Watership Down: a gentle epic about care, exile, and quiet resistance
The story follows a small group of rabbits who flee their warren after one of them, Fiver, has a terrifying premonition of its destruction. Led by Hazel, they cross hostile territories, encounter different social systems, and eventually attempt to build a new community rooted in cooperation rather than domination. What unfolds is an epic journey about survival, exile, and the fragile work of creating a society that does not reproduce the violence it escaped.
I finally finished the graphic novel adaptation of Watership Down, and I think Iāve landed on a very honest place with it: a solid 3.75 stars.
The very first thing that drew me to this edition was the beautiful cover and the art style itself. I found it poetic, restrained, and quietly haunting. The illustrations give the story a distinctly adult dimension, while preserving the idea of this being, on the surface, a ārabbit tale.ā Thereās something very eerie in the way the softness of the line contrasts with the constant sense of danger. For me it worked perfectly with the tone of the story.
What really stayed with me was Hazel as a leader. His leadership feels deeply progressive: attentive, caring, and grounded in collective well-being rather than authority or force. The story consistently values solidarity over individual heroism, and I genuinely loved how the group survives through cooperation, mutual care, and trust. The cast of characters is endearing, and the emotional bonds feel earned rather than rushed. I was also very drawn to the rabbitsā mythology and socio-political system, which give the narrative a real epic texture without turning it into high fantasy excess.
One of the most striking aspects for me is how humans are portrayed: not as individual villains, but as a destabilising, incomprehensible force. The first part of the story, with the warren that stays put despite the looming danger, might actually be the most politically unsettling section of the book. It reads like a metaphor for societies that accept comfort and apparent stability at the cost of autonomy, slowly collaborating with their own disappearance. Fiver, dismissed as irrational or hysterical, fits perfectly into the figure of the discredited whistleblower. He is the one who names structural violence before it becomes undeniable.
At the same time, I understand why Watership Down may feel less mind-blowing today. If youāve already read a lot of fantasy or political narratives, many of its themes (exile, found family, authoritarian systems, care-based leadership) feel familiar now. That doesnāt make the story weaker, but it does change how it lands. I can absolutely see how radical this must have been at the time of its publication, especially as such a dense political allegory told through animals.
For me, the graphic novel format worked extremely well. It keeps the emotional and political heart of the story while avoiding some of the novelās slower pacing, which made this a very pleasant reading experience. It wonāt become an all-time favourite, but it is a thoughtful, generous, and quietly political epic and a genuinely beautiful way to discover a classic.
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Storge (pronounced stor-jay) is one of the four ancient Greek words for loveāalongside agape (unconditional love), philia (friendship love), and eros (romantic or passionate love). Storge refers specifically to affectionate love rooted in familiarity, kinship, and long-term bonding, such as the love between parents and children, siblings, or even lifelong companions.
It is quiet, persistent, and often taken for grantedāyet it forms the emotional bedrock of many human lives.
Key Themes in the Philosophy of Storge
Familiarity and Habit
Storge is not sparked by idealism or passion but by closeness and shared life. It grows over time, through routine, caregiving, and daily acts. The love you feel for a pet, a childhood friend, or a family memberāeven without shared interestsāoften reflects storge.
Unchosen Relationships
Unlike friendship (philia), which is freely chosen, storge often arises in relationships we do not chooseālike family. This raises ethical questions:
What obligations arise from storge?
Is it morally virtuous to love someone simply because they are āyoursā?
Embodied and Practical
Storge is embodiedāshown not in grand declarations but in acts of care, physical closeness, and emotional reliability. Its moral structure resembles the ethics of care more than formal duties or principles.
Forgiveness and Endurance
Storge is often forgiving, enduring even when relationships are strained. Philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch hint at the quiet strength of this loveāits power to withstand disappointment, change, and time.
Philosophical and Ethical Implications
Aristotle: Viewed familial love as essential to the moral development of the citizen.
Christian Philosophy: Storge appears in C.S. Lewisās The Four Loves as the most instinctive and humble form of love.
Care Ethics: Feminist philosophers like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings emphasize relational, nurturing ethicsārooted in the values of dependence, empathy, and connection, all aligned with storge.
Existentialism: While often focused on autonomy, existentialists also explored how family and rootedness shape identity and responsibility.
Storge in the Modern World
In contemporary society, storge can be both challenged and reimagined:
Chosen family: Many find storge in non-biological relationships, redefining kinship through chosen bonds.
Elder care and parenting: These areas reveal the labor and moral complexity of storgic love.
Technology and distance: How does digital life affect the sustaining presence required for storge?
In Summary
The philosophy of storge asks us to recognize the quiet love that holds the world togetherānot the love of heroes or saints, but of caretakers, siblings, pets, and neighbors. Itās not idealized or passionate, but stable, loyal, and deeply human.
I really like this paper on abortion. I've always personally found Thomson's violinist argument unsatisfying, because it seems to me that there is a pretty big difference between being kidnapped and hooked up to a random violinist vs your own potential child. I read Hursthouse as well and found her view quite inadequate on the topic of abortion in later pregnancy which she views as wrong (philosophers are so clueless on this - these are less than 1% of all abortions and usually because of fatal foetal abnormality, severe pre-eclampsia, sepsis etc. always after other things have been tried and delivery is preferred where possible because abortions at that point can be riskier than delivery. The hill you decided to die on is a septic stillbirth about to kill the mother? Please research what you're talking about before writing about it. Philosophers are always arguing abstract stuff that bears little resemblance to real life).
Bodily autonomy is the strongest argument to me but it's clear that autonomy isn't an absolute right - autonomy doesn't allow you to consent to being eaten by a cannibal even if that's what you wanted and you're not interfering with anyone else in doing so . I find it quite odious when autonomy is framed as "do what you want with your body" because first of all lots of things people chose to do are harmful and second it's liberal property rights assigned to the body itself (you are property, except you're your own property). I do still believe in the value itself despite my issues with the modern framing of it.
I've found arguments about foetal personhood equally unconvincing, in that foetuses can clearly be very important to people in some instances (miscarriage can be devastating) while not at all in others. A blanket approach either way isn't suitable to explain the discrepancy. Treating foetuses as completely unimportant raises the question of how someone deliberately trying to get a pregnant woman to miscarry/stillbirth through targeted attacks on her abdomen or through drugging her (like that horrible twitter story of the man who drugged his unwitting pregnant partner to cause an abortion) is any worse than non-obstetric assault.
A care ethics perspective explains it in a simple and intuitive way: wanted pregnancies are the beginning of a caring relationship while unwanted pregnancies are not because care cannot be coerced.
I still wonder how Herring would apply care ethics to the case of a regretful parent. If care cannot be coerced, then can men be expected to provide financially for an unwanted child? I'm sure care ethicists have written about this. Nonetheless despite this quibble I find care ethics the most satisfying moral justification for abortion as a public good I've read thus far. Selected parts of the paper below
Ethics of Care and the Public Good of Abortion - Jonathan Herring*
As the focus of this article is on its application to abortion, only a very brief overview of ethics of care can be offered here. Joan Tronto summarizes ethics of care in this way:
...a set of moral sensibilities, issues and practices that arise from taking seriously the fact that care is a central aspect of human existence...a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our āworldā so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.3
[...]
Ethics of care is based on the belief that people are relational. People understand themselves in terms of their relationships. Their well-being is deeply tied up with the well-being of others. If good things happen to those they are in a positive relationship with, then that is good for them.9
[...]
Conceiving of the foetus on its own terms fails to capture the fact that it is integrated into the woman. The traditional presentation is some kind of fairy tale image that the woman provides a cosy sitting room for the foetus to live in, awaiting birth. But the woman is not simply a āfoetal containerā.31 Barbara Katz Rothman writes:
the reigning medical model of pregnancy, as an essentially parasitic and vaguely pathological relationship, [which] encourages the physician to view the fetus and mother as two separate patients, and to see pregnancy as inherently a conflict of interests between the two. Where the fetus is highly valued, the effect is to reduce the woman to what current obstetrical language calls the āmaternal environmentā.32
The reality is that all interaction and dealings with the foetus must be mediated through, and with, the woman. Pregnancy is utterly relational.
[...]
Wanted pregnancies are caring, and therefore of the highest moral value. We need to protect them through the criminal law from unwanted termination, and to recognise the goodness of them. By contrast, unwanted pregnancies lack moral value as these involve coerced care, which may well impede other wanted caring relationships. As Bryon Stoyles puts it:
Relational accounts of fetal value allow that pregnancies have whatever meaning and value they are given by the pregnant woman. Thus, relational accounts allow that pregnancy can have little or no positive value and also that pregnancy can have great value.42
[...]
The relational ethics of care approach would focus on the question of what obligations flow from the pregnancy, given that it is unwanted, and so will not be marked by the reciprocity and mutuality required for a relationship to be caring. Given that a parent is not obliged by the law to give organs, or to even suffer the prick of a needle to give some blood in order to save the life of their child, it is inconceivable that the law could require a woman to go through pregnancy and birth for a foetus in order to promote a caring relationship. The law is not in the business of coercing relationships through threat of legal sanction, as that undermines the very goodness of a mutually respectful caring relationship.
[...]
The problem with the traditional understanding of the foetus is well captured by Hannah Roberts, a Lecturer in Law whose eight month pregnancy was terminated through a car accident. She writes:
The current lawās attempt to answer this riddle is a clumsy one. It characterises our daughterās death as one of my āinjuriesā, because she died in utero, and was not a legal āpersonā with a separate existence from me at the time she died. Calling our loss an āinjuryā fails to acknowledge the depth of sorrow involved in grieving a child. 59
Yet she goes on to express nervousness for saying her foetus was a person or a child, for fear that that would negatively impact on abortion rights. This is also captured by the writing of Victoria Browne, arguing that miscarriage is ādisenfranchised griefā. She acknowledges that there is a concern that:
if one were to acknowledge that there was something of value lost, something worth grieving in a miscarriage, one would be conceding ground to antiabortion or āpro-lifeā arguments.60
An ethics of care approach provides a way around this dilemma. We can recognize that, in the case of a wanted pregnancy, there is a caring relationship which the state has a duty to support and protect. However, in the case of an unwanted relationship, the state has a duty to provide abortion to ensure there is no coerced relationship, which would be the antithesis of care. Further, by providing abortion, the state promotes caring relationships ā the current caring relationships the woman has; the care for any child the woman later has; and care for herself. We can, on this understanding, have a law which offers a liberal approach to abortion, yet is able to provide powerful criminal sanctions against those who terminate a pregnancy without consent, and to acknowledge the serious loss in an unwanted miscarriage.
[...]
Third, the presentation of abortion as a matter of choice or control tends to privatise the matter. As Petchesky explains, this ālets men and society neatly off the hookā. 61 While the choice/control language creates a powerful liberty claim, it fails to make the case for positive rights to abortion. As Lisa Smyth notes:
the emphasis on privacy prevents any consideration of the socio-political forces which produce both involuntary pregnancies and calls for abortion access, and constrain the āchoicesā of different women in different contexts.62
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If one takes care ethicsā ideas about the context of dependence and complexity of care seriously, and if one takes Levinasā idea of infinite responsibility seriously in an existential sense, there is a fundamental tension, because one can do everything that one can and to the best of oneās abilities and have never done enough. And I think that idea is actually desctructive; itās at least destructive if one really takes it seriously and digs deep down into oneās psyche. And you can point to the necessity of self-care, you can point to all the evidence about moral distress and burnout among professional dependency workers or caregivers, you can point to lots of facts and concepts that suggest that this is a tension that actually can hurt oneās ability to care well. And so the solution I propose is- itās a fusion that tries to dissolve the tension. Good care is based upon the hope of caring better. A care that is ideal and itās never achieved, because again, one might always be wrong, the other might interrupt, youāre always relearning how to care in the moment. And care ethics I think is born out of this hope, this hope that one will always care better.
But care ethics puts that hope to work, and work is always finite. There are only so many hours in the day and thereās only so much that one can do - work has limits and work has ends, and work is humble in a way that brings hope down to earth and makes it really real. And we need both, I think. We need a hope that never ends, and an ethic of work that knows where to end. We need finite responsibility, with infinite hope.
Examining Ethics podcast, ep.35: Finite Responsibility and Infinite Hope with Joel Reynolds
āCare reveals the myth of independence. Human life is embedded in nested dependencies.ā
ā Eva Feder Kittay
The Childās Bath by Mary Cassatt, 1893
Aligning with Ji means that our relationships, whether they be familial, platonic, romantic, or whichever label we may apply to them, must be approached with steadfastness, loyalty, faithfulness, and care. Attachment and possessiveness areā¦
