This paper begins with specific articulations of ‘care’ by three prominent care theorists - Eva Kittay (1999), Joan Tronto (2013), and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) - to analyze aspects of the Covid-19 reality in the US and in India. The central concern is to explore whether a care analysis of the pandemic can initiate radically different imaginings of ‘living with’ in a post-Covid world. After examining some roadblocks to adopting the deeply relational nature of life that Covid-19 foregrounded, I explore whether our response to the crises contains an implicit self-refutation of entrenched neoliberal frameworks based on atomized selfhood, individualized responsibility, and the values of market fundamentalism.

COVID-19 triggers urgent questions about the social, political and ethical implications of care markets, practices and relations. This article presents analysis of the Houses of the Oireachtas Special Committee on Covid-19 Response exposing current discourses about care in Ireland. Utilising the Trace analysis method (Sevenhuijsen, 2004), grounded in feminist care ethics, reveals a state accountability exercise grappling with the failures of the care market and the inhumanity of congregated settings. Care discourses were constrained by a focus on the formal health system, normalisation of binary care giver and care receiver categorisations and a lack of recognition of gendered inequalities of care in homes and workplaces. Public discourse and feminist analysis revealed unreasonable labour conditions for women working in health and social care and a silencing of the voices of those with care needs. The article contributes to a reconceptualisation of care in post-pandemic futures and urges societal co-responsibility for ‘universal care’.

Responses to brain injury sit in the intersection between neuroscience and an ethic of care, and require sensitive and dynamic indicators of how an individual with brain injury can learn how to live in the context of a changing environment and multiple timescales. Therapeutic relationships and rhythms underpinning such a dynamic approach are currently obscured by existing models of brain function. Something older is required and we put forward narrative types articulating outcomes of brain injury over various periods and starting points in time. Such storytelling challenges a static neuropsychological paradigm and moves from an ethics that focuses on patient autonomy into one that is reflective of the cognitive supports and therapeutic relationships that underpin ways that the patient can re-find the beat that proves the music is not over.

Ethical issues raised by the outbreak of COVID-19 have predominantly been addressed through a public health ethics lens. This article proposes that the rising COVID-19 fatalities and the World Health Organization’s failure to include palliative care as part of its guidance on how to maintain essential health services during the pandemic have exposed palliative care as an underlying global crisis. It therefore calls for a different ethical framework that includes a care ethics perspective and thereby addresses the ways in which the pandemic has triggered new difficulties in ensuring the delivery of appropriate end-of-life care for the dying. The article analyses the structural weaknesses of palliative care accentuated by the pandemic and proposes solutions that could set in motion lasting changes in the way it is delivered beyond COVID-19.

Justice can be approached from many angles in ethical and political debates, including those involving healthcare, biomedical research, and well-being. The main doctrines of justice are liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, luck egalitarianism, socialism, utilitarianism, capability approach, communitarianism, and care ethics. These can be further elaborated in the light of traditional moral and social theories, values, ideals, and interests, and there are distinct dimensions of justice that are captured better by some tactics than by others. In this article, questions surrounding these matters are approached with the hermeneutic idea of a distinction between “American” and “European” ways of thinking.

Drawing upon the Trace method developed by Selma Sevenhuijsen (2004), this paper has traced the discourse constructed in two key Troubled Families Programme (TFP) policy documents through the lens of care ethics, highlighting tensions between ‘care’ and ‘justice’ orientations in the neoliberal family intervention model. It is argued that whilst the family intervention model advocated has the potential to provide families with support underpinned by an ethic of care, the TFP's managerialist tendencies also create challenges to the integration of care ethics within such services. Given that the programme's financial framework generates considerable opportunity for local variation in policy implementation, the ethics of care offer a valuable moral framework by which to evaluate local practice. Moreover, engaging with a distinctly feminist ethic of care renders visible to family support services the inequalities produced through the gendered distribution of ‘caring’ responsibilities, and highlights the need for interventions to address rather than reinforce these inequalities.