Historically, philosophers have studied ethical theories that focused on how we make decisions based on what is morally right or wrong. But a somewhat newer branch known as care ethics, approaches morality from a much broader context, which involves centering the individual’s experience and their relationship to the people around them. Maurice Hamington is a philosophy professor at Portland State University and author of the book, “Revolutionary Care.” He argues that the world needs more care and compassion for others and also recently spoke to the Atlantic about incorporating care ethics into parenting approaches. Hamington joins us to share more on care ethics and how he thinks it could be incorporated into our daily lives.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end this week with care. About 40 years ago, a group of philosophers started talking about a different way to approach ethics. Instead of focusing on justice or utilitarianism, care ethics has focused on interpersonal and often ongoing relationships. Maurice Hamington is a philosophy professor at Portland State University, who’s explored the ethics of care for decades now. His latest book – and there’s a stack of them beneath that one – is called “Revolutionary Care.” He joins me now. Maurice Hamington, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Maurice Hamington: It’s great to be here, Dave.
Miller: To me, one of the challenging aspects of this topic is that “care” is a small word, four letters, with a huge range of meanings. So what do you, as a philosopher, mean when you say care?
Hamington: Care is something that is essential to humanity. It has sustained us, it allows us to flourish. There’s one story we tell about the history of humanity that was “dog eat dog” and competition, survival of the fittest. But there’s another story about how we had compassion, how we had cooperation, how we cared for one another – and that’s an equally powerful one. So when I’m talking about care, I’m talking about something that we all require to live and survive. You know how vulnerable babies are when they’re born. If they’re not cared for, they die. And we need care, not just when we’re born, not just when we die,
but throughout our entire lives.
Miller: What’s the opposite of care?
Hamington: The opposite of care is a kind of apathy, disregard for one another, for our relationships with others.
Miller: Neglect … not violence necessarily.
Hamington: Well, it can turn into violence. But if we look at any of the social movements out there, if we think about something like the Black Lives movement, or even what’s going on between the Israelis and the Palestinians, at its core is a cry for help, a cry for care. The Black Lives Matter … why aren’t we caring about the lives of Black men and women more? So a lot of our controversies have care at the center of it.
Miller: What’s different about the philosophical enterprise of putting care in the center, from an ethics based on utilitarianism? A word a lot of people have heard, where if I understand correctly, the idea is to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number of people. How are those different? How would the approaches of those two be different in practice?
Hamington: Great question. A consequentialist approach is great for one way of figuring out what’s the right thing to do. Care ethics does a little different kind of work. It does have a contribution to make to issues of normativity, what we should do, but it does a different kind of work. It is more about our ongoing relationships, trust, the morality between people. Typical ethical theories really focus on those dilemma moments.
You’ve probably heard of the “trolley problem.” A trolley is racing down a mountain and you have to decide whether to pull a lever. It would kill some people or not kill other people, and they have different variations of it. But care ethics is more about thinking about the long-term relationship here – why didn’t we put in redundant safety systems for it? And why don’t we collectively work to stop the trolley? Or something like that. It’s less about that and more about how we live our lives.
So, for many of us, the word “ethic” is actually a limiting thing for care. We talk about “care theory” [and] there’s even a movement today to talk about “care aesthetics.” Care is a focal point for a lot of theory because care is so important, and yet it has been neglected historically, in terms of theory but also in terms of labor. We know that care laborers don’t get paid as much as other laborers. It has been devalued, in many ways.
Miller: I want to get to some specifics. In your more recent work, you’ve identified three sort of sequential components of what you call “good care,” sequential because they go in order. First, humble inquiry, then inclusive connection, then responsive action. So let’s take these one at a time. What’s humble inquiry?
Hamington: Yeah, they’re not sequential. They’re just three aspects and I just list them out: one, two, three. So they don’t have to come in order. But all care has some knowledge at its base. It’s a knowledge-based activity. When I care for somebody, I want to give them food because they need it, but I want to give them good food. I mean, there’s knowledge that’s involved when …
Miller: But is the inquiry because you have to know for sure that they want food?
Hamington: I need to know what their needs are. Too often, we assume what other people need. And the danger there is paternalism, where I will decide for you what you need, [that] kind of thing. But humble inquiry is to come to the other person, and not presume I know the answer, and listen to them, and find out from their perspective. They may have a very different intersectional identity than I do and I may need to know a little bit about their culture, maybe their religion, their history, in order to meet their needs better. So a humble inquiry is coming to the person in need, and trying to understand their context and what they need.
Miller: What is inclusive connection?
Hamington: Inclusive connection is thinking about how we expand it. This is where empathy and imagination come into play, in terms of care. And you mentioned in your intro how care can be political. It is easy for us to be very parochial in our care. We, of course, care for our family and friends, the people we live in proximal relations to. But if we’re going to make a better world, if we’re going to make a more caring world, we have to go beyond that. So how do we empathize with those who are different from us, who we are less familiar with? How can we leverage our experiences with our family and friends to maybe understand somebody in a different culture, in a different country, using our imagination?
One of the first books I wrote was “Embodied Care,” and our bodies are our baseline point of understanding. For example, if somebody, who I didn’t even speak the same language with and I didn’t understand their culture, if they fell and hit their head, I don’t have to wonder, “oh, I wonder what that means in their culture,” or something like that. I know from embodied experiences that this person needs help, that they’re experiencing pain. We have that commonality and our bodies are really kind of built to care.
So inclusive connection is trying to take what we know about care and expanding it out. That’s where the social and political aspect comes from.
Miller: Then responsive action? It seems like going to help somebody who’s just hit their head, and as you said, these come together. But helping them, it seems like a responsive action, the response to the head hitting. What else does it mean?
Hamington: Yes, well, ultimately care is not just about intentions. There is such a thing as having a good care disposition, but it’s not enough to have intentions. If you’re my friend and I always say, “oh, I care about you,” but I never do anything for you, it kind of rings hollow, right? I’m not doing anything. So you need to have a responsive action towards that person.
Again, responsive means I’m being very particular. I’m considering the context and what the person has told me. Sometimes, the old joke about doctors saying, “take two aspirin and see me in the morning,” that’s kind of like a rote answer, not really demonstrating any kind of responsiveness, just trying to get you out the door. So, caring is always a response to a person’s needs.
Miller: One of your theories of care is that it’s not prescriptive. It can’t be boiled down to a set of universal directions. You’ve said that at its best, it’s more like improvisation. What do you mean by that?
Hamington: It’s really like a set of skills, like improvisational skills, that we can develop and we can work on, but we won’t know the answer. [In] every situation, new needs emerge from that situation. And I can’t foretell all of those, but I can bring skills to it. So think about an improv performer. It may seem a little odd, but even people who specialize in improvisation, they practice. What are they practicing? They’re not practicing the answers. They don’t know what the answers are going to be in the future. What they’re practicing is the skill, “How do I respond? How am I nimble and move?” So if you think about, in terms of care, listening skills, the way you comport your body in a certain situation can communicate care. Your empathy and imagination, that’s another skill that you can bring to it.
Miller: How much do philosophers like you, when talking about care, talk about love?
Hamington: It comes up because love and care are kind of on a continuum with one another. In the love generation, we talked about everybody loving each other. That seems very nice, but also, somewhat impractical. Care certainly is on a continuum with it. And the people you love, you hope that you also care for them at the same time ...
Miller: When you say continuum, I mean, is this too simplistic to say that that love is sort of the extreme version of the kind of care that you’re talking about?
Hamington: Yeah, they are definitely related to one another. And realistically, I’m not going to be able to love everybody. You think about loving your dog versus loving your partner, and even that is on different kinds of continuums with one another. They resonate, but they’re not the same kind of thing. And that would be true with love and care. I can care about somebody, and disagree with them, and not approve of what they did, but I can continue to care.
Love can teach us a lot about it. Like a family, for example, it can be a crucible … and here, I’m not just talking about just traditional heterosexual families. I’m talking about even chosen families or whatever. Families are the place [where] we expect the highest level of care, just as we expect love in those situations. And that’s where we learn about forgiveness, giving people second chances and so forth. How do we take that and extend it outward?
Miller: How have your own personal relationships, familial ones – maybe most obviously, as a son or as a father, say, or as a romantic partner – shaped your academic understanding of this?
Hamington: That’s a great question. Certainly, they go hand in hand. A lot of times, academics, particularly in the scientific age, we want to make a clear distinction – like, “I’m objective. I’m doing this scientifically, emotions set to the side.” Care has always been a place where emotions are welcome. So, yes, I have learned a great deal about care from my partner of 41 years, and my daughter, and from my animals. I once wrote an article about what we learn from our companion animals. And it does affect me. I draw from those examples.
I have given up being just the objective kind of philosopher, and I really want to be an advocate for care. If you go to my website, it says “the world needs more care.” And I want to evangelize for care. I think it’s got this great possibility that it can cross political lines. It doesn’t matter if you’re a conservative, or you’re a progressive, or, again, your religion or culture, everybody needs care. So, if we elevated our language around care, if we valued care, maybe we can bring people toward a kind of common good.
Miller: You mentioned your website. On that website, you have a one sentence bio where you call yourself “a feminist philosopher of care and professor at Portland State University.” How central is feminism to your work?
Hamington: So care ethics arose out of feminism and I think it is central. It used to be that when I first started out as a male, I would say, “oh, I’m pro-feminist,” because I didn’t want to claim a feminist position, never having lived in a woman’s body. But I have now just completely embraced it and say, “no, I’m a feminist.” I recognize the limitations of my knowledge from an embodied standpoint, but feminism is political. And I’m talking about an inclusive kind of feminism that is trans-inclusive, class-inclusive. Sometimes when you use the word “feminism,” it gets a little bit of a connotation as a white, heteronormative kind of approach. But I’m talking about a very inclusive kind. It is central to me and the work that I do.
Miller: Has there been a shift in the way care is seen as gendered, in the decades since you began your work?
Hamington: Well, that’s a very interesting question because, at first, there was a lot of confusion. When care ethics first arose in the 1980s, there was a lot of confusion about what it was and who it was meant for. Some people thought it was a women’s morality because, historically, we’ve socially constructed a lot of the Western world, where women carry the burden of care. And much of that continues to be true. But what feminists did was they leveraged that burden, they re-appropriated it into a moral outlook that was missing in the Western tradition, in the patriarchal tradition.
So care ethics is not meant for women, it’s meant for everyone. But its origins did draw from women’s experience, a great deal.
Miller: Given that actual individual relationships are sort of the central kernel of this philosophy, with obvious examples like a parent and a child or some other duo, how do you scale care to the societal level? How do you keep that relationship at the center as you start dealing with millions of people?
Hamington: Excellent. So that ties back to your last question. One of the mantras of feminism is that the personal is political. Because the experiences, the phenomenology flows through our body, we have the potential to take that personal and make it political. That’s where the empathy and the imagination come in. So we can have pro-care policies.
My recent book, “Revolutionary Care,” the first half of it is kind of theoretical philosophical stuff, and the last part is a series of provocations thinking about what the world would look like. For example, what would our economy look like if we put care at the center of it? And similarly, we could put care at the center of our politics. We’ve witnessed some good examples of that in the past.
We scale it, first, by valuing it, talking about it, raising the level of discussion. Up until recently, care has gone under the radar. It has been undervalued and under-talked about, but if we put care at the center, then we have the potential to scale this. What would it mean to really care about the citizens of the United States and make sure that people feel cared for? We talk about a drop in trust in the United States. Well, everybody says you have to earn trust, it comes with time. Well, caring can build that trust, if you have experience after experience of caring.
So, it can be scaled, but we have to have the will to do it. We have to want to put it first.
Miller: Maurice Hamington, thanks very much.
Hamington: Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Miller: Maurice Hamington is a philosophy professor at Portland State University. His latest book is called “Revolutionary Care.”
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