Wynne Moskop, Ph.D., will present "Feminist Care Theory and Global Injustice" from noon-1 p.m. Wednesday, March 23, in McGannon Hall, room 144.
Everyone is welcome. Bring your lunches. Refreshments will be provided.About the talk:
In the last two decades, leading advocates of a feminist ethic of care have developed care as a comprehensive moral theory that can frame, or perhaps even replace, justice.
Care thinkers now apply the concept of care to global geographic disparities by suggesting ways in which countries in the global North should care for countries in the global South that depend on them for aid.
However, their implicit analogy here to parents caring for dependent children calls attention to a neglected problem in care theory that detracts from its capacity to address global injustices.
The ever-present potential for the giver of care to dominate the recipient requires an understanding of care that points more specifically than current understandings to distinctions between just and unjust relationships.
To think about how care theory might improve on this point, Dr. Moskop draws from the insights of Thomas Aquinas on the related virtues of charity and mercy, which feminist religious thinkers have cited as evidence of care thinking in the Western canon.
Differences between mercy and justice that emerge in Aquinas' descriptions show why an understanding of care that incorporates mercy, along with other forms of care, is too broad to be useful as a model for care as a comprehensive moral theory. Differences between mercy and justice also suggest that a better model is care that resembles justice, or friendship, which feminist scholars have discussed without fully developing. A focus on friendship, understood broadly by Aquinas (and Aristotle) to describe various kinds of associations built on reciprocity and shared ends, can enhance care thinkers' efforts to identify and address global relationships that are unfriendly and unjust. The global migration of care workers provides useful illustrations.