Enacting Care

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the ethics of care and, from a different perspective, the enactive approach in cognitive science, have put forward a strong criticism of traditional individualistic and rationalistic accounts of autonomy, cognition and agency. Both approaches have suggested a revision of these notions in terms of a relational ontology with an emphasis on the embodied and situated nature of cognition and agency. In academia, however, there has not yet been any attempt to focus on theoretical affinities between these two approaches or to consider the prospective consequences of merging their perspective. The paper aims at filling this gap by sketching possible theoretical intersections of both approaches and by demonstrating the significance of the affinities at the level of practical implications. I argue that enactivism and the ethics of care can be mutually informative particularly in conceptualization of the processes of societal transformation and in grounding the strategies of addressing the exclusion and discrimination of people who are stigmatized as ‘different’ on the basis of their various disabilities.

Keywords:

• Ethics of Care
• Enactivism
• Autonomy
• Social Institutions
• Autism
• Exclusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Enactivism is an umbrella term that is used to describe various related approaches within cognitive science and philosophy of the mind. In what follows, I will focus on the enactivist tradition whose philosophical foundations have been laid by Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) in The Embodied Mind and which has been further exemplified by Thompson (2005, 2007), Di Paolo (2005, 2009), De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher (2010), Froese and Di Paolo (2011).

2. In what follows, I will provide only a sketch of widely shared ideas behind the care ethics in order to make clear, in the following step, how they might be linked up with enactive views of the mind, agency, autonomy and morality.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under ‘Empathy: Between Phenomenology and Neurosciences’ [grant number P401/12/P544]. I owe my gratitude to Virginia Held for her valuable comments on previous versions of the paper.