Care ethics, philosophy, and the law - with Ira Chadha-Sridhar
Episode 15 of Careful Thinking
The fifteenth episode of the Careful Thinking podcast features my conversation with Ira Chadha-Sridhar.
Ira is the Hatton-WYNG Junior Research Fellow in Law, Medicine and Life Sciences at Hughes Hall in the University of Cambridge. She has a BA.LLB (Honours) from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata, and an LLM from Cambridge University, where she was recently awarded a PhD for her thesis entitled ‘A Care Ethical Theory of Political Obligation'.
Ira’s research interests lie at the intersections of law and philosophy. She’s particularly interested in the ethics of care and its relationship with questions about the law: both within jurisprudence, and within areas of legal doctrine, such as medical law and family law. Ira’s current research project focusses on care ethics and its intersection with doctrinal questions in medical law.
Ira’s publications include a number of articles written while she was still a student in India, for example on the ethics of care in maternity laws, and critical feminist reflections on the laws around shared parenting. In 2021 she published an article on ‘The Value of Vagueness: A Feminist Analysis’ in The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, while 2023 saw the publication of her article on ‘Care as a Thick Ethical Concept’ in Res Publica.
Ira Chadha-SridharI first heard about Ira’s research when I was preparing to interview Steven Steyl for Episode 10 of the podcast. I discovered that Steven and Ira were working together on a journal article, and that they shared an interest in applying insights from analytic philosophy to care ethics. As I noted during my conversation with Steven, it’s far more common to find care theorists citing Continental philosophy (often viewed as a rival to analytic philosophy), and particularly phenomenology, as a key influence on their thinking: witness, for example, the frequent references to the work of Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, by earlier guests on Careful Thinking. By contrast, the philosophical reference points for Steven and Ira include thinkers in the analytic tradition such as Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe: a trio of Oxford-based women philosophers who, interestingly, have been the subject of not one but two recent (and highly recommended) collective biographies.
Having been introduced to Ira’s work, I was intrigued to learn about the ways in which her research brings the ethics of care into dialogue with questions of law and jurisprudence. It seemed to offer yet another example of the ways in which a new generation of researchers is taking care theory in exciting and previously unexplored directions.
Our conversation on the podcast began by exploring the origins of Ira’s interest in the law, which she saw as a means to address some of the injustices she perceived around her when she was growing up in India. We discussed the early influence of feminism on Ira’s thinking, and her introduction, as an undergraduate in Kolkata, to feminist care ethics. It was during her Masters study at Cambridge that Ira conceived the idea of exploring the implications of an ethics of care for thinking about the law and jurisprudence, and we spent some time talking about her doctoral research, which developed a care ethical theory of political obligation.
Ira has published material from one chapter of her thesis as a journal article, focusing on care as a thick ethical concept, and we discussed the main claims and arguments of this paper, and the ways in which this approach might help to resolve some key questions in care ethics, for example around the distinction between care and ‘good’ care. We also talked about the distinctive contribution that analytic philosophy can make to an ethics of care, and about the work of the new generation of scholars working in care ethics. Finally, we turned to Ira’s current research on medical law and care ethics, which she is planning to publish in a monograph.
Here are a few quotes by Ira from the episode:
I arrived at Cambridge in 2018 for my Masters in Law, and I think two out of four of my papers were basically papers in philosophy...And I was…really fascinated by the method and the rigour of analytic philosophy that I was being introduced to, and I was simultaneously reading care ethics….And I was…struck by the fact that while legal and political philosophers were talking about...the role of law and its relationship with certain political ideals or values, like justice, liberty, freedom, equality, care was very much absent in this kind of discourse. And at...some level that made sense, if you think of care as this kind of thing that's relegated to a private, personal, interpersonal context, which is emotionally laden...But as the care ethicists that I was reading were telling me, that's clearly not the case. And there's a lot of work on how care is a concept of extreme public and political significance. And that's when I started thinking about the relationship between some of the questions that I was studying in legal philosophy and care ethics.
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So the debate on political obligation is really a debate about whether we owe any kind of moral duties or responsibilities to obey the law, and if so, why. And so my thesis first positioned itself as a thesis in philosophical anarchism, where I argued that there isn't really this general moral duty to obey the law. Rather, our duties to obey the law, when they exist, are content sensitive. So they depend on the content of the legal directive in question. And then that's where I drew on care ethics, to say that whether or not we have a moral duty to obey the law can partially be answered by work in care ethics. So my argument was that when we have laws that encapsulate a genuine kind of moral responsibility to care, in those cases there is a moral duty to obey the law. So in some ways, it was kind of positioned against the libertarian tradition, which said that the state…cannot use its coercive power to require that people act in order to meet each other's needs...all we can ask of each other is kind of non-interference into each other's liberty. And so I was trying to argue against that and say, actually, the state can use its powers to sometimes...enforce moral responsibilities of care that we owe to co-citizens.
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When we describe something using a thick concept...like the concept of courage…we both evaluate that as being largely positive or praiseworthy, but we also describe something specific about it...My argument in this paper was that care is a thick ethical concept...engaging with this literature on thick concepts can help clarify some of the core issues in contemporary care ethics, particularly about how caring actions are performed in a range of contexts. They might not always be morally valuable. They might not always be praiseworthy...So how is that claim on bad caring actions, for instance, compatible with the claim that care is morally valuable...? To address this discrepancy, I've...turned to the literature on thick concepts.
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When I was...working in the course of my doctoral research on the relationship between care ethics and jurisprudence...something that has been evident to me is that the law in several areas of doctrine will rely on the notion of care. So particularly in some areas of private law, like tort law, you have the law...imposing a duty of care upon individuals, and then that duty is breached by an action that doesn't satisfy a certain standard of care. So, again, the notion of care is being employed by the law, and surprisingly, very little work has been done on the relationship between the moral concept of care and the legal concept of care…So this is my current project, the duty of care under medical law and the affinities or differences between the legal concept of care and the moral concept of care…And that's what I'm interested in, to bring this care ethical perspective…into the conversations on the legal duty of care under the law.
You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can download a transcript of the episode here:
The header image is ‘Exhibit 17: Lady Justice’ by Jude