Center for Humans and Nature

Ideas of Humans and Nature

Return to main program page

Frontiers of Ethics: Ethics of Care and Place

Lead Staff: Bruce Jennings, M.A.

Rationale

In moral philosophy, feminism, and bioethics, an ethic of care has become a well developed alternative to other ethical approaches based on utilitarianism, the concept of rights, and distributive justice principles. These latter frameworks seem abstract, formal, and individualistic, whereas an ethic founded on the fundamental human experience of receiving and giving care stresses relationship, interdependency, and the concreteness of moral agents as mortal, vulnerable, and embodied selves. However, this ethical framework and its characteristic sensibility and orientation have not been brought fully to bear on questions of ethical responsibilities to non-human life, need, and vulnerability. Is a care ethic necessarily anthropocentric? It has played a part, obviously, in discussions of human interaction with other animals (especially pets) and in discussions of stewardship and conservation. How would care ethics function from an ecosystemic perspective? Could it enrich our way of conceptualizing our relationships with nonhuman systems?

Another dimension of care ethics that makes it pertinent to environmental ethics is its concrete emphasis on specific relationships in particular places and landscapes, both natural and social. Most work in moral philosophy and Western ethics is abstract in the sense that it seeks to discover standards of right and wrong that are universally valid and applicable. Paradoxically, moral psychology tells us that ethical thinking and our sense of value are rooted in the lived experience in a specific place, with specific natural and social characteristics, landscapes, and cultures. Can ethical theory and moral psychology be brought together in a philosophical account that roots our ethical obligations more concretely and locally?  Would that fall prey to a kind of relativism, parochialism, racism, and exclusivity that more cosmopolitan, universalistic, and humanistic ethical theories have tried to avoid?

History and Partners

This new project will work with leading thinkers in the fields of bioethics and environmental ethics who have made significant contributions to care and place-based ethical perspectives and whose future work in these fields is promising and could be enhanced and encouraged by collaboration with the Center. The project will also seek out the cooperation of institutional partners, for example universities with joint programs in bioethics and environmental ethics, whose interests, expertise, and mission overlap with the aims of the project.

Goals and Strategies

The goal of this project is to give voice to an ethic of place that avoids the dangers of relativism, parochialism, and racism so that this ethic can serve as an important conceptual resource and a valuable addition to building a new narrative of self understanding in American society. Joining an ethic of place with an ethic of responsibility for systems (as well as for individuals) and an ethics of care could provide a compelling way forward from an individualistic, agonistic, and consumer oriented society toward one more solidly based on community, relationality, and interdependency. Such an ethic would build effectively on what great American conservationists of the past were seeking at the core of our identity, what Aldo Leopold referred to as a land ethic.

To this end, this project will draw on the insights of multiple worldviews, across cultures and academic disciplines, by conducting original research and convening experts around a particular challenge or series of challenges.  This project will also communicate ideas broadly, through books, white papers, journal articles, symposia, and social media.

What’s Next

The activities of this project in 2011 will be largely a feasibility study and planning effort. Our focus will be on determining the nature of the original and unique contribution that the Center can make to these areas of ethics, using the methodology of its collaborative, interdisciplinary research and strategic intervention approach. Our work will begin with consultation and study among our staff, board, and fellows and other close collaborators. We will identify the appropriate thought leaders and scholars in the fields of ethics, law, and the social sciences who might be enlisted to assist us in identifying areas ripe for development in the ethics of care and ethics of place, so that our work supplements, rather than duplicates, ongoing work by moral philosophers, moral psychologists, and those working on the evolutionary basis of ethics.  In the spring or early summer of 2011 we will convene a scoping meeting during which, over the course of two days, the content, planning, and methodology of this project will take shape.