Abstract
The questions and issues that make up the field of global ethics have, for several decades now, largely been understood through the binary framework of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘communitarianism’. Despite the widespread criticism of the limitations of this dualism, and some attempts to ‘qualify or hyphenate core terms’ it has proven ‘remarkably difficult to escape or transcend’ the cosmopolitanism-communitarianism framework (Sutch, 2018: 35). Maggie Fitzgerald’s new book, Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics, manages not only manages to escape these familiar categories, but to break new ground in global ethics. Fitzgerald (2022) begins from the premise that it is insufficient to start with the problem of how to negotiate difference in the world; indeed, on her account, the problem is that we live in a ‘world of many worlds’ (p. 3), where differences are deep and pervasive (onto-epistemic), seriously limiting possibilities for translation and understanding across worlds. This, then, is the idea of the pluriverse – a ‘matrix of connected yet distinct worlds’ (5), the ethics of which is the central focus of Fitzgerald’s book. Specifically, she asks, ‘How might we care for worlds that are not our own, and that are, therefore, to some degree unknowable to us?’(3). Her answer, developed through meticulous and detailed analyses throughout the volume, is that the pluriverse must be understood as constituted by the practices of care by which we reproduce and maintain our lives and our worlds as well as reasonably possible (211). Worlds, like moral subjects, are vulnerable, even precarious, and the ‘ways in which we attend to ethical dilemmas in the pluriverse further constitutes the very political conditions for the reproduction (or not) of worlds that comprise the pluriverse’ (211).
Thus, not only does Care and the Pluriverse provide a rich account of the nature of ‘the global’ – centred around her compelling claim that the antimony between the universal and the particular is an insufficient space for thinking about global ethics – but it also develops a fulsome critical, political account of the ethics of care. In considering the pluriverse as (care) ethical, Fitzgerald brings into conversation two of the most exciting and innovative critical approaches to global ethics, significantly advancing the conversation in the process. For Fitzgerald, the characteristics of a critical and political ethics of care provide a unique meta-ethical orientation that can help subjects of the modern world rethink global ethics in the image of the pluriverse (123–124). To that end, she argues for the need to understand the normative commitments of the pluriversal project so that it is focused on valuing what she calls ‘partial relations of care’ (129), where partial means ‘evolving and animated’ and resistant to closure (129).
Moreover, Fitzgerald explains, there is a need to recognize that, unlike the ‘simple’ relationality of most accounts of care ethics, care in the pluriverse is constituted by ‘relations upon relations’(179); this complexity means that both care and ‘the political’ cannot be understood in a linear or fixed fashion. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s critical, political conception of care is political in both ‘associative’ and ‘dissociative’ ways, insofar as it recognizes the political significance of both rupture and newness, on the one hand, as well as care and reproduction, on the other (170). This understanding captures the more commonplace understanding of care – Fitzgerald paraphrases the often-quoted definition of care from Fisher and Tronto (1990: 40) who characterize care as a collective task of distributing care responsibilities, ensuring care needs are met as well as possible, and maintaining, continuing and repairing our worlds – an acting in common which is necessarily collective and political. But it also highlights the dissociative aspects of care – which draw our attention to the uncontrollable nature of care needs and the challenge this presents to the existing social order, as well as pointing to the power dynamics and inescapable differences that emerge through our relationality. This sophisticated, political understanding of care and care ethics avoids the dangers of romanticization or idealization, and challenges commonplace conceptions – and misconceptions – about what an ethic of care actually entails.
This way of thinking about care is particularly important where our task is considering care in the context of global ethics, insofar as it contributes to the challenging of binary and hierarchical conceptions of ethics and politics, and difference and universality. Moreover, by putting feminist ethics of care in conversation with the pluriversal literature, forms of care that have largely been rendered invisible by the colonial logic of modernity – specifically care for earth-beings and more-than-human entities – are brought to the fore. As Fitzgerald writes, (and I would agree) continuing to nurture this ‘partial connection’ between the ethics of care and the pluriversal literature and continuing to expand and explore different understandings of practices of care so as to broaden the horizons of possibilities for our shared lives, is an important task for future research (220).
Of course, there will be readers would have liked to see Fitzgerald focus more on the ‘possibilities for our shared lives’ in this book. International or global ethicists have been focused for many decades with the question of how to bridge boundaries of difference in global politics – how to find ‘shared understandings’, solidarities, even basic or ‘thin’ common ground on which to build moral languages and ethico-political practices. The pressing need to find common ground for global cooperation has become even more glaringly evident, even to those most insulated from crises or hardship, since 2020. In the light of this, one might be tempted to suggest that, in emphasizing ‘radically different’ worlds, Care and the Pluriverse takes us back a step or two, emphasizing difference when we should be focusing on connection and the possibility of conversations. I would suggest, however, that a full recognition of the existence of different worlds – including the recognition that ‘our world’ is but one of many – is a crucial, preliminary task, and one which has perhaps not been adequately carried out by global ethicists, even ‘critical’ theorists. In her critique of post-foundational ethics, Fitzgerald reminds us that consideration of worlds radically different from our own cannot be achieved simply through the requirement that all subjects must always be ‘decentring’ and self-alienating: Were it posited for the pluriverses, such a requirement both asserts a level of homogenization across worlds and subjects of world (all subjects must be self-alienating), and perhaps even more importantly, fails to acknowledge that there is a privilege associated with being able to foreground the revisability of one’s onto-epistemology. The risk, for example, for a modern subject to assert that modernity is not ‘real’ seems far less than the risk associated with this same move by subjects who are members of onto-epistemologies that are already marginalized in the global political economy (who are already fighting for their worlds to be taken seriously as worlds). (88)
Tied to this, simply recognizing that ‘we are all vulnerable’ fails to account fully for the way that precarity – which Fitzgerald describes as ‘intensified vulnerability’ – results from unequal distributions of power. The uneven distribution of vulnerability – that is, the differentiated precariousness of various worlds – is the ever-present backdrop against which ethical dilemmas in the pluriverse unfold (158). This is a clear-eyed account of difference that cannot be ignored or glossed over through reference to ‘common humanity’, and the ways in which different worlds have, and continue to be, constituted in and through relations of power.
Two further aspects of Care and the Pluriverse also warrant mention here. First is the way that it is ‘motivated by the actual dilemmas and relations between onto-epistemologies and is thus concerned with developing tools to navigate these relations ethically’ within what Fitzgerald calls “her” onto-epistemology, the modern world (91). Throughout the book, we are immersed thought-provoking and challenging ‘real world’ stories of Gyack, the northern corroboree frog, the Whanganui river, the mountain Ausangate, and the caribou or the atîku of the Innu Nation. These stories are not just ‘illustrative examples’ of abstract theory; rather, they are close and careful accounts of life worlds beyond those that regularly make it into the pages of books on International Relations theory. They remind us that our theories have big consequences for real people and for the lands and natural environments that make up their worlds. In this way, Fitzgerald has taken up feminist philosopher Walker’s (1997) important injunction to moral philosophers to ‘bear a far greater descriptive and empirical burden than they commonly do, in pursuing details of actual moral arrangements’ (p. 13).
Second, Fitzgerald’s work should be upheld for the extent to which it draws on the rich and vital work of Indigenous scholars. This point may seem trite or banal to some. Yet the failure of our discipline to listen and respond to (and cite) the voices of Indigenous peoples and scholars from diverse worlds is a glaring example of the hegemony in IR of what Fitzgerald calls the world of modernity. 1 Indeed, the book itself would not be possible without the work done by these scholars to disrupt the complacency of our understandings of ‘the international’. Keenly aware of her own positionality within the world of modernity, Fitzgerald recounts with care Indigenous ‘stories’, recognizing them not just as ‘metaphorical and interpretive’ but as ‘real’ (99).
Care and the Pluriverse is a rich, theoretically sophisticated work. Despite its use of detailed examples and stories that illustrate the colliding of worlds, some readers may find Fitzgerald’s theory somewhat esoteric and far removed from their own familiar disciplinary terrain. IR scholars – even international political theorists – will find few references to nation-states, the international system, sovereignty or security; care ethicists – especially those who theorize care primarily from the positionality of feminism, moreover, may not recognize care ethics as it is theorized here. But it is only by pushing at these boundaries that new theoretical ground can be broken. And there is no doubt that Fitzgerald has done that here.
