that can be co-opted — the munitions-factory mother and the pro-logging wife as cases where care reinforces dominance rather than resisting it.

Broader Connections

• Imperial ethics operate by granting exemptions from care rather than lacking morals #exemplifies (0.82) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1390