Caring Democracies

By Stephen Downes
Nov 28, 2021
Transcript of Caring Democracies

Unedited audio transcription from Google Recorder

Hi everyone. I'm Stephen Downes. Welcome back again to Ethics Analytics and the duty of care. We're still in module six. I kind of apologize for that because this is going on for quite a while, but there is a lot to talk about here and a lot of this stuff is new and you know, needs to be brought out and explained in some detail.

So anyhow module six is the duty of care and this particular video is on carrying democracies and this was and the main focus of some writers. And I'm thinking especially Joan Trento Toronto and Nell Nottings but you know it's it's a topic that occupies a thought of a lot of people who are writing about the ethics of care and especially writing about the ethics of care, in an educational context.

Because there's such a close relationship between the needs and demands of democracy, and the resulting need and demand for an education system, and an education system of a certain type. So we're going to be looking at that, for this particular video. And then after that, we'll look more deeply into the concept of democratic education, which will wrap up our look at the duty of care.

It's been a long investigation, a lot of videos, a lot of content, but it's really important to consider these topics when we get back as we will, in the next module to looking at how all of this discussion of ethics plays out, when we think about the decisions that we make, when using artificial intelligence in education in learning analytics and, you know, in society generally?

Okay, so I'm going to pick up where I left off and in fact, on the same, slide on the idea of unequal relationships, apparently, because I wasn't completely happy with how I dealt with it last time and partly, because this really is the logical place to be, begin a discussion of democracy, and justice, and injustice, and community, and all of that.

So, Sarah Lucia Hogland, argues that the idea of unequal relationships, which really is what's presumed in an ethics of care are, ethically problematic, and consequently, a poor model for an educational theory. I'm not sure that she's wrong here. She argues that on nodding's account of ethical caring. And here this is all quoting from Wikipedia.

The one caring is placed in the role of the giver and the cared for in the role of the taker. And you know, if we jump from this context to the wider political context, there's all kinds of rhetoric around the idea of people who are givers and people who are takers, you know, the people who produce wellness society and the people in crew simply receive well from the society.

Etc. So the one caring in this relationship is the dominant. One, two, a degree. Choosing, what is good for the cared for although we've talked about that, right? It's not a case. Where the carer simply says, this is what's good for you, but nonetheless, it's still the case that the cared for is putting the position of being a dependent and very often in a position without any actual real power in the relationship.

This comes up, especially in schools, especially in schools where you have younger students. And there's not really much of a sense where you can say that. The students has power in the student teacher relationship, you know? They usually have to bring in a proxy like their parents or the school board or lawyers or something like that.

Right malarily in health care. It's not the case that has that the patient has power with respect to the doctor, the nurse or the hospital. And the way we know this is how poorly the concept of choice plays out in a health care and the US health care. You have to pay for your care, which means that the relationship is a transactional one.

And the relationship is one where in theory, right? The patient could choose, not to pay for the treatment and that wouldn't receive the treatment. And the result of that is often death, because people can't afford to pay for the treatment so they pay for the treatment. Because what else are they going to do?

Or at least they say they're going to pay for the treatment and then place themselves in a lifetime of debt. Now, this is not power relationship here, right? This is not one where the patient has equal standing with the the hospital. So, it's not what we might call a free market.

And so creating an ethics. Based on this unequal relationship is problematic. Now, I was thinking about that in between doing videos, we had to buy a new fridge as the old one died. Speaking of not having power and I had to go to the store. So, I'm sitting thinking about this and, you know, the whole concept of the ethics of care in this context is one that's told from the perspective of the person who has the power.

And if you think about, you know, reframe it in your mind, that way for a moment, The way it's depicted, right? The importance of getting the expressed need from the person being cared for, right? We were not saying and and I'm not reading so much sentences like if you are in a position of dependence it is important for you to express your need.

That's equally true but we're not reading it that way, right? We're reading this as an ethic which governs the care giver rather more than an ethic that that governs. The cared. And, you know, it takes me back to the old approaches to international aid, where the rich countries would decide what the poor countries needed.

And yeah, they would be even enter into a dialogue and a discussion and then say, well you have to exercise with strength, you have to have, you know, economic policies, that do whatever you have to have free market. Economies you can't have social programs and the country is basically, just took it.

Because what else are they going to do? They found themselves in this position, where through no fault of their own, they had massive, social problems and deep, foreign debt. And in order to be able to do commerce with the rest of the world, at all, they had to accept these conditions, I thought I've even less neutral ways of describing that, but I decided not to use them, but but you can imagine for yourself, you know, how all of this and the role of colonialism, and the role of racism, all, please into this.

And we have this very unequal relationship, and then, we're going to describe in ethics of that relationship. And who's it going to be addressed to? Well, the wealthy, right? The wealthy nations. So there is a sense here, where the ethics of care is an ethics written by wealthy people for wealthy people.

And we want to be aware of that. I want to be aware of that. Now. I'm not exactly a wealthy person but you know on a global scale. Well just look my office behind me. I'm doing pretty well compared to the rest of the world. So even me talking right now about this, you know, I'm a wealthy person talking about ethics for other wealthy people, and part of that is I'm not going to tell a poor person, what their ethics ought to be, that would be wrong.

And the other part of it is, you know, ethics is deeply and intensely personal. And so, what I'm talking ethics. There's a certain sense here that I have to be talking to myself. Now, I think a lot of these considerations are taken up in the ethics of care, but not on a naive reading of the ethics of care.

And maybe naive is a cruel word to use in this context. And I think that if we look at the ethics of care, as also an ethics that creates, what what I call here, a caring democracy that we begin to, at least approach some kind of understanding where the ethics that are in play, aren't just an ethics of rich people because really, that wouldn't be helpful.

Would it? At least I don't think so. So, let's look, then we'll come back to this idea about virtues, which we talked about in the previous section in a previous video and we begin with the observation. And again, this is coming from a discussion of no nodings from UVM that the American tradition and also North American.

I might even include the Europeans, but last to less and degree regard virtues as personal possessions hard, one through a grueling process of character building. Now, you may recall in the previous video, I discussed whether we should think of virtue in that sense where you have less virtue if you have less virtuous characteristics.

Now, if you're not as generous as you could be, does it? That it doesn't follow that you're somehow ethically less worthy, and that's what applies here. So, contrast that perspective with John Dewey's perspective, where we have virtues as quote, working at applications of personal capacities with environmenting forces, right?

In other words, working with what you have in the fire in the environment that you live in. And so nodding straws from that. I think quite accurately the observation that how good or how bad I can be depends in substantial part on how you treat me. So, my ethical virtue, my virtue generally isn't just a thing that I create and that, that applies equally, well for rich people and poor people.

And, you know, we've had this discussion before another context, right, you know, rich person isn't rich typically because they're more, virtuous, and other people, no matter how they're treated in forbs or the Wall Street Journal. A rich person is rich usually because of luck. And if it's not locked, then again, as if I said, as I've said elsewhere, it's a primer fish.

Prana face, she indication of criminality. In other words. Wealth. Very often indicates how I convert you, but let's go with the lock thing mostly. So the look aspect of well really boils down to how the rest of society treats you and the way the rest of society treats somebody who looks into wealth is it gives them money and maybe possessions.

And sometimes in the olden days people, right? Society, for whatever reason decided to give this child, who was growing up more money than it gave other children. Now, there were processes for this, like inheritance, right? Of prima, janitor, all of that, right? You know, we didn't talk about the processes, but but it boils down to, they received more from society than other people.

And remember, in the previous video, I talked about, no, how generous you can be Bill Gates, can be generous to the tune of 30 billion dollars, I can't. Well, that depends in substantial part on how Bill Gates is treated by society. As compared to me, for example, society as it is currently constructed, grants bill gates, the ability to form a company, the ability to retain ownership of software and only license it out.

The ability to retain copyright trademarks patents and therefore, charge royalties for things and so on, right? There's the whole business structure that enables the wealth of the bill gates. So that's the observation here, right? My individual virtue, my ethical standing, or even indeed, my ethical possibility is not independent, from social virtue, or social, ethical standing.

And that's a really important realization and that's something I think that really distinguishes, and ethics of care from the other, ethical theories that we've been looking at which are mostly focused on personal individual ethics of choice as made by rational individuals, right? And the different ethical standings or the the possibility of an ethical standing for a society or community is relegated to something like politics or whatever.

And I'll be honest here, I've said on many occasions that ethics is the domain of the personal. And I still believe that despite what I've just said here and politics is the, the mechanisms, the set of mechanisms that we need in order to have us avoid killing each other.

So I don't consider politics to be part and parcel of the distribution of resources of a society. I so, but but you know, there's some fuzziness in some overlap here. So given that then the duty to act as described by an ethics of care isn't like a continent kind of duty that is based on a day ontological theory where a rational person considers what the various options are for example, whether the principle one follows can be expressed as a universal and followed by everyone.

It's more, it's more a case where there's a duty to care in the sense that it's an inclination to care. It's, you know, the I've talked already about the motivation or the urgency of care as compared to this more rational thing and this this is Britannica talking. Remember we have two male authors writing in the botanical article, this impulse better to call it.

I think a sentiment is obligatory in anyone who aspires to the sense of self as a moral caring person. Now that's not it, right? That's a reading of the duty to care as a personal individual obligation, but it's not something that you can pull off just by yourself. So, it's, you know, it's it's a lot like climate change, right?

And there's, you know, a lot of cases people are talking about, well, you know, climate change, is a matter of individual responsibility. And that's why we need to choose to drive electric cars, use public trends at we, for our new refrigerator needed to make sure that it was energy, efficient and inner energy, star certified and all of that.

But, you know, someone like me, can't do much about global warming. Just there's a limit to what I can do. I try to keep a pretty low footprint in front of the most part I succeed, but it's society as a whole that is going to have to make this change.

So even if the climate presents itself to me as something that is urgently needed to be addressed and therefore calls in me a duty and you know, and and I can't really be thought of as a moral caring person. Unless I deal with the environment, it is nonetheless, a social thing.

And we tend to think of social things as things that ought to be organized rationally, these rankings of duties these universal obligations etc. But here what we're saying is that the inclination to care is the important thing that ought to govern our society and not just businesses usual. You see the distinction here so that leads us to talking about how our duties, extend outward.

So quoting from Jenny, McNes, who wrote a really nice summer of neonatings, universal caring is impossible, conflict and guilt are inescapable risks of caring. We can't do all the caring for all the world at any given time, knowing individual can and again our caring is not independent of our social economic cultural and other contexts.

Right at the same time here's Toronto speaking. Virginia held. Most recent account of a graphics of care treats the global as a meaningful level of care. In addition to the level of the intimate interactions of the household. For example, if NGOs can create connections of that foster care, that's nothing but good, but as long as the nation state remains the container within which car is allocated, then global unjust inequalities of care will exist.

And that's because the nation state acts in its own self-interest. It's kind of like, you know, if you know, if you care only about your immediate family, that's not really. An instantiation of the duty of care, because your family is embedded in this social structure and what you do impacts people around, you know.

So that's why you don't burn tires in your back yard. Even if everybody in your family, says it's fine, right? And countries are the same way. You know, if we think of the country as a family, well, some countries have been burning tires in their backyard and maybe they shouldn't have, but they didn't consider what the impact of burning tires would be on other countries, especially countries, that can't even afford tires in the first place.

Okay, in the analogy a bit too far but you get the idea, right? So the universal is a domain of care but we need to. And and so we need to be careful not to create these artificial boundaries, you know, separating family that we care for with everyone else separating nations that we care for and not everyone else at the same time.

Recognizing that the capacity of an individual to care for everyone is limited. It's a tough dilemma, right? I can't personally care for a starving person in Malawi, I can't. Because if I did that for each starving person in Mali, it would overwhelm me At the same time. I can't consider the starving person in Malawi as external to or not part of what I understand to be the community about which I should be caring, right?

The starving person in Malawi should generate in me some urgency to act. Even if I can't care for that starving person in Malawi, it's a tough thing to express. So yes, I'm gonna throw numbers and maybe express it that way and this, you know, it's a bit of a, a bad way to do it but it'll get the idea across and out of that might be.

So if I fully careed for the starving person in Malawi, that might be a hundred dollars, right? And I can't pay a hundred dollars to wherever you're starving person in Malawi. I just don't have that kind of money but if I can see myself as being in a position where the starving person in Malawi matters to me then as part of my political action and perhaps the political action of everyone involved, my community as a whole can make that $100 available and that might mean like you know maybe one sent out of my pocket and one sent out of everyone else's pocket to make sure that that $100 is there for the starving person in Malawi.

Okay, take that example is what I mean, accepting ignore the numerical quantitative aspects of it because it's not going to be simply reducible to quantities and that's kind of what I mean. And I think I mean yeah, I mean the literature is all over the place on this on what you can care for, what you can't care for, what your sphere of caring is.

But I think that really is the only consistent way to talk about a duty of care.

So, we need to be thinking in other words about community community clock community. And again, there are different levels of community, right? There's the people on my street, the people in my town, the people in my province, the people in the world, all of those coming to play. So and what we're trying to do here is quote on quote, build community.

So this isn't about me as a rich person, helping poor people. This is about me as a member of a community working toward a community, such that there aren't poor people. So now we go to Bell, Hooks to build community requires vigilant awareness, of the work. We must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

Well, that's kind of a hard thing to grasp. While it was, I've put images. And well I just I took that quote put it in Google and this is what came up, Fox News and, and all of that Trump etc. So those those are, I guess the things that perpetuate domination.

So, what's going on here, again? Our creation of no wrong word, our having of moral virtues, or our capacity to behave in an ethical way. In our capacity to care is influenced by the community around us. And one of the ways the community around us influences us is to socialize us, you know, and this is what a lot of this, you know, critical theory and indeed.

Critical race theories about right. It's about the socialization that takes place that would lead us to behave in ways that just perpetuate the domination. Simple example, maybe two simple but we are socialized to want to drive and especially to drive using cars that can see in gasoline. So we behave in such a way that we use gasoline but our use of gasoline requires that we support oil companies in order to receive a gasoline.

Otherwise, we can't drive, but oil companies in order to conduct business in the way that they do need to do things like kill poets, like King, Sol Wea, and Nigeria. And so I were action of driving. A car is behaving in a way that perpetuates the actions that the oil company took in Nigeria and and that they take another countries as well.

So what hooks is saying here is to build a community, we need to be aware of the social forces that do things like lead us to want to drive curse. Now, I mean, the criticism here and there is one is that that's a pretty passive way of looking at it, right?

Well, I don't choose to drive a car. I just drive a car because you know, socialization makes me want to on the other and you'll notice the sort of it's the sort of approach that somebody who knows would talk about to someone who doesn't know. Right. You know, I know you want to drive a car but really the reason why you want to drive a car is because you've been socialized into it.

That's not right either. Is it? So but we are not independent of the interactions and relationships that take place in our society. So the, the urgency here and, you know, so I'm going back to the motivation and urgency. The urgency here is to be aware of these socialization factors that affect ourselves and other people to more or less a degree.

Have their own obligation to be aware of socialization. Not affects them, but what does not come out of that? Is a sanction for us to tell them to be aware of the socialization. See the difference here, right? It's not about me telling other people, you must be aware. It's on about me, the knowing person, the person and power and control.

Informing. The people who have less parent control that, no really. All your desires are just socialization. They're not real. Oh yeah. Well I have the same desires too and can it's all just socialization so that just doesn't fly. Right? So, and so you need to be, I'm here, I'm slipping into it, right?

We need to be, I need to be aware of that.

Only the other hand, we can't just let it be the case. At least in the argument is made that anything goes and this is the markets argument, right? So, the markets argument is basically each person acting independently on their own will make decisions such that the totality of decisions will exhibit something like a wisdom of of the crowds, or as Adam Smith said, the invisible hand of the marketplace, but we know that the marketplace fails.

So, but you know, when it comes to things like any quality poverty, you know, the need for education, even they need for health care to a large degree. We don't make these community responsibilities. We make these responsibilities of charity. In other words, we make them basically the basis of individual responsibility.

So you have an individual responsibility to contribute to a charity that will in turn address the problem of hospitals. And so, again, if we allow just all the individuals to make their own decisions in their own way, we get the desired kind of social justice that we want except we don't right, John Toronto, the market passes of bootstraps and charity allows self-interested behavior to allocate care responsibilities.

They do. So, however, only by uneven processes, where those with greater resources, get more care. So if you think about it, when rich people don't eat to hospitals they may donate somebody to hospitals for poor people. But they're just is likely to donate the hospitals that serve well them, you know, the charity begins at home, not sort of thing, right?

And we see this acting in the community, look at the foundation support. Open educational resources and look at who these foundations are supporting. These foundations are not taking all of their money and using it to develop say a content authoring industry in Malawi, just not happening. No, the charities money that are the foundations money goes to organizations like MIT and Stanford and Yale Harvard to create resources which will then be dumped on Malawi and other places.

And we'll call that open education or resources and yay. We've done charity and accent market, failure, and it's a market failure for several reasons. For one thing. After that process, you really haven't done anything to help the people of Malawi, right. Because once they use those resources, they're still right in the same situation that they were.

And in fact and you see this a lot with food aid, you've actually depressed the market in the recipient nation, so that people who actually produce the things that they really need in that country. Can't compete with free and that's an objection. A lot of people have raised with respect to open educational resources as in our agreement for allowing, you know, commercial resale of these resources.

But again all you've done there is create, you know, and the intermediary sex sector which takes resources, adds a price to them and themselves them, and you still have it developed a market capacity in that country. So market. Yeah, this is why John Toronto calls them market passes, right?

These are passes. And I've mentioned this before there things that you can do. Instead of caring, right, there are a past like, you know, here's my pass. I don't have to care because I've provided charity. So, you know, I've done my bed and in fact, you know, it's even worse because she adds at the end of the day, given the way the market seems timeless.

It becomes impossible to think structurally about past injustice in the face of market ideas. There's a reason why Malawi can't produce its own food or educated told people and it has nothing to do with the people of Malawi and everything to do with the colonial history of self-central Africa.

The Lake area. And but if we just say, well, we'll just let the market forces decide that that sweeps away, the full impact of that history. And says okay well everybody has their own voice in the marketplace will just let it all play out. But the way this works is the people with more money, get more votes, they support themselves and if possible, they can continue and even deepen the exploitation of those parts of the world without money to cast, folks.

And so, that's why a marketer approach doesn't work. This has important consequences when we go back to talking about artificial intelligence and analytics. Particularly when we think about the way these things work because we have self-contained independent on a mess entities neurons or people or whatever who are interaction with the rest of the world around them.

And, you know, making basically what really look like market-based decisions. And and, you know, we can ensure that's what prevents a market failure in a human neural net. And sometimes the answer is nothing. I mean, sometimes people go in the same, but there are structural conditions and structural constraints, and real physical neural networks, and and successful networks, generally that don't exist in markets which are really artificial creations of scale, free networks of distribution and resource allocation, you know?

And that's you know and you you read about the desire for that to continue when people talk about interfering in the marketplace, right? But in our brain stuff, interferes with what we're thinking all the time and that is, in fact these sentiments, these emotions, these feelings of urgency. And so, I think that a care ethics would want to translate that into a social community.

Or as we say a carrying democracy, a democracy, thats caring might have a market structure, but that mark structure is going to be secondary and dependent upon the, the caring urgencies that are created by facts about injustice, poverty, oppression, and the rest. And the question is, what are the mechanisms for enabling that?

How do you get it? So that the marketplace if you will has a sense of care, right? Now, we've actually written that out legally out of the marketplace. The major players in the marketplace literally can't care and and that's a problem. And that's why Mark we have, that's one other reason why we have market failures different kinds of injustice.

Arise from different causes I hear. I'm drawing from Mahabali and others who are talking about open, educational practices specifically. But we could talk about caring practices, generally that respond to different kinds of injustice. So, we have three major types listed here. I'm sure it doesn't exist. All the ways that we can create injustice in this world.

One of them is economic injustice. Simply, you know, in economic injustice. There's a redistribution of who has access to resources, and who doesn't. And the causes of that, you know, we've talked about that already, you know, inheritance structural factors all of these things that give bill gates 30 billion dollars and someone in Milwaukee, three dollars backs, the all of those factors create economic injustice and and ethic of care would be directed to award.

Redressing that injustice. Similarly, with cultural injustice. This isn't so much about money and resources and access to goods and services but recognizing and valuing people from different cultures or those cultures themselves. You know, here as it says, you're recognizing their culture in it, or going for further to address, the root causes of cultural misregnation with reacultural race.

A cultural culture. Cultural recall cure relation. A culturation pretty bad won't have to do funics and I like videos and it and, you know, we've experienced in this country. For example, a systematic attempt through the process of residential schools to eliminate and expunge from the face of the earth, the indigenous people's cultures, including their language, their tradition, their sources of traditional knowledge, their religion etc, and an ethics of care would respond to that by reaffirming the value of those cultures and going further to address, not simply the fact that, you know, we attempted to eliminate the culture by reviving the culture, but going deeper, and asking why we ever would have.

Thought was a good idea in the first place. And then we're places elsewhere around the world where this sort of attack on individual cultures is still taking place and we can think of some prominent examples just watch the regular news And we have to ask globally. Right? Why is it that we would think it's a good idea to eliminate a culture?

And how can we address those factors in society that make this something that people believe? And then there are political injustices. So in the context of learning it might and I'm quoting involved. The involved, those normally without access in the redesign or overhaul of the learning experience emphasizing equitable representation and parity of participation or it might go further to address root cases of political misrepresentation through reframing and parity of rights to me what this gets down to is the fact that in these relationships, you have an unequal power relationship.

And yeah, it's not just about power. I know that politics is about more than power. Despite what CBC says with their show power and politics, right? Politics. Sometimes is the expression of power through nonviolent means, but sometimes it's creating mechanisms for people to work together for common goals and ends or even, you know, interaction interaction for the purpose of finding mutual value.

You know, many ways to define politics what political injustice does is removes, the capacity of a person or a group of people to participate in that process, whatever it is whether it's power collaboration, etc. And what an ethic of care does is first of all, to recognize that this capacity to participate politically has been removed.

First of all, secondly, to address the consequences of that. In other words to replace that capacity that has been removed, you know, to provide that capacity. And then third, again, to address the root causes of it. Why would we think that it makes sense or that it's reasonable or that?

It's right to deny a person or a group political process, and we're seeing that play out in the United States right now with the whole issue of voting rights. And, you know, and ethic of care would take care to ensure that everybody has access to their right, to vote and would prioritize that over abstract rules or principles.

Or as the case may be hypothetical fears or concerns or perhaps, you know, the the simple desire of one group to dominate another and they're again, we've talked about this, there are many causes many ways in which someone's capacity to care, maybe diminished and that's even important factor here.

I think, you know, the people who perpetuate economic injustice cultural injustice and political injustice. It's not simply that, you know, you can't simply say, well, these are evil people and obviously have no virtue and we must simply oppose them. Because as we've stated already, they as individuals are not independent of their own political contexts, somebody living and working.

In Western China is not living in working independently of the context in which they find themselves. Somebody living and working in Alabama, similarly are not independent of that context and there's a broad scope of socialization, a broad scope of social and political infrastructure, and in facts and history that all playing to their thoughts and feelings about injustice, and whether the ethics of care should apply here and how they should apply here.

Etc. That's not to hold them blameless. But it's, you know, it's different from just saying while these people are just wrong, that's supposed them. And it means going after the structural relationships and a society, that create these kind of in justices. That's why I talk a lot. When I talk about networks, not about the contents of a signal from one person to another or one year on to another and a kind of concerned about those but not nearly as concerned as you might think.

And I would never try to manage a network by examining the contents of those individual messages and making sure only the ones I like get through. It's just not efficient, I'm interested in the structural processes. You know, what are the mechanisms by which connections between individuals grow? What are the limits on the number of connections?

The natural physical limits on the number of connections, a person can have how much influence can one entity have over another, right? How much resistance is there to, the propagation of a signal? We see this come up. A lot in theory of epidemiology epidemics. Pandemics like we're having now.

And what thereafter here is, you know, annoying. They're trying to get everybody to wear masks and they're trying to get everybody vaccinated. The purpose here is not to go after each individual, instance of a virus and kill it. But rather, to prevent the spread by reducing the likelihood of one person passing passing and on to another, to a low enough probability value and that caught off as one, right?

If the probability is lower than the virus is less likely to spread. That's why we've vaccinated. That's why we use masks. It's not because they fight the vaccine directly, it's that they reduce the spread of the virus and then of its own accord. The virus will die out. Or at least be reduced to insignificance same sort of thing, here with injustice, same thorough, sort of thing with open educational practices, you know?

Again it's not just about, here's some content, you can have it or hear some content, I'll commerce convert it to commercial value and then sell it. It's addressing the structural underlying factors that create the need to ensure that people have access to educational resources and an educational system that promotes their growth and their development.

And then as well an educational system that prose they're wider growth and development more generally. You know, in in a variety of ways, social justice is the tool that we use for this Nancy Fraser in her account of social justice talks about dismantling institutional on institutionalized obstacles, that. Prevent some people from participating on a par with others as full partners and social interaction.

Now, that's kind of like the political injustice here, but I think we can generalize that reasonably well to talk about the other types of injustice. So there's two ways of looking at it, in one of her earlier writing, she's talks, she talks about social justice as an outcome, where all relevant social actors participate as peers and social life.

I always a bit cautious about fuzzy words like relevant. But we'll leave about aside and then the second part, a process in which procedural standards are followed and quote a fair and open processes in fair and open processes of deliberation. Now, that's kind of getting back to ethics as rationality even ethics.

As social contract, this social justice has a lot in common with social contract approaches. Especially as it's defined like this, but I think in the context of an ethics of care, it's less about writing a context. I'm more about making sure as an imperative that everybody is able to participate.

Fully meaningfully in the process of being in a society. There was a recent special issue of journal of interactive media in education where these concepts were looked at. And in the editorial they talked about how many of the articles were based on a phrasal social justice model and, and flow from that.

Now, of course you see in the diagram here, again, the roots back to social contract theory. I think that's a very tenuous root link back, but it is kind of a combination of social contract theory with feminist and racial justice literature talks about the three kinds of injustice, the economic cultural and political that we talked about and then that caches out into, I'm gonna just as an aside, when I say cash is out.

I, I don't mean, you know, don't mean anything by money. It's just an expression that I use to say that becomes instantiated as cash is I was just an easier way to say it as things like open textbooks, things like an open educational practices framework, professional learning for advocate refugee, advocacy, social and linguistic inclusion critical, social annotations.

So that that's kind of a cultural perhaps a discussions about Nussbaum and open techs textbook content diversification. And yeah, this is that seems pretty clear to represent, cultural injustice, but yeah, it doesn't really matter what, how they line up and you know it even extends to things like decolonization first, nations knowledge, authority, etc, and addressing things like the digital divide.

You know, recognizing that a social infrastructure and even technical infrastructure have an impact on your capacity to participate fully in society. So that leads us ultimately to what we might call caring democracies and that takes a back to the ethics of care. Back to John Toronto. Sorry. If this spelled it there, I always want to say Toronto in my head, I don't know why, you know, it's this little dyslexia that I have.

That makes it impossible for me to deal with means It's just one of those things. Anyhow are to look at the changes that we need to make to transform into a carrying democracy. Again, by caring democracy, a democracy that has an urgency to respond to expressed needs, especially from people who are vulnerable or being oppressed, right?

So first of all, that means, giving people a voice in the allocation of caring responsibilities, right? You don't dump it. All onto the lowest echelon of society, and we talked about that way, back near the beginning of the discussion of care. And it means to recognize vulnerable ability rather than autonomy as a better way to understand our basic equality.

Now that's an interesting way of putting it and I have always considered autonomy to be important and I still think autonomy is important, and I don't think it's an eye there or situation here. I don't think you make the trade-off between autonomy and vulnerability because what you're trying to do when you address vulnerability, is to return a person to a state where they can be autonomous, you know, is much as possible within the context of the social infrastructure and to fully participate in a society.

Nonetheless, it comes down to freedom, cannot simply mean the ability to choose agree Accounts of freedom. That rest are upon the absence of domination are preferable to those that do not. If your concept of freedom is simply, you know, ways that individuals can autonomously express themselves whether through speech, thought religion, carrying guns or whatever and doesn't address how social structure, it can change or transform into a structure that marginalizes and impresses people.

Then it's not a sufficient definition of freedom. And then, finally Toronto said, Toronto says, adding a fifth phase to caring that takes us all the way back to going and stages of caring. Caring with the idea that caring is something that is ongoing, that is something that is a social thing.

Something that characterizes your society, your nation jelly, you know, the global community as a whole understanding that are truly just and free social order would make a dressing, the needs of the most vulnerable. It's primary responsibility, rather than say arguing about economic systems, or belief systems, or competing ways of framing, the world, framing value, rights, goodness, ethics, and all the rest of that.

I think that's a point that's worth making. I think that certainly we don't have a properly and fully functioning society if we have, especially large swaths. But even individual cases where people are being oppressed, people are living in poverty. It does kind of go back to the idea and you can probably find it in there of every person being of worth and of value.

But the reason why you treat everybody, you know, the reason why you address vulnerability first is not based on an abstract principle that everybody is of equal value. Because then people in justice are very with the principle. It becomes an imperative because of the way poverty and misery and oppression make us feel.

And this ethic of care, in addition, to motivating individual, action should overall motivate wider social action. And so, the objective of an ethic of care, I think, is moving ourselves to a place where these imperatives can have an impact on us and influence us to action. There are different ways of doing that different ways of approaching it, but ultimately I think that's probably what it was down to.

So that's carrying democracies. I still want to talk about a democratic education or pedagogy of care and that'll be the next video. So, and and, and might wrap up the series. I'm not sure if that'll be the last one or not, like, it might be, it probably will be, and then we'll do the wrap up and summary.

So, thanks for listening. I know this went on for a while, but I think it addresses a really important aspect of the ethics of care. And I think makes, you know, the considerations in this video are considerations that make the ethics of care stronger, more defensible. And, and that's a big part of what I'm trying to do in this discussion.

I talked about all the caveats off the top of these presentations. I probably should have said more about what I'm trying to do. Here is represent the position of ethics of care in a strong. And, and that defensible, that's the wrong word, but it's in those strong and robust away as possible.

So that people including myself, can see why it is intuitively appealing, and why it has become more so popular recently. So, that's it for this video. I'm Stephen Downes. Thanks for coming along with me for the ride, and I'll be talking to you in the next one. See you then?

Force:yes