Entrepics and Care Ethics

... The entrepic motions toward a goal of world prospering that emphasizes stewardship of systems that constantly borrow from each other. Such attentiveness seeks out sites of breakdown that are sometimes inevitable, but that also signal what may require responsiveness and healing. The entrepic thus brings us into the orbit of an ethics of care.

This project began with a twofold concern: first, studying the various ways humanity has taken up entropic phenomena, and second, finding strategies to work within the limitations of entropics with a mind toward the guardianship of finitude. While I can only gesture to it here, this latter purpose is one I see contributing to care ethics and the concerns many care ethicists have with vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness, all of which the entrepic turn involves. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler describes the shared condition of human vulnerability as an ontological fact, “one that emerges with life itself,” the source of which cannot be recovered, insofar as “it precedes the formation of ‘I.’” Vulnerability is directly associated with finitude and contingency, both of which are constitutive of the human condition insofar as human beings are fundamentally interdependent, incomplete, and exist in an existential state of original precariousness. Vulnerability, understood as fundamental openness, is one core aspect of being in a world that demands attention and respect. Born into a world that must tend to us before any possible reciprocation, each of us is constitutively incomplete and dependent on others. No human is an island, and sovereign subjectivity, built as it is upon the foundation of autonomy, inviolability, and independence is splintered through recognition of our deeply exposed and fragmentary condition. Ontological vulnerability forms the ground of our ability to be either recognized or dehumanized, thus raising concerns about how precarity is unequally distributed onto different groups either trapped by or benefiting from systemic forms of oppression. To be open to others and the world can bring harm, but it can also bring connection and love. This is a central insight into the ethics of care and one to which entrepic philosophy connects.

In a virtual roundtable involving several prominent thinkers, Jasbir Puar pushes back against Butler’s emphasis on the human in the discussion of precariousness and precarity. Puar argues that if Butler is serious about not rehabilitating the more dangerous ideas of humanism’s emphasis on sovereign subjectivity, then the discussion needs to move beyond human vulnerability to engage “other animals, plant life, and ecologies of matter.” I believe entrepics offers a contribution to these larger concerns of care ethics because it promotes a form of thought and action that rejects nihilism by awakening concern for the many aspects of material finitude. This invites humanity to care not just for itself but to turn toward the many organisms, organizations, and structures that form the manifold worlds of which we are composed and in which we participate.

The benefit of care ethics is that “it addresses aspects of the human condition that other moral theories tend to overlook or underplay — our vulnerability to injury, our inevitable dependencies, and the ubiquity of our needs.” As the turn toward care and reverence for finitude in the face of death is at the heart of entrepic thought, what Sarah Clark Miller calls “the four faces of finitude” (need, vulnerability, dependence, and precariousness) are always in play. The emphasis on finitude is directly in line with the goals of entrepic philosophy, which invokes consideration and reverence precisely at those moments when humans face mortality. These are universally shared experiences by all of us insofar as we are human, even as these are not by any means shared in the same ways. Additionally, entropic philosophy shows this interdependence to be something that expands beyond the human and is part of the warp and weft of the cosmos itself.

The moral theory known as “the ethics of care” implies that there is moral significance in the fundamental elements of relationships and dependencies in human life. Normatively, care ethics seeks to maintain relationships by contextualizing and promoting the well-being of care-givers and care-receivers in a network of social relations. Most often defined as a practice or virtue rather than a theory as such, “care” involves maintaining the world of, and meeting the needs of, ourself and others. It builds on the motivation to care for those who are dependent and vulnerable, and it is inspired by both memories of being cared for and the idealizations of self. Following in the sentimentalist tradition of moral theory, care ethics affirms the importance of caring motivation, emotion and the body in moral deliberation, as well as reasoning from particulars. ...

Carol Gilligan

In In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), Carol Gilligan introduced the idea that there is a “different voice” in ethics that had previously been underappreciated in developmental psychology. Her research criticized Lawrence Kohlberg and other psychologists who worked on moral development focusing on males. The scales Kohlberg and others were using to test moral development, when applied to females, suggested that a large percentage of females never reached moral maturity. Gilligan argued that her research on moral development demonstrated that there two distinct moral voices and two distinct ways of demonstrating moral maturity. In a later paper, “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” she posited that each voice is associated with a justice-dominant or care-dominant moral orientation. Most people are capable of switching between these orientations quite fluidly, but tend to default to one or the other.

Nel Noddings

In Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), Nel Noddings developed a theory that embodied what Gilligan had identified as the voice of the care-oriented moral thinker. Noddings’ theory gave moral motivation and moral obligation a foundation of natural caring. Natural caring generates a spontaneous sense of obligation (an “I must”) in response to needs that arise in our immediate relationships. When natural caring doesn’t arise in response to another, our past experiences of caring provide us with the basis of an ideal to aim for: ethical caring. We construct this ideal from our own stock of experiences of successful care: care that is both offered and received as caring. Our obligation to aim for ethical caring stems from the value we place on relatedness. Acting upon this ideal sometimes, though not always, establishes (or re-establishes) natural caring.

Notably, our moral obligation to care is, on Noddings’ view, something that can’t be captured in a set of universal rules or principles. What constitutes successful caring is highly specific to the particular people and situation.