Taking Responsibility for Global Poverty

Fundamentally uncaring: The differential multi-scalar impacts of COVID-19 in the U.S

“…The lens of care ethics highlights the uneven power structures traversing gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, migration status, and disability ( Bourgault and Robinson, 2020 ), not merely to offer critique and deconstruction, but to also invite and enact a mode of affirmative change ( Beasley and Bacchi, 2005 ; Lawson, 2007 ). Standing in stark contrast to utilitarian- and Kantian-based ethics, care ethics paves the way for thinking beyond power structures as they currently exist across multiple scales in order to think toward a political being that is inclusive (rather than exclusive), addressing the expressed needs of the disenfranchised, as they articulate them ( Held, 2018 ; Lloyd et al, 2012 ). In this way, care ethics is “a transformative ethos rather than a normative ethics,” a mode of doing rather than a set of rules of morality ( Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017 , p. 67).…”

Frontiers of Responsibility for Global Justice

“…The answer to this question crucially depends on which standards are considered sufficient or relevant for collective membership or affiliation. Various works in the growing literature on group agency have mentioned the intentional participation in a collective action, sharing the collective’s practices and goals, identifying with its ethos or way of life, or else holding a position of power or influence within the group, as plausible grounds for membership and for members’ subsequent shared responsibility (French ; Kutz ; Held ; Pettit ; Calder, Bessone, and Zuolo ; Held , in this issue).…”

“…A theory of responsibility for global justice might thus argue for a shift of focus, from “ascriptions of responsibility” (for purposes of blame or compensation, for instance) to “recommendations to take responsibility” for “what needs to be done” (Held , in this issue). As Virginia Held suggests in her contribution to this issue, such a shift is not only allowed but actually called for by the ethics of care as advocated by Held and others (Gilligan ; Tronto , 131–33; ; Held ; Engster ; Laugier ).…”

“…One could think that, for it to be viable, any conception of task responsibility ought to acknowledge that the urgency and extent of obligations will vary depending on what triggers them, on a scale that goes from deliberate action to plain disengagement (Larrère , in this issue). In this regard, various articles in this issue discuss the concept of complicity as a defensible way to account for situations where the absence of resistance may alone be considered blameworthy (Held ; Aragon and Jaggar ; Sangiovanni ; all in this issue).…”

“…The problem is that being equally loosely tied to every other member of a global community may not provide sufficient motivation to care about distant others’ standards of life or labor conditions. As several articles of this issue point out, if one wants to argue that people do have positive obligations toward each other at the global scale, one must account for the ways in which a person may indeed feel a responsibility to act for the well‐being of distant others or on the structural processes that affect it (Held ; Tan ; Aragon and Jaggar ; McKeown ; all in this issue). That is, one must account for the particular circumstances in which awareness, care, and moral feelings may arise among people who do not stand in any significant sort of relationship to one another.…”