If one takes care ethics’ ideas about the context of dependence and complexity of care seriously, and if one takes Levinas’ 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 one’s abilities and have never done enough. And I think that idea is actually desctructive; it’s at least destructive if one really takes it seriously and digs deep down into one’s 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 one’s ability to care well. And so the solution I propose is- it’s a fusion that tries to dissolve the tension. Good care is based upon the hope of caring better. A care that is ideal and it’s never achieved, because again, one might always be wrong, the other might interrupt, you’re 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 there’s 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
