The Ethical Concept of Care Part One

By Stephen Downes
Nov 27, 2021
Transcript of The Ethical Concept of Care Part One

Unedited transcript from audio by Google Recorder

Hi everyone. I'm Stephen Downes. Welcome once again to ethics analytics and the duty of care. We're in module six, which is focused on the duty of care. We've already looked at that concept as a legal concept and now we're going to do a fairly extensive look at the ethical concept of care.

That's the core of this module, To be quite honest. Had kind of put off talking about this because I wanted to get it right? And it's going to be hard for me to get, right? And in fact, I'm going to need to begin with some caveats, that I think it's important that we keep in mind.

One thing is that? Well, look at me, The ethics of care. Is a new philosophy commented earlier today, that it didn't really exist when I was going to school or even when I was teaching philosophy, it's something that really only came into being as you know, a wide spread and well known philosophy after I had started in the field of online learning.

So there's that also kind of male and yet the ethics of ethics of care particularly associated, or with women with a feminist epistemology and a feminist perspective and you know, I don't want to be the man who sits down here and explains to women what their thought is. I think that would be a bad plan for a variety of reasons, but I have more caveats as well.

The and I noticed this, most of the people that I'm quoting in this section, although I've tried to take a wider perspective, but certainly most of the leading voices in this in this section are American. And, of course, I live in North America and convenience old person, completely different, none of the less.

It doesn't represent as much as I would, like the voices of people, and of women in particular, from places like Africa, and South America, and Asia, even Europe to some degree. So, I think there's a scope for a wider investigation that I can offer here. A lot of the people that I quote is, well, come from leaving academic institutions that are checked again earlier today and they're coming from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and they're gonna talk about oppression and it's hard for me to wrap my head around.

The idea of people from Harvard Stanford and Princeton talking about oppression, but then again, I'm sure it's hard for a lot of people to look at assist gender old white male from Canada talking about oppression. So, you know, I get that and as I'm sure they would say, I will say I can't help being who I am and I'm gonna do this subject.

The most justice that I can and I'm presenting it a bit differently than we'll see in a lot of presentations, you know, the the online encyclopedia's covering care theory or the books. You know, I did consult. That and other books on this. I've done. I've got a whole digital library generally, you get a presentation where it goes, you know, go again, nodding Joan Tronto, Bell hooks and presents them is, you know, like luck birthday him.

Is if they're presenting each, you know, a distinct and independent theory and arguing with each other, about what that should be. And I go really read that at all. That's not to say that the dogs have their own perspectives. Absolutely, they do and these perspectives really shines through clearly, in a comment from different places.

Obviously, but I felt that it would be a more appropriate treatment to think of athic of care as an undifferentiated whole and these authors as representing different aspects of it rather than as arguing among each other about what it should be. I think that might be more true to the ethic itself and it's more true to my enterprise certainly.

And again, all these authors are still with us, I checked. Some of them are very old but nonetheless, they can tell you what they think better than I can again. No debating that obviously. So what you're getting here, isn't me explaining them to them and people like them, this is very much an interpretive exercise.

This is the ethics of care as seen from my perspective, from the specific context of this project, which is to look at FM ethics and analytics, and AI within the field of learning. And so, you know, and gotta lose this discussion of that, and he's authors as well. But I come from that kind of background as well.

And so I think that seeing their work from this perspective can be valuable. I and even if it isn't, that's what I'm doing and that will have to live with that I guess. So I wanted to throw these, you know, these contacts in. You know, previously in this course you know I've said you know I mean analytic I'm not I'm not a very good analyst but I'm coming from a tradition where you know, you can't just hand ways, that's slicing things into categories, doesn't cut it as thinking.

We want to talk about causes we want to talk about how things happen and I I'm still going to carry this approach into care, theory as well, but I'm going to try to interpret it and evaluate it very much on its own merits. Because, although I sounds skeptical, starting off like this.

I also want to say I agree with most of it. Well they don't all agree among themselves, right? So but you know, I think they're on to something. I think that what they're talking about is important and reflective of a lot of the work that I have done over the years.

Now whether I've been influenced by them, I couldn't say I won't say that I sat down and read feminist philosophy before working on mooks, that would be a lie. But, you know, maybe voice to voice to voice to voice what they said, influenced me or more likely what people who influenced them said.

Also influence me, perhaps through different channels, no matter it doesn't really matter. But in the end, I do agree with a lot of that and I'm going to make it reasonably clear. I think where I'm finding a consistency between the ethics of care and the work that I've done over the years.

So, that's the caveats and we're eight minutes into this. But these were important things to say now. Let's ask as well. And I'm gonna talk about what care is so obviously, but I want to ask some questions first to set up this inquiry, and we're again for setting it up from the perspective of artificial intelligence and analytics and learning.

So we're going to need to ask things. Like how can neurons care is caring driven by evolution and if so, is that a cultural evolution or a biological evolution? I know nature versus nurture. I'm not going to dive into the nature versus nurture question, but it's going to come up.

There's carrying depend on rules and rationality. And even them if we're going to talk like that, what the what do rules and rationality even look like this carrying require a attachment, will see in our discussion that has a lot to do with connection and relationship but what how does that cash out?

Exactly. What do we mean by that? So these are some of the questions I have in the back of my mind as we begin this inquiry. Okay. So, let's just acknowledge right off the top care has many meanings. It's a word that is commonly used in our society. And a quote here from John Toronto.

When we say cares and lows care dinner to burden. When we say I care for you, we express love care. Always expresses an action or a disposition, a reaching out to something. When we use it, to refer to ourselves as in I take good care of myself. We are in that instinct thinking of ourselves as both the doer and that toward which we are reaching out Care.

Expresses relationships is used to express our deepest convictions as when we say. I care about dolphins, it is used by advertisers and then always to make us like a company and perhaps continue to buy its products. As we hear advertisers say McDonald's cares. What's important here is that all these different meanings of care are presented to us like a menu or a buffet from which we choose one or two.

I mean, the meaning at the word has many meanings and maybe dimensions of meanings for a reason. The concept that it's trying to get at has all of these different shades and nuances and that I think that's one of the things that really struck me in this particular investigation.

Is now how complex a concept it is? I mean, you know, we've looked at concepts, like duty, we've looked at concepts like, utility and happiness and yeah, I mean, there are shades of nuance in those as well. This one reaches, I think a bit deeper into the new ones and that might make it more useful.

And the other hand, it makes it more handy and we're going to need to be careful. And, you know, I'm going to be careful to draw out all of these different meanings, all of these different flavors. And again, it won't be like one of the big one, two, and three inside.

These are the essential things of care because I don't think it's that kind of concept. So, the concept of care itself pretty dates, of course, the ethics of care and a lot of the discussion of care, as a particularly feminist philosophy, as we'll talk about later, I found this short but at the time very popular work by Milton airoff, entitled on caring talking about to care for another person is in the most significant sense to help him grow and actualize himself.

You can tell that that's pretty feminine sweating. Just by the way, that that's expressed right. It's a process a way of relating to someone that involves development in the same way that friendship can only emerge in time through mutual trust and a deepening and qualitative transformation of the relationship.

So you know, the idea here is of mutual growth, mutual development the element of relationship. This exists in care, even with even before it becomes a feminist philosophy. Mayor of continues in his non-gender neutral language, in the context of a man's life. Caring has a way of ordering his other values and activities around it.

There's a basic stability in his life. He is in place in the world instead of being out of place or barely drifting a remlessly seeking his place. So care here is tied to identity. It's tied to value. You can see how it becomes the basis for an ethnic but it is something that existed prior to the 1980s when people started writing about this and it existed, prior to melting mayor often that we could go through a whole itemology of the word care, and the different flavors of care through history.

So, but there's nothing wrong with that. I've always said everything I ever talked about is stolen from somewhere else, and I probably be kinder to the writers of the ethics of care. But I do want to do want to talk about the idea, or I do want to stress the idea that they're drawing from a pre-existing concept here, and also importantly, the context that informed them in their own lives and in their own philosophical development.

Since then, there has been a proliferation of writing about care and care ethics. And I flew, this from Maria Prieg De La Bellicasa, who wrote matters of care in 2017. I've got links to just as an aside full text PDFs for a lot of these important reference works exist on line unwise.

A lot of the other branches of philosophy and so where I found them I was able to download it, download them and read them. I've indicated here as well on the slides. And if you actually access to slides and download the, you'll be able to click on these links and read these full length presentations.

So, anyhow, Philip De La Casa mentions, a bunch of different. Domains where carer ethics have been explored, including print critical psychology, political theory, justice citizenship scientific choices for glitter development, techno science, knowledge and science animal rights food politics, ecology, and many many more. There is no huge amount of writing in character ethics.

I'm only summarizing the very surface of it. The very perhaps leading edges of it, so we need to keep that in mind as well. Again, a lot of nuance, this is typical right? And it's something ignored in other domains who inquiry, not just in philosophy, not just in ethics, but around any idea, a whole community will develop in the whole bunch of different strands of flavors will develop technology.

Look at, you know, we started with the web simply email and we got this huge complex thing that we have. Now any domain you think of starts out simple starts out. Pretty clear really gets complex. And it only takes a generation issue for that to happen. And we're only a generation or so into discussion of care ethics.

I want student analysis of any decard again after they cart. You see this flood of rationalist philosophy just flower up behind them. So some dimensions of care. Again, not definitive, nor a menu, you don't choose. You don't say. This thing is part of empathy. This thing is part of equity, all of these dimensions are going to be present in any instance or practical application of care.

But there was, you've heard in the media? A lot recently, empathy social justice, equity cultural responsiveness, inclusion empowerment, all of these are things that we've seen. Of course, there's always someone who wants to assess all of these. And so, I've linked here to document police histling and gooseinson asking can quality from a care ethical perspective, BSS review, and they've broken it down to antecedents of the relationship, the relationship looking for the logic of the of the patient fit and then finally good care.

Again, these are aspects or dimensions of care, flavors of care. Even that's not quite right, imagine cares, being, and many color. All these are some of the different colors of that ball. Types of care, we found this discussed to some degree and, you know, again, I'm not sure how much this helps us but but I certainly were drawing out because different authors of emphasized, different aspects of care.

So, some of the care types of care, one that sort of resonates with me is care for ideas. If I didn't care about fair, for example, I wouldn't such spend near the amount of effort that I have on it. We certainly see people care for objects, I care for my computer and my computer case for meat while baby not.

But people do care for objects, I think that their cars is like people and name them. There's care for other people, obviously, and there's care for animals, they're self-care or care for ourselves. Care for what happens to us happens after we die. For example, there's care expressed as protection, care, expressed as production.

Altru talks about protection and production as being quote passes. The idea here is a you get to pass on care. Other kinds of care. If you're protecting, you get to pass on other kinds of care or responsibility for other kinds of care. If you're a producer and that's not a good notion.

I mean, it's not clear that just because you're in protection or just because you weren't production, you're not bound by responsibilities of other sorts of care. Of course, what we mean by that we'll have to drive and explain to some degree, try to says, what it means to be a in a democracy is to care for citizens and to care for democracy itself.

So our care can extend to our society and indeed, you know, to the environment as a whole to the ecology to the planet, as a whole, possibly for the universe as a whole. And if you're religious can be careful for God or care about God, or Allah or Vishnu etc.

All of these are aspects of human care. If you're wondering about the image on the slide, it's interesting because this aspect is sort of reflected in Robert a timeline. This is a set of excerpts from or set of images from the movie starship troopers, which is his book. It's hard to read but I'll read it.

What's the moral difference? Asks the instructor? If any between a citizen and a civilian. Now this is a meme. So we got a parody answer. A citizen returns the cart with any without any legal obligation. A civilian does not when you have structure responds exact words of the text but you get the concept right?

And someone who cares is more like on this interpretation a citizen someone who doesn't care on this in this context is more like civilian. There's a lot of discussion on the boards about whether this representation of hind line is satire or not and will indeed rather hindling himself is saturating or not.

Highly is an interesting and complex author, but there is this shared idea between a hind line and the ethics of care of having a responsibility to those around yourself and that responsibility as distinguishing, someone who is ethical as citizen from someone who is not emmersi civilian.

It's terror has been one of these things though. I mean, it's interesting to draw this distinction between kindling and the discussion of care because timeline doesn't talk about care properly. So, called detox about duty and honor and things like facts. And historically care hasn't had the same place as part of social activity that other things have or look at some of these other things.

And not eating stocks about these things as being marks of personhood and she says, and I quote, if we decide that the capacity became is as much a work of personhood as reason, a rationality, then we will want to find ways to increase this capacity. And as well, the experience of caregiving both has a carer and a recipient is essential for this.

So these are things that we're going to explore theme, from going to explore more in this presentation. But there is this idea, we can come up with this idea of, you know, the way people have defined being a person as being rational almost happiness, the rational animal, maybe there's a sense of humans as the carrying animal, I don't know what that would be in Latin.

So home will carry in this sorry, I suppose I could look it up and now of course carrying does not distinguish humans from non-humans. Perhaps, arguably, arguably non-humans care. But you know, recently can draw out this idea of caring as indicating personhood just as we could draw out this idea of reasoning indicating personhood or tool use indicating personhood or language use indicating personhood and could be thought of this part and personal of that.

Let's kind of important because it wasn't till recently, but women were considered persons. I mean, the sorts of reasoning and the sorts of mental processes that they would typically the responsible for words, considered marks a personhood. I think that's a big part of the shift that's taken place since the 1980s as we began to think more and more of women as persons, which just as an aside was long.

Overdue also more and more, we began to think of the way they look at it, but the world has being part of personhood and that there's a relationship between there. Certainly the suggestion in the writing is that there is such a relationship chair as well and, you know, or running up to 27 minutes here.

So, I don't want to continue this first introductory thing, care response to me as well, and we need to be careful how we express this. And no nodding contrasts her own work with Ellen blooms, the closing of the American money. I remember when I came out, he came out while I was in university and there was a lot of debate about it.

If you go back, you look at the archives of the University of Calgary newspaper. The gauntlet. You'll see some of that debate. We had some of that to me in our offices and balloon says, there's no real education that did not respond to felt me, okay, fair enough. But what boom says, is that in his way of identifying the needs, they must be quote, the permanent concerns of mankind and nodding comments.

He claims to know what the needs are before. He needs his students because he knows the unchanging quality of human nature. Well this this whole question of human nature is going to come up again. And again we've already touched on it, right? Nature versus nurture. Well, here it is again, but from the other side so their care does respond to a need.

But the criticism here is that bloom is just simply coming up with whatever this need must be from human nature. He's not alone. Even you think that mass flow is higher key? For example, we're looking also at a pyramid of needs based on some story about human nature.

And this leads us into a rhetoric of solving problems, just that's what bloom is doing, right? He solving the problem, he's meeting the need and similarly and this is from a review of Maria Queen. Villabella Casa where urge to resist the rhetoric of playing the game of solving problems by responding to any question in standard ways or by pretending that our particular research is not related to the textures of more than human worlds.

In a situated time of an awkward quote. Sometimes the writing generally is pretty clear and all of these officers, we unlike saying cunt, but sometimes you get some hotwordness because they're writing from a perspective often of critical theory, but, you know, there is this tendency to want to address problems with the theory or with a set of ideas or with a model.

But it is pretty general, you know, in standard ways. And so if there's a problem, whether it's academic, malpractice, poverty, racism, whatever you take your formula, you apply it to it. That's, that's the model, right? And and we build a cost is telling us. No, we need to resist and confidently, resist.

The rhetoric of playing that game of solving problems and it's a tough tough risk. Sorry. It's a tough game to not play because people want you to solve problems and you know, and the whole model of a theory is that you come up with a hypothesis or a generalization which is confirmed through evidence and tested through prediction.

And the whole idea here, is that you then apply it in the situations in artificial intelligence. This is also an objective and it's called transfer or you're transferring the knowledge from one domain into another domain and maybe that's possible. But the idea of creating an abstract entity like a model and using that to transfer, that's less clear that you can do it.

And at the very least here, the idea is that we can't just pretend that the particular situation that we're applying it to doesn't matter. You know, our particular research is directly related to the textures of whatever researching and it isn't just going to transfer over.

The ethical concept of care works against that tendency Wikipedia is definition sort of gets out. This although as an aside the discussion of Wikipedia and on the ethics of care and especially on the writers in this field is uniformly not newly as good as the coverage in other areas.

And I'm sure the editors of Wikipedia know this and maybe they'll care. And in this imbalance, on the part of Wikipedia has been noticed in the past and documented by people other than me. Well I will say this, We can quote from Wikipedia here, The ethics of care is enormative.

Ethical theory that holds that moral action centers on interpersonal relationships and care or benevolence as a virtue. Now that definition clearly is coming out of the terminology and the taxonomy of the other ethical theories, right? I'm not coming from within the perspective of care itself. But what's important here is that it draws out the concept of impersonal interpersonal relationships as core to care.

Some of the assumptions of a theory persons are understood to have varying degrees of dependence and interdependence on one. Another other individuals affected by the consequences of one's choices. Deserve consideration in proportion to their vulnerability, that's way too mathematically expressed. Nobody's measuring proportions and then situational details, determine how to safeguard promote the interest of those involved.

Now, again here, we're treating the vulnerable person as a passive recipient of care, but that's not the concept care is based on relationships. Care is based on a mutual exchange between the career and the care for and that what may be important thing about care is it's it's not that you get more old points that by acting as a carer.

It's not that, you know, caring is part of a virtue as in a virtue theory, the way we discuss before it's more about the concreteness of the relationship and the concreteness of the interests of those involved. That these are things that you cannot simply abstract away from but you could but if you did, you couldn't apply that through it to a new contacts because those things are still going to matter.

So now one of the originators of ethics of care and also one of because, you know, I'm not sure who was first. It doesn't matter. Carol Gilligan was responding to Colbert's six stages of moral development. Now, Colbert is well as killing him are both working within the context of cognitive psychology and their both influenced by Piaget.

So they're thinking of stages of development stages of moral development and they're thinking in terms of more or less developed. And that's all where the distinction comes from. What happened is. Killing him. Looks at coalbergs work. Describing these stage, these stages and says, a couple of things. First of all, but Culber is interviewing exclusively, loving your old boys to develop this theory and secondly, that women can only go so far in his six stages and then stop and don't get to the point of his, you know, being an authority or considering individual rights or abstract reasoning and creating ethical principles and that seems wrong.

And it is wrong, right? Who would develop, who would do us a theory of moral development and interview? Only boys. So her work is a reaction to that and in a different voice, she expresses that reaction and instead of the ethic and justice that we see in Culbert, Gilligan is presenting a kind of moral reasoning based on an ethics of care, which she says is developed primarily through a woman's voice.

And so the stages of care for gilling, it basically are three careful, the self as the first stage and then care for the other is a second stage and then care for both or a balance sets of care. Would be the highest stage. And she writes, women are more likely to make more decisions based on issues of care, inclusion, and personal connection, rather than on a more abstract and distant and distant notion of justice.

So that takes us to the felt need and that's where we'll wrap up. This part of the presentation. We talked earlier about felt need as being you know identified by people like bloom as found in human nature and so you can identify you, this is the need. This is what everyone has for yelling again, and for others who follow a ethics of care.

They're based on a recognition of needs relation and response. So, it's based on the actual consideration in the actual voice of the people who are impacted by whatever decisions are made, and this would include the person being cared for, but it's not necessarily limited to the person being cared for, you know, for example, we might ask a question, is it moral to steal bread to feed my wife who otherwise is starving and a serious justice response might be.

Yes, it is more because life is far more valuable than your possessions. And that's that's kind of a nice calculated way of doing it. And ethics of care, though, would ask questions like well how would this influence the relationship between you and your wife? And what would she think of you after and what are the longer term consequences if you're arrested and and sent to prison Malaysia of Alzheimer was initial your gone for 20 years?

How was that going to affect me? And what are the impacts on the water community? What is the impact on the person who depends on selling bread for a living because that person too, is almost certainly not rich, you know. It's not, you know, we think well yeah, no they just do without the bread but you know, it's gonna have an effect on them.

So all of these things come into play and as we'll talk more about in the next section, it's not just whether I think these things coming to play right and we're not doing mental exercises here. It's based on their expressed needs. It's based on how our actually having conversations with the person being cared for and possibly other people in the community so that they can express their needs because they are the ones that are in a position to say what they are.

You know, anytime I come up with some idea of what somebody needs, who's going to be some guesswork here, the more authoritative person to do that is going to be the person who's me time, addressing doesn't mean I agree with them. Doesn't mean they get cart blush, I'm not a servant, but it means they get expressed and then we have a conversation.

How we take into account my needs their needs, the wire needs of community and we come up with an approach that is appropriate for these circumstances. Okay, I'm going to end this one here and but don't go away. We're gonna have a part to. We're only one fifth of the way through this, to me, fascinating discussion.

So talk to you soon.

Force:yes