Global health and the COVID-19 pandemic: a care ethics approach

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a case for a feminist care ethics approach to thinking about ethics and justice in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the existing commentary has been focused on arriving at a universally-acceptable principle of resource allocation – specifically for the global allocation of vaccine doses. A feminist care ethics approach, by contrast, begins not with prescriptive principles, but with the everyday practices of people existing in relations of responsibility for and interdependence with others. It thus gives rise to an expanded moral imaginary beyond the ‘cosmopolitan-nationalism’ binary, encouraging contextualized and multi-scalar inquiry into the enduring hierarchies that perpetuate global injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Care ethics
• feminist theory
• International Relations
• relationality
• global health

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 It should be noted that the Foreign Policy article was adapted from what was described as a ‘forthcoming paper’, co-authored by a larger group of nineteen philosophers, including the co-authors of the Foreign Policy article. This longer article, written primarily for an audience of academic philosophers and global health experts, develops the framework considerably and provides a more sophisticated, nuanced account. That said, it still follows a global distributive justice approach, focusing on the just distribution of scarce resources among nation-states. See Emanuel et al. (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona Robinson

Fiona Robinson is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.