The Feelings We Feel: Care and Community in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a show that focused on teaching children an ethics of caring for oneself and care for others. This article examines those ethics through the songs “I Like You As You Are” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It contends that these songs focus on a celebration of the self and others, welcoming individuals as they are into the community, and embracing authenticity. This article looks to understand these ethics in a contemporary setting and argues that Mister Rogers and the communal ethics of care that he taught are needed.

Implicaciones biopolíticas de la Covid-19: Del pesimismo a la parresia

Covid-19 is, above all, a problem concerning public health and healthcare professionals. This seems totally obvious but not for everybody. However, just beginning the outbreak of the pandemic, in the midst of its deadliest first wave, some renowned intellectuals, such as Slavoj Žižek, speculated in highly idealized and utopian terms about the positive effects that would be unleashed for philosophical and political thought. In this article we try to think the biopolitical implications of this pandemic, especially through a critical pessimism that faces the immanentist prophetism, which is typical of intramundane futurist projects that we read today in political publications. To fulfill our goals, we fully enter into the debate on the pandemic through contemporary authors such as Foucault, Agamben, Fukuyama, Han, and other relevant thinkers. After the hybris of the pandemic, we propose an ethics of caring for oneself and others in a parrhesia where, what is hidden and biopolitically manipulated, comes to light as a support for the different democratic systems, where Covid-19 must be fought.

Learning to manage a mental health condition: Caring for the self and ‘normalizing’ identity at work

This article examines the internal and external pressures to ‘normalize’ identity in relation to individuals experiencing mental health conditions (MHCs) at work. The data takes the form of three vignettes extracted from a larger empirical study of 60 interviews. These explore the tensions surrounding identity for individuals experiencing MHCs as well as their interventions to suppress exhibiting the condition. The analysis captures a number of competing meanings surrounding identity in relation to learning to care for the self and managing MHCs. Our contribution is to explore the relationships between learning to care for the self and the performativity of ‘normalizing’ identity in managing MHCs at work. It also provides a potential means of integrating Foucault’s ethics of caring for the self with the literature on identity in ways that can be illuminating for those who manage their MHCs and the demands of work through processes of ‘normalization’. This analysis offers theoretical insights regarding how identity work may be self-defeating in exacerbating MHCs and therefore is of some practical benefit for managers, health professionals and those experiencing MHCs since they often leave individuals with little choice but to intensify their attempts to ‘normalize’ their identities.

ethics of caring in the child-friendly projects: new challenges

This paper aims to consider the implications of Noddings’ ethics of care theory for child-friendly projects and their underlying philosophical assumptions. It is explained that this theory with its emphasis on the children’s needs and rights and, more importantly, the emphasis on the care relation and care encounter indicates how Noddings’ main concepts and ideas could be taken into consideration in exploring the challenges of implementing child-friendly projects. Therefore, the main concepts of ethics of care theory including need and right, empathy and sympathy, receptive and projective, care about and cared-for, expressed and inferred needs were investigated by considering their adaptation with the origin and the destination of child-friendly projects. Accordingly, a series of questions was set out to illustrate the theoretical challenges that may have been reflected in implementing the child-friendly project. These questions were also categorized in light of three core characteristics of Noddings’ theory of caring: 1) relational ontology; which refers to the relational nature of children life, 2) attention with concern; which refers to the moral sentiment/non-rational life of children and 3) particularism; which refers to the particularity of children’s lives. As individuals/researchers and as members of the child-friendly community we can focus on these questions to understand the challenges of the project and provide a potential for its qualitative evaluation.

Rural, Poor and Mapuche: A Window into the Power of Caring Education

This article goes deep into the process of turning around a marginal and precarious school, into one with high quality learning results and an ethos of caring and competence that echoes and celebrates the life, insight and work of Nel Noddings, in particular her 17 years of teaching and leadership in elementary and high schools, and her philosophical work on the ethics of caring and its implications for education. The article gives an account of the context, process and results of the radical transformation of a rural school serving a Mapuche community in the south of Chile, which in 2007 had the worst learning results of the country. A decade later, against all the odds of territorial isolation, socio-economic poverty and cultural distance from the mainstream, the school is consistently achieving results equivalent to the average of upper middle status schools in the main cities of highly urbanized Chile. At the heart of the change is ambitious and effective teaching that both cares and is able to help students substantially grow in terms of their fundamental skills. The article examines the forces and actors involved, the concepts, moral orientation, means and strategies through which they acted, and the time-scale of the project.

Feminist Economics and Ethics

Based on different normative foundations, a plurality of approaches to feminist economics has developed since the 1980s. The major tasks of an ethics of feminist economics, feminist economic ethics, are to make visible these normative foundations and to critically reflect them from a non-androcentric moral point of view that has first to be unfolded. Therefore, the first section on feminist ethics looks beyond androcentric ethics, reflects critically the existing gender norms and asks, “care justice for whom?” The second section degenders economic terms and makes explicit the normative foundations of feminist economics and economic ethics. The third section is dedicated to the method, subject matter, and agency model of a contemporary feminist economic ethics taking queer and postcolonial ethics into account. The conclusion summarizes the challenges a critical reflexive feminist economic ethics of paid and unpaid work as an ethics of caring provisioning is facing.

Specyfika etyk kobiecych w ujęciu Carol Gilligan

The paper discusses the ethical views of Carol Gilligan that emerged to dispute the theory of six stages of moral development developed by Lawrence Kohlberg. In his opinion, women tend to reach the higher stages of his scale less frequently than men do. According to C. Gilligan this does not evidence the moral supremacy of men over women, but the faulty de- sign of the research tool. In her opinion, the Kohlbergian conception was based on an ethics of justice that took into account an exclusively male point of view. Women, whose voice is not heard in the public sphere, adopt a different type of ethics, namely the ethics of caring. C. Gilligan believes that it is necessary to promote this specific type of female ethics in order to overcome male dominance which is harmful both for women and men. Introducing a fe- male ethics will make it possible to refute the ‘double lie’ underlying patriarchal civilization. The lie involves (1) the assumption that male ethics are universal; and (2) female concealment of their own models of moral reasoning.