The virtue of care - with Steven Steyl
Episode 10 of Careful Thinking
My guest for the tenth episode of the ‘Careful Thinking’ podcast is Steven Steyl. Steven studied law, philosophy and politics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where he also completed an MA in politics and international relations. He then studied for a PhD at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, where his thesis was entitled ‘Towards an Aristotelian Theory of Care, a Comparison of neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics with Feminist Ethics of Care and the Fundaments of a Virtue Ethical Theory of Care’. Steven teaches at UNDA’s Sydney campus, where he'll soon take up a new post coordinating the national bioethics curriculum. Steven is also in the process of completing postgraduate legal training with the New Zealand Law Society.
Steven has published a number of journal articles in the field of care ethics, exploring the relationship between care ethics and virtue ethics, the nature of caring actions, and queer care ethics. With Daniel Engster, he is co-editing a forthcoming collection on care and moral theory.
My first encounter with Steven's work was reading his chapter in the book on Care Ethics, Religion and Spiritual Traditions, published in 2022, to which I also contributed a chapter. Since then, I've sought out some of Steven's other writings, and I've been impressed by the critical challenges that he’s posed to mainstream care theory. Steven is one of a number of impressive new and younger voices in the emerging field of care ethics, and I think he's someone we'll be hearing a lot more from in the future. So I was really glad to have this chance to talk with him about some key aspects of his work.
Steven Steyl
We began our conversation on the podcast by exploring Steven’s writings on the relationship between care ethics and virtue ethics, and the question as to whether care can be described as a virtue. Our discussion continued in this philosophical vein as we moved on to consider the nature of caring actions. We then talked about Steven’s exploration of queer care ethics, among other things discussing what a care ethical approach to the vexed question of conversion therapy might look like. Steven also spoke about the personal roots of his interest in the issue of invisible disabilities, and what taking account of them might contribute to care theory. In the final section of the episode, we discussed how a care ethical analysis might transform an understanding of contemporary social and political issues like migration.
Steven’s work offers a constructive critique of the ideas of some key figures in feminist care ethics, and also engages explicitly with the writings of some of my previous guests on the podcast, including Petr Urban (Episode 4), Ruth Groenhout (Episode 5) and Maurice Hamington (Episode 6). Like Xavier Symons, my guest on Episode 2, Steven has been strongly influenced by the analytic tradition in philosophy, and specifically the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe, rather than by continental philosophy, which is to the fore in the work of many other modern care ethicists. I think he makes a good case in this episode for analytic philosophy’s practical relevance to some of the key debates in care theory.
Here are a few quotes by Steven from the episode, to give a flavour of our conversation:
People often think of moral philosophy as this abstract, detached, kind of ivory tower conversation that's going on. But thinking about the virtues, I think, really brings it home that this is about how you live your life. This is about who you are as a person. The advice that we give people is often things like, do what's caring, do what's kind, do what's just, do what's courageous…I think that talk of virtue is really practical and important in everyday life.
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Caring...is hard. It's really difficult sometimes to care for people. Sometimes needs are really difficult to spot. It might be the case that I've overestimated my own needs, or I've underestimated someone else's needs, or I've completely misconstrued them…Eva Kittay has a really great example of helicopter parents, and of course they mean well. Helicopter parents are trying to do the right thing. They just happen to be wrong about it. And so you might have this natural inclination to care, but it needs to be refined, otherwise it just goes wrong.
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Care ethics is usually thought of as a sort of departure from gender norms…because we're telling men to care, and that is arguably very unlike the kinds of things that men were told not so long ago. Deviating from these gender norms is precisely what queer people do often. And so you might say, well, look at what's going on in these queer communities, that's the same kind of thing we're talking about in care ethics.
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I think invisible disabilities raise several unique issues or questions. I think…part of the problem is that a lot of the talk in care ethics is about virtues like attentiveness and…perceptual conversations. And those don't seem to get us very far when it comes to invisible disabilities, which are by…definition, invisible.
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It's not often emphasised that what migrants and refugees are doing is caring. If you look at the interviews with people who come to the border and seek refuge, or they seek to be integrated into another state, they'll tell you that they're caring for themselves or they're caring for their children. And I think the special connection that we draw between caring and ethics is illuminating here, because we want to say if someone's seeking refuge to protect their child or whatever it is, they're doing the right thing. And I think when we frame migrants and refugees as, to a very large extent, people trying to do the right thing, that really changes the discourse.
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 Damien Hirst’s ‘The Virtues (Justice, Courage, Mercy, Politeness, Honesty, Honour, Loyalty, Control)’, via artnet.com