Internationale discussiegroep over ethics of care

Jan Jans was onlangs in San José (VS) voor de bijeenkomst van de Society of Christian Ethics. Zijn plan is om met ingang van 2011 een aparte, internationale discussiegroep voor ethics of care op te richten. Doel is om de communicatie tussen de internationale onderzoekers te verbeteren. Hij schreef hierover:

“In a broad sense, ethics of care is a political-ethical approach that aims at understanding care by investigating it through a specific lens. An ethic of care looks at society and chooses ‘care’, and especially relations and structures of care as its window/focus.

In the eighties of the 20th century, ethics of care emerged out of feminist ethics by its attention for care as a structure within communities. For an ethic of care, the point of departure is the conviction that each and every kind of care contains something of value, some ‘good’. Good care turns out to be more than ‘useful’, ‘efficient’ or ‘pleasurable’. Care itself belongs to morality: it deals with a good life, with and for others, in just institutions.

Ethics of care looks at care with a special interest in:

• What makes situations unique and specific
• The fact that relations of care always contain dependency and asymmetry
• The given that humans are vulnerable because of their corporality
• The importance of engaging in a practical relationship with those who are dependent upon care in order to discover what is good for them.

The initiative for this new discussion group comes from researchers working at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), who are already engaged in the network “Care and Contested Coherence” and includes Annelies van Heyst and Carlo Leget as editors of the series “Ethics of Care” (Peeters Publishers). In their approach of an empirically grounded ethic of care, key components are ‘professional loving care’ and ‘transformative presence in practices of care’.

The goal of the discussion group is to foster exchange between researchers firstly from the European and American areas, aiming at broadening the scope to include the South and the East.”