Care and the Pluriverse: A Review, by Maggie Fitzgerald

Abstract

From the early work on global justice by thinkers such as Singer and O’Neill in the 1970s to the most recent philosophical work on the ethics of climate change, the fields of International and Global Ethics have been dominated by moral theories and traditions based in the western academy (Caney, 2006; Hutchings, 2018; Nell, 1975; Singer, 1972; Widdows, 2011). In particular, the field has been fundamentally shaped by deontological, utilitarian and contractualist approaches, which can all be traced back to arguments originally developed in seventeenth and eighteenth century European thought. Alternative moral approaches have also predominantly drawn on western sources, including virtue, care and postmodernist ethics. Only in the last decade have we begun to see more arguments stemming from ethical traditions beyond the west. These have often drawn on alternative religious and spiritual traditions as a source of insight into how we should think about global relations between people and between people and their environment (Chimakonam, 2017; Metz, 2014; Schönfeld, 2011). In addition, we have begun to see work that brings decolonial insights to bear on questions of global justice, humanitarianism, climate change, migration, global health and so on (Bell, 2019; Graness, 2015; Lu, 2017). This includes some attempts to think through what it might mean for Global Ethics if we cannot take for granted the purported universalism of dominant moral paradigms (Dunford, 2017; Hutchings, 2019). However, Fitzgerald’s book is the first really sustained attempt to go beyond expressions of dissatisfaction with the parochialism of the resources on which much work in Global Ethics relies to develop a new way forward. In Care and the Pluriverse, she makes a novel argument that brings together literatures on the idea of the pluriverse with the critical ethics of care as a basis for developing a new direction for thinking in Global Ethics. Fitzgerald’s approach to rethinking Global Ethics starts from the mutual implication of a commitment to pluriversality and the critical ethics of care. The contemporary conception of the pluriverse, developed by decolonial and indigenous scholars and activists in Latin America, is that there is no single, universal world (ontology) in which all inhabitants of the world participate. The idea is explained most commonly by pointing to contrasts between modern and indigenous being (worlds), the former characterised by an oppositional ontological distinction between culture and nature, the latter by 1180646 IPT0010.1177/17550882231180646Journal of International Political TheoryBook Roundtable book-review2023