The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary

Abstract

T his paper sets out to strengthen a connection that, since the publication of my first writings on the concept of care, I have sought to establish between the ethics of care and my own philosophical background and ground—ordinary language philosophy as represented by Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell—and thus to find in ordinary language philosophy (OLP), often considered to be disconnected from gender issues (except through speech act theory), resources for a reformulation of what for me is at stake in feminism: the inclusion and empowerment of women’s voices and expressiveness (and that means ALL women), and attention to their experience.