By Jasmine Cartwright (she/her)
Nothing is more uncertain than the world around us. Life turned on its head not even two years ago with the global pandemic of COVID-19, and we’re still seeing mass changes everywhere around us. What these mass changes are highlighting are the uncertain grounds on which our liberties stand, making the fault lines of our society more prevalent than ever. We started with basic infringements, such as lockdowns, then moved to protests against police brutality, and are currently fighting for women’s rights over their bodies and access to abortion. Of course, these are systemic problems that, even today, need grassroot dismantling. The crisis of the pandemic was but one of the most recent crises in a series of never-ending problems that require radical solutions but still remain unaddressed. Besides public opinion—the most important vessel of persuasion—crisis response approaches need to be re-evaluated during times of prevailing uncertainty. Especially when the Morrison government’s economy-led response let the pandemic reign supreme, resulting in Australia becoming the world leader in COVID-19 infection rates just last week.
Australia’s previous economy-based response team did little to support those who are feeling most vulnerable. The allocation of JobKeeper payments to companies with increasing profits during the peak of the pandemic, instead of to struggling small businesses or public universities, the delayed government response to the 2022 floods, and the restricted access to disaster payments for vulnerable people are key examples of the Liberal and National Coalition Party’s (LNP) inconsiderate crisis response. As a minimum-wage worker and a full-time student, I could not have been more excited by the Greens’ suggestion to include dental and mental health-care plans on Medicare, as I haven’t seen a dentist since I moved out of home almost four years ago, even though I have a low-income concession card. I recognise that I have privilege over a lot of other people whose concerns were being flagrantly ignored by the previous government, but even I felt oppressed when all I heard coming out of the prime minister's mouth was talks of building a strong economy over supporting those who are crying for help. The point of these personal anecdotes is to emphasise that the LNP’s responses distinctly lack a central utilitarian philosophy—ideas that prioritise affected people’s happiness and wellbeing—that could have turned the current societal climate of Australia on its head. Ideally, we will see this transformation with Albanese at the head. Given his roots and life experience, his promise to a 5.1% wage increase to keep up with inflation is an indicator that we might actually be facing a government that puts the needs of the people in the spotlight. A government that includes a central vein that draws on the principles of ethics of care.
The ethics of care were first outlined in 1982 by psychologist Carol Gilligan. Ethics of care is a philosophical feminist approach that draws on its context to ascertain what solution is most useful and relevant to a problem or crisis. There are four main pillars upon which care is built:
attentiveness, which is described as a proclivity to become aware of need;
responsibility, which is a willingness to respond and take care of need;
competence, which is the skill of providing good and successful care; and
responsiveness, which is the consideration of the position of others as they see it and recognition of the potential abuse in care.
From these four pillars, a much needed compassionate approach can be derived, one that has accountability baked into it. Applying ethics of care helps response teams handle crises saturated with uncertainty, as we found with the global pandemic. Application also incorporates how a population responds to an approach, which informs the development of responses over time, an important aspect if doubt in the government continues to cloud the crisis. Due to the nature of a care approach, we are ensuring that those most afflicted by the crisis are at the centre of decision-making conversations.
Like with all things, ethics of care does not exist without its criticisms. Ethics of care has been critiqued for being empirically flawed, theoretically indistinct, essentialist, and ambigous, having too wide a scope, as well as behaving as a slave morality (Sander-Staudt, 2009). Ethics of care as a slave morality was, in fact, the earliest complaint, suggesting that it valorises the oppression of women (Sander-Staudt, 2009). This complaint focuses on the genderedness of care, arguing that women are taking their caring nature—what the patriarchy has characterised as inherent to their gender and oppresses them for it—and turning it into a virtue. While ethics of care may indeed sound like a perpetuation of this misogynistic ideology, our unprecedented crisis calls for a revolutionary response, one of which involves turning what has so far been perceived as weakness into a strength. In doing so, we transform the expectations of who the carer is, and pay tribute to a range of workers at the frontline of this pandemic: male nurses, female doctors, to name a few. By reshaping the idea of who gives the care, the critique of slave morality is debunked.
Critics have also questioned the empirical accuracy of the studies Gilligan based her initial theories upon, claiming she had limited sample sizes, consisting of only liberal, feminist women, skewing the efficacy of ethics in care in practice (Sander-Staudt, 2009). They claim inclusion of a more diverse sample complicates the application of ethics of care., bBut this critique comes from the same critics who asserted that care ethics is just a different moral voice, like what could be found in religion, but is maternal in its nature, implying the issue is ethics of care being overtly feminine. Again, this critique can be challenged by representing care as gender-neutral. Some men can be caring just as some women can be uncaring. Assumptions made by the left or the right that women are inherently caring only perpetuates the gendered division of care labour.
There are other complaints, but they contradict each other in overarching terms: that ethics of care is not theoretically distinct enough, but also that it is too narrow in its scope. That it fails to account for individual differences in its broadness, but then, that it is too broad and not specific enough. These critiques should not force ethics of care to be ignored or devalued as a form of crisis response. If anything, the critiques reflect the same kind of narrow mindset that led to the incompetent crisis management formerly in practice, which disrupted access to those who need it. Disruption of access includes things such as restricted childcare access, engendering women to give up work. By leading with care, we reach those who need it, such as people of colour and people in low socioeconomic statuses, without putting the onus of particular roles on particular genders, such as care responsibilities falling on women. The critiques effectively move around the same two loci: the inherently misogynistic perception of care and who can access it. Both of which can be challenged through actively applying ethics of care to management practices.
Care is not only a useful approach in the face of a crisis, but also an equally relevant approach in the face of rebuilding after a crisis. In her recent book, Feminist City, Leslie Kern discusses notions of feminist recovery plans, which encourage a deep structural transition to an economy that values the work that sustains our society: care work. She argues that a care perspective is central to “radically rethinking what safety means and what justice looks like'' (2021, pp XIII). But this is not without its challenges. As a society, we have been conditioned to see the image of the “rational autonomous”, as masculine, and the “dependent caring”, as feminine. Which is why we often attribute care work in our society to women, archaic and traditional roles we’ve been forced back into as a result of the pandemic. Merely looking at the outcome of last year’s census, women on average in Australia have seen an uptake in a minimum of five hours per week in unpaid care work (ABS, 2021). There needs to be a social revolution of what caring looks like.
We need to develop the same expectations of care delivery for both men and women for a care approach to be integrated into the national crisis response. Social attitudes are, of course, the hardest to change, but we drastically need to dismantle this patriarchal view of care so we can start actually meeting the needs of our communities in times of crisis. Something that we need now more than ever. In a review of the ethics of care, there is the description of care as: “a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Tronto and Fischer, 1990). Here we can find a holistic definition that puts forth the notion of collaborative care, which is essential for the maintenance of a healthy, functioning world.
Care needs to be a central tenet for how we respond to people in need. It must be the grounds on which we ask the most important questions of initiation (where do we begin?) and allocation (who needs the most help?), so for once we might actually rebuild into the semblance of something better. Into something we all deserve, a place where those who have missed out finally get support. These people may live in areas that see once-in-a-lifetime floods for the second time in a decade; they may miss saying goodbye to those they loved most because of an arbitrary line drawn in the sand that divided our states. Societies naturally form as people congregate. Infrastructure is a useful tool, but it should not be what we seek to uphold most, especially when it’s rusting with racism and crumbling under oppression. When even the basis with which society is built fails, and everyday functioning must be overhauled for everyone, uncertainty saturates the world and, in what is potentially a cringe-y, heart-on-your-sleeve moment, the most essential heart of every question asked next should be about care.
References:
ABS (2021) Women spent more time than men in unpaid care work in May. https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/women-spent-more-time-men-unpaid-work-may
Devakumar, D., Shannon, G., Bhopal, S. S., & Abubakar, I. (2020). Racism and discrimination in COVID-19 responses. The Lancet, 395(10231), 1194–1194. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30792-3
Fisher, B., & Tronto, J. (1990). Toward a feminist theory of caring. Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives, 35-62.
Gilligan, C. (1986). Reply by Carol Gilligan. Signs: journal of women in culture and society, 11(2), 324-333.
Kern, L. (2020). Feminist city : claiming space in a man-made world. Verso.
Sander-Staudt, M. (2009) Care Ethics. Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/care-ethics/#:~:text=3.-,Criticisms,essentialist%2C%20and%20f)%20ambiguous.
Sas, N. (2022). COVID-19 infections in Australia hit worldwide highs — and experts predict another Omicron variant spike is coming. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-15/covid-infections-in-australia-among-worlds-highest/101062364
Thielsch, M. T., Röseler, S., Kirsch, J., Lamers, C., & Hertel, G. (2021). Managing Pandemics—Demands, Resources, and Effective Behaviors Within Crisis Management Teams. Applied Psychology, 70(1), 150–187. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12303