Jess Kyle at IASH

February 15, 2012

Jessica Kyle

Graduate Fellow, Philosophy

IASH Fellows’ Speaker Series: “The Ethics of Care and Military Humanitarian Intervention”

Cases of military humanitarian intervention (MHI) suggest that values promoted by an ethic of care at times take center stage in public policy debates, whatever their general political marginalization.  Yet the very appeals to care values used to justify MHI also encourage exceptionalist attitudes toward international law when they hold that the moral urgency of certain humanitarian crises demands unauthorized or otherwise illegal military action.  Kyle considers the extent to which the approaches of two prominent care theorists, Virginia Held and Joan Tronto, can address this issue of legal exceptionalism in name of care.  She argues that both approaches ultimately contribute to what she calls the problem of global worldlessness—the loss or erosion of the relatively recently emergent global space of politics—and she turns to the Arendtian care value of “amor mundi” or care for the world as a potential counterbalance to other care values during policy deliberations.

12:00pm, IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)