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Protecting the World: Military Humanitarian Intervention and the Ethics of Care

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Jess Kyle
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Abstract

Feminist care theorists Virginia Held and Joan Tronto have suggested that care is relevant to political issues concerning distant others and that care can provide the basis for a more comprehensive moral approach. I consider their approaches with regard to the policy issue of military humanitarian intervention, and raise concerns about exceptionalist attitudes toward international law that entail a collection of costs that I refer to as “the problem of global worldlessness.” I suggest that an ethic of care can overcome these concerns, and offer an Arendt‐inflected rereading of some of Tronto's work to show how this is possible.

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Crossing Borders Special Issue , Spring 2013 , pp. 257 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I appreciate the comments on an earlier draft of this paper from Joan Tronto, Deen Chatterjee, and other participants in the June 2011 Ninth International Conference of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) at Bryn Mawr College. I am grateful as well for the support I received while working on this paper from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at Binghamton University, and for the feedback from other IASH fellows at a February 2012 presentation of my work. I also thank Bat‐Ami Bar On for pointing me in the direction of Tronto's work for considerations of Arendt and care and for her other helpful comments.

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