Text detail

Care is part of our personal and social lives, whether we realise it or not. Its critical philosophical reflection began relatively recently with the formation of the feminist ethics of care in the 1980s. It was Joan Tronto’s work that explicitly justified why care must be conceptualised not only as a moral value but also as a political value (1993), and why care as a democratic practice must become a key part of the political agenda of contemporary democracies (2013). Indeed, care and related activities and values, such as protection and development, are finding more and more space in the discourses of public policies and their actors – in the dictionaries of leaders, managers, and politicians. However, the question is what kind of care they talk about, what are the conceptual and normative assumptions and frameworks on which they are based, and what does this mean for the creation of public care policies in various areas of society, be it education and upbringing, health care, social services, care for the environment or for the preservation, development, and improvement of democratic institutions. And, how the conceptualisation of care and related concepts in public discourses influences the practice of care that we are confronted with in the social reality, which we implement ourselves and in which we participate. In the first part of her text, the author outlines the ethics of care as a set of ideas and approaches that grew out of empirical experience with care and its theoretical reflection. In the second part, she clarifies the moral and political theory of care as formulated by Joan Tronto (1990, 1993, 2013) to show how the concepts of integrity of good care practice and the concept of democratic care practice represent useful and inspiring tools for research, understanding, evaluation, and transformation of conceptualisation of current care practices in the various areas of life. Finally, the author focuses her attention on the possibilities of careful research of care.

Biograf themes:

Care and maintenance

Citation:

JESENKOVÁ, A. (2022): Feministická etika starostlivosti ako východisko pre starostlivé skúmanie starostlivosti [Feminist ethics of care as a starting point for careful research of care]. Biograf (75-76): 41 paragraphs. Available at http://www.biograf.org/clanek.html?id=1096 [last access04. 10. 2024]

Acknowledgement: