Abstract
The ethics of care has regularly been described via contrast with deon-tological, consequentialist, and virtue theories of ethics. Often, such descriptions play care and justice against one another as potentially congruent but frequently competing social goods. This articulation of the field, which moves across major perspectives within moral and political philosophy, does not fully describe how ethics appears in some areas of humanities, particularly literary studies, where an ‘ethics of alterity’ has predominated for several decades. This ethics emphasizes a scene of encounter across difference, and an ethical responsibility to the other which has been narrativized via the scene of hospitality. This essay proposes that the ethics of care and the ethics of alterity share much—more than care ethics shares with other kinds of moral philosophy. But it also identifies differences which have made it easier to position alterity, rather than care, as a guiding ethos for literature, literary criticism, and literature education. Why is this so, and what would it mean for the ethics of care to be more central in literary study and literature education? Taking as an occasion a novel explicitly concerned with care-taking and care-giving, J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (2005), the essay explores the prospects for a care-focused practice of literary studies. Copyright © 2024 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Educational Philosophy and Theory |
Early online date | Sept 2024 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - Sept 2024 |
Citation
Clapp, J. (2024). The ethics of alterity and the ethics of care in literary studies. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2024.2406014Keywords
- Ethics
- Alterity
- Care
- Literature
- Coetzee