Human Rights, Care Ethics and Situated Universal Norms

Abstract

As interest in the relationship between geography and ethics grows, it becomes important to examine how different approaches to ethical philosophy may fit with geographic scholarship. To that end, this article focuses on a particular approach to ethical responsibilityinternational human rights law-and asks how that approach can be put into conversation with discussions in geography about morality, distance and care. It explores three contributions of such a conversation: first, it examines how the relational ontology of care ethics provides a new perspective on the moral value of human rights, so that the relationships and context in question drive the relative value of rights. Second, the article discusses contributions that human rights can bring to questions of caring across distance. Finally, it unpacks the duties that accompany human rights and questions the scope of duty that attaches to the norm of equality.

Towards developing a critical and ethical approach for better recognising and protecting human rights defenders

“…Carmalt argues persuasively that while human rights law might set universal rules for conduct, what is needed is the 'contextual thickening for their implementation'. 36 It is our hope that the considerations we have outlined in this article provide the beginning of this contextual thickening required in order to inform and improve the practices and policies employed for protecting human rights defenders throughout the world.…”

Care‐full Justice in the City

“…Theorists such as Gould () have made connections between an ethic of care and the justice practices of recognition and redistribution on a global scale. Carmalt () has used an ethic of care to rework conceptualisations of human rights. Till () has begun to develop connections between the right to the city and a place‐based ethic of care in the context of what she terms “wounded cities”.…”

“…Abstract theories provide a starting point, a guiding set of understandings from agreed upon moral philosophies that can be enhanced by an understanding of actually existing care and justice. The tendency of urban justice‐thinking to operate in a way that sets out universal principles can work in tandem with the “context‐based approaches” of an ethic of care (Carmalt :316). This working can be done through mobilising a general understanding of injustices and carelessness and responding to the actual manifestation of these in contextually appropriate ways, as encouraged by an ethic of care (Carmalt ).…”

“…Care ethics have been theorised as an ethic that can be practised across distance through mediated relations of consumption, through housing markets and through universal human rights (Carmalt ; Conradson ; Cox ; Milligan and Wiles ; Popke ). There is no site that will always produce caring practice and there are no guarantees that care is present in some relationships and not others (Barnett and Land :1067).…”

Normative geographies and the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine

“…That geographers have not by and large heeded Sayer and Storper's call or made Smith's prediction a reality (though see, for example, Carmalt ; Lee and Smith ; Proctor and Smith ; Smith ) is perhaps not better evinced than by a 2009 article – this time the introduction to a special issue of Antipode – in which Elizabeth Olson and Andrew Sayer put forth a call similar to Sayer and Storper's of a decade earlier (see also Smith on his own 1997 prediction). In this intervention, Olson and Sayer argued again that, while geographers do not hesitate to condemn certain practices or discourses as unjust, they rarely acknowledge or debate the ideas about justice that underlie these condemnations.…”