Abstract
The relationship between love/care and justice was one of the key tensions from which care ethics originated; to this very day it is subject of debate between various streams of thought within care ethics. With some exceptions (e.g. Christa Schnabl) most approaches have in common the belief that care and justice are mutually exclusive concepts, or at least as so different that their application is situated on different levels. Hence, both are complementary, but distinct, so that there is no real interaction. This paper aims to investigate whether, and if so, how, a deeper understanding of Ricoeur’s thoughts on this matter enriches the relationship between care and justice with respect to care ethics. This connection suggests itself from Ricoeur’s interpretation of the relationship as a dialectical one in which the logic of superabundance (love) and the logic of equivalence (justice) meet. Care enables people to see the face and individuality of the one, ‘le chacun,’ within the anonymous structures of justice that tend to reduce all human beings to the anonymous each, ‘le on’; justice in its turn is the precondition for love to become incarnated and made real. What may this view—of care and justice standing in close connection, in which they correct and strengthen each other—add to the understanding of concrete practices of care?
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Notes
This was exactly the critique of some care ethicists on Rawls. See for example Okin 1989.
When these moral approaches are subsequently coupled to gender, this view becomes quite problematic, resulting in a practical division of labour with duties assigned according to gender. It results in “the ever present possibility of reinforcing rather than challenging existing systems of gender stratification” (Katzenstein and Laitin 1987, 264–65), possibly resulting in sacrifice or dominance. (For this debate see, among others, Clement 1996, 21; 26; Held 2006a, 539; Bubeck 1995, 194; Flanagan and Jackson 1993, 75; Benhabib 1992, 277; 273.).
For a description of care as practice, see also Held 2006a, 29–43.
A first kind of relationship lies in the argument that the actual practice of caring in the private sphere is a necessary precondition for justice. Not only do people need a moral education through caring relations to enable them to follow abstract principles, but they also require the experience of care to help them develop the necessary dispositions of care (e.g. empathy) needed to understand and fulfill the requirements of justice (Moore 1999; Okin 1989, 235–236; Sevenhuijsen 2003, 183). However, within this view, care and justice are again complementary, but care does not really challenge the assumptions or implications of justice as such.
I deliberately put ‘care’ between quotation marks because Ricoeur does not use the term as such, but similarities between his diverse terminology and care ethics is unmistakably present.
I do not claim to give an elaborate, let alone an exhaustive account, of Ricoeur’s (relational) anthropology and its indebtedness to Aristotle whatsoever. I only want to focus on some elements that justify that his anthropology can indeed be called relational and as such relates to some basic assumptions of care ethics.
Note that in this work, Ricoeur does not yet clearly distinguish mutuality and reciprocity and uses both terms interchangeably, in contrast to the later Course of Recognition. This distinction will become important in explaining the dialectical relationship between love and justice, as I will show.
Ricoeur will claim that even this deontological approach must have a teleological starting point, as in the case of John Rawls’ maximin principle. This finding confirms Ricoeur’s intuition of the primacy of ethics over morality. These reflections as well as how such a deontological approach is developed, for example, by the procedural justice approach by Rawls, will not receive further elaboration in this contribution. See for example Ricoeur 1991, 228–239; Ricoeur 2000.
For a more extensive elaboration on this concept of justice, see Ricoeur’s The Just (2000).
Two arguments can sustain this claim, Ricoeur states. First, the biblical passage itself gives this impression since after mentioning the Golden Rule, Jesus questions whether one who lives up to this rule is really doing much more than sinners do who also are benevolent towards their neighbor. Second, although the Golden Rule is already an improvement, considering the ius talionis which approves of vengeance, the distinction between the neighbor and the enemy is left intact—and it is exactly this distinction that the new commandment abolishes. By putting the logic of equivalence and the logic of superabundance in a dialectical tension, however, Ricoeur does not follow these arguments. See Ricoeur 1990, 392–393.
As an example, Ricoeur (1991, 201) refers to Rawls’ maximin principle, stating that it is only through the ethical intention and contribution of the commandment of love that it was acceptable. If not, it would “fall into the subtle form of utilitarianism”, “in as much as [this commandment to love] is directed against the process of victimization that utilitarianism sanctions when it proposes as its ideal the maximization of the average advantage of the greatest number at the price of the sacrifice of a small number, a sinister implication which utilitarianism tries to conceal.”
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Van Stichel, E. Love and justice’s dialectical relationship: Ricoeur’s contribution on the relationship between care and justice within care ethics. Med Health Care and Philos 17, 499–508 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-013-9536-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-013-9536-7