Revolutionary care - with Maurice Hamington
Episode 6 of Careful Thinking
My guest on the sixth episode of the Careful Thinking podcast is Maurice Hamington, one of the world’s leading authorities on care ethics and care theory. Maurice is Professor of Philosophy, and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at Portland State University in Oregon in the United States. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including the ground-breaking Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Care Ethics (2004), Care Ethics and Political Theory, co-edited with Daniel Engster (2015), and Care Ethics and Poetry, co-written with Ce Rosenow (2019). Maurice’s most recent book, Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos (from whose cover the header image for this post is taken) was published just last month.
I was first introduced to Maurice's work a few years ago in the course of my research on fatherhood and men's care for children, when I read his beautiful description of hands-on care for his young daughter in a chapter for the edited collection Revealing Male Bodies. I then had the pleasure of meeting Maurice at the inaugural conference of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium in Portland, which he co- organized and hosted. Maurice and I also worked together on the edited collection Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions, which was published in 2022. Maurice has been a great supporter of Careful Thinking, suggesting and putting me in touch with potential future guests for the podcast, and I was really pleased to have this opportunity to talk to him about his important work.
Maurice HamingtonOur conversation in the episode began with Maurice’s academic journey from business studies, via religious studies, to philosophy, and from there to care ethics, and with his personal and intellectual journey to feminism. We then spent some time talking about Maurice’s often-cited book, Embodied Care, which was published twenty years ago this year, and about the influence on his thinking of the twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the nineteenth-century American social activist Jane Addams. We also discussed men’s role in care and the importance of encouraging the development of caring masculinities. Moving on from the role of the body in care, we talked about the part played by the imagination, and how poetry and the arts can contribute to moral development.
We spent some time exploring the relationship between care and politics, and between care and religious belief, which led to an extended discussion of Maurice’s new book, Revolutionary Care, including its expansive definition of care, some of the key components of good care, and the potential contribution of non-western thinkers, traditions and practices to thinking about care. The second half of the book consists of what Maurice describes as a series of ‘provocations and invitations’, and we concluded our conversation by exploring a few of these, including Maurice’s suggestions for building a caring economy and his advocacy of veganism and extending care to animals.
There were some interesting connections and linkages between this episode and previous episodes of the podcast. Our discussion of care ethics and politics echoed aspects of my conversation with Petr Urban in Episode 4, while the relationship between care and religious belief was also touched on both in my interview with Xavier Symons in Episode 2 and in my conversation with Ruth Groenhout in Episode 5. Maurice mentioned the influence on care ethics of key feminist writers, such as Carol Gilligan, Nell Noddings and Joan Tronto, and their names have also been mentioned in a number of previous episodes, and I’m sure will come up again in future episodes.
Here are a few quotes by Maurice from the episode, to give you a taste of our conversation:
On men and care:
bell hooks has said that feminism is for everybody, and it's absolutely true. We think about how patriarchy and certain forms of masculinity, sometimes referred to as toxic masculinity... have oppressed women, but it has also limited the opportunities for men. Men suffer under patriarchy as well. Yes, they accrue certain kinds of privileges, but they're also deprived of a full emotional life if they buy into certain kinds of masculinity....And I think it is important if we're going to imagine a more caring world in the future, if there's going to be a revolution of care, part of it is going to be bringing along the male half of the human race into valuing care at a higher level.
On this moment in care ethics:
I feel fortunate to be at this moment in care ethics. This is like the golden age of care ethics. If I had been talking like I am now about care ethics thirty years ago, I would have been very marginalized. It is now where people are recognizing how important relationality is and valuing it.
On care and imagination:
Imagination, I think, is probably an unsung hero in philosophy and ethics, and particularly in the ethics of care, because when we care for somebody, we cannot inhabit their minds. We don't know with certainty what they're going through. We can engage in inquiry and learn and try to be closer in understanding, but we always have to take something of an imaginative leap. And so when you think about a concept like empathy, empathy is inherently imaginative...I am trying to understand deeply what somebody else is experiencing and going through, and I have to use the imagination. Furthermore, if I'm going to respond to that person, I have to imagine possible outcomes.
On ‘Revolutionary Care’:
Care theory...has developed quite a bit in those 20 years [since the publication of ‘Embodied Care’]...I had some theoretical questions that I wanted to answer. That's what I do in the first part of the book. And then I wanted to also take some big swings, to take on some radical ideas in the second part of the book, as kind of provocations. So in the first part of the book, I wanted to clarify some things. It is quite appropriate to criticize the word care in the abstract because of its history. Care is the language of the colonial power…in oppressing people, care is the language oftentimes of the abuser in an abusive relationship. Care can be the language of excessive paternalism when it comes to people with disabilities. And so there's lots of reasons to criticize care. And so I wanted to spend a lot of time talking about what good care is and to differentiate care from good care, because care in and of itself, abstractly, is morally neutral, given its history. And so I talk about good care, and that in itself is a minefield, because many people said to me, you can't write about good care. Care is too contextual. You have to respond to the situation. So how can you talk about good care? And the answer is, I don't talk about what to do in any situation. I talk about a kind of trajectory…and this is another controversial aspect of my thinking, is I think that care has a postmodern quality to it.
You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can download a transcript of the episode here:
As always, please feel free to leave feedback or comments below on any aspect of the episode.