The Ethics of Vulnerability, Alterity, and Nonconformist Embodiment: Situating Poststructuralism as a Moral Theory


Evan Wicklund, Carleton University

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had deleterious medical, social, and economic consequences in societies throughout the world, it has disproportionally impacted persons with compromised health conditions and persons labeled as having disabilities (Singh, 2020). As Tom Shakespeare and his colleagues (2021) claim, the coronavirus has disproportionally affected these populations not only because they are at an “increased risk of poor outcomes from the disease itself”, but also because they often have difficulties accessing inclusive healthcare and experience increased levels of social isolation (p. 1331). Although the data on disability and the coronavirus is concerning, the pandemic has also provided opportunities to contemplate the value of critical theory, explore why care ethics are important, and pose critical questions about which bodies are valued in society and which are not. In this presentation, I examine how an ethics of care that prioritizes alterity (Levinas, 2009) and vulnerability (Kittay, 2018) is crucial for enhancing the lived experiences of persons with nonconforming embodiments. To broaden my understanding of the sociocultural and philosophical ethics of disablement, I use a genealogical analysis (Foucault, 1990; Nietzsche, 2003), to explain how while ethics has been understood in various ways, it has consistently maintained the standard of compulsory ablebodiedness, or the higher valuation of normatively conforming bodyminds over others (McRuer, 2006; Reynolds, 2022). To that end, I investigate the foundations of ethics in Western societies to formulate a hypothesis of how embodied difference provides nascent opportunities for theorizing about the ethics of care. I have divided my presentation into two sections: I first provide a brief overview of the historical approaches to ethical discourse, focusing on virtue, deontological, and consequentialist ethics. I then explain how phenomenologists have built upon the teleology of their predecessors, but are not only interested in what it means to live in a way that is congruent with universalist morality, but more specifically what it means to live an ethical life with others. In the second overarching section, I first explore what may be referred to as the feminist turn in ethics (Gilligan, 1989; Kittay, 2012; Wendell, 1997); a discourse which draws upon traditional forms of moral theory, yet fosters principles such as relationality and impartiality, both of which are important for conceptualizing an ethics of care. Finally, I argue that how while traditional approaches to moral theory may be useful for theorizing the intersections of nonconformist embodiment, the writings of Emmanuel Levinas (2009) provide a unique opportunity to theorize about an ethics of care that is grounded in the asymmetrical responsibility we have with others. In conclusion, I introduce two concepts which I believe prognosticate further areas of research and portend a poststructuralist ethics of care which are congruent with Levinasian care ethics. The first is Martin Heidegger’s (2010) explanation of the process of breaking-down, while the second is Georges Bataille’s (1985) advocation for a metaphysics of heterology, which relies upon a materialistic philosophy of expenditure and excess. I argue that tracing the genealogical development of these concepts helps me develop a framework that decentres the homogenization of contemporary discourses on ethics, and therefore invokes a theoretical approach to understanding the nuances of the obligation we have to other sentient beings in our proximity.

This paper will be presented at the following session: