Reimagining Government with the Ethics of Care: A Department of Care

ABSTRACT

The question of how to apply care ethics to institutions and social policies has been much discussed, with recent research expanding the scope of care ethics policy analysis to policy areas that are generally not viewed as ‘care related’. This paper seeks to engage with this literature in a critical and constructive way to explore more fully the transformative potential of the ethics of care. In particular, this paper argues that the aforementioned literature uses care ethics to focus on practices of care, as opposed to employing the ethics of care as a critical political theory (Robinson, Fiona. 2018. “Resisting Hierarchies through Relationality in the Ethics of Care.” International Journal of Care and Caring XX (xx): 1–13). While such analyses are important, this paper proposes a ‘Department of Care’ as a thought experiment to demonstrate how the ethics of care, as a critical political theory, allows for a radical critique of institutions and governing norms, and inherently destabilizes the dominant understandings of the purpose, structure, and role of government and public policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics of care
• politics of care
• care as political
• institutions
• governing norms

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to sincerely thank Fiona Robinson, Christine Koggel, and especially Sacha Ghandeharian for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Thank you also to the two anonymous peer reviewers for thoughtful comments and feedback. Additional thanks to editor Derek Clifford for exceptional editorial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Maggie FitzGerald is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Notes

1 By department, I mean a sector of a national government that deals with a particular issue. Importantly, there are many variations in governments, and departments within governments, across nations and contexts. Accordingly, I believe it is important to note that as a Canadian citizen, this imagining is much informed by the structure of my own government, and thus is perhaps best understood as a thought experiment about government in the Canadian context. In this way, this paper participates in a rethinking of the institutions of democracy, and particularly Western institutions of democracy, and thereby aligns with care ethics work like Tronto (2013) and Bourgault (2017). At the same time, however, because the Department explored here is a thought experiment, the specific nature of the institution I am imagining is perhaps less important than the broader analysis facilitated through this discussion of a Department of Care. Indeed, my goal is to broaden the horizons of possibility for rethinking our governing norms and the institutions they operate in and through; for this reason, I do not want to limit this imaginary by asserting a pre-determined state form.

2 Held (2013, 648) makes a similar point in her review of Barnes' book (2012), noting that Barnes’ research on everyday practices of care is a fascinating contribution ‘for those of us who have participated in the development of care ethics as moral theory.’ In so doing, Held also implicitly points to two strands of care ethics literature – one focusing on practices of care and the other focusing on the ethics of care as moral theory.

3 The idea that there are some ‘non-care’ related areas of policy is interrogated more fully below.

4 By the socio-symbolic order, I mean the governing norms, discourses, ideologies, ways of thinking, and social habits which structure social relations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 767-2015-1242].