Presentation of the Translation of a Chapter of Ethics of Considération

Why is it so difficult to change our lifestyles and achieve environmental sustainability when no one can deny that our model of development has a destructive ecological and social impact and that it inflicts considerable violence on animals? What could contribute to the reinforcement of democracy today when so many people experience a socially degraded life, have lost the desire to participate in public life, or are seduced by populism?

In an attempt to respond to these challenges and reduce the gap between theory and practice, we propose a virtue ethics that was expounded in detail in Éthique de la considération. “Considération and Feminism” is a chapter of this book.

Instead of focusing on principles or on the consequences of our actions, a virtue ethics is interested in our concrete motivations, that is to say, in the representations and the affects that encourage us to act. It insists on the moral traits that could lead us to be temperate and have pleasure in doing the good, instead of being constantly torn between happiness and duty. Respect for nature and other beings, be they humans or nonhumans, does not derive from duties or norms. The ethics of care and ecofeminism have shown that our capacity to care for others is linked to the particular bonds that tie us with them. Emotions and affects cannot be ignored when we try to understand what may lead people to change their lifestyles and habits. Moreover, we have to pay attention to our negative emotions instead of repressing them, if we want to find a path that travels from fear and shame to commitment, which is so important when dealing with environmental disasters and with animal suffering.

As ecofeminists point out, our fear for the planet and for the health of our children can be a starting point to denounce the inability of States that focus only on production and growth and are blind to the impact of production on reproduction and health. Becoming aware of what endangers nature is also an opportunity to turn one’s situation of vulnerability into a strength—since it provides the emotional maturity required to restore one’s capacity to act (one’s power to) and to cooperate with others, instead of exerting our power over them. These moral traits help individuals, especially those who were assigned to subordinate roles, like women and minorities, to organize themselves and put pressure on governments, obliging them to take into account the social, environmental, and health challenges that people encounter in their daily lives.

Although we may agree with this entirely, it is nevertheless obvious that without a process of self-transformation and individuation we will not succeed in changing our way of inhabiting the earth and making room for others, including other species. Particular relationships and emotions are not enough to give birth to moral traits or virtues that change our way of being and our behavior. The key to environmental virtues and to the alleviation of animal suffering is our relationship with our selves, and it is also an experience of the incommensurable. This point stresses the differences between the ethic of considération and ecofeminism, although they have much in common, as shown in the following text translated by Jonathan Sinnreich.

The ethic of considération takes its source from the morals of antiquity, but it rejects their essentialism. It is based upon a philosophy of the subject that takes seriously the materiality of our existence and our corporeality, the fact that we are vulnerable selves that depend upon others, and that we live from natural and cultural things that nourish our lives, giving them a meaning and a savor. Such a phenomenology of corporeality, which we developed previously in Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body (translated by J. Smith, Bloomsbury 2019), highlights the relational dimension of our existence: we are not only biologically, psychologically, or socially dependent on others, but we also always have an impact upon future generations and other living beings as we eat and inhabit the earth. Not to mention the fact that being...