A Disruptive Ontology of Caring Time: overcoming moral harm in care through an emancipatory ethics of time

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Associate Professor at Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India

Abstract

Care ethics emphasizes the incessant nature of the work of care. The other-oriented focus of care work and the asymmetric relation between the one-caring and the cared-for entails a normative commitment to a cyclical conception of living time on the part of the one-caring. Moreover, in care, we must think of the time of the self as intertwined with the time of the other, thus constituting a mutual temporality. However, from the perspective of a feminist phenomenology of time, potential moral harms can be identified in the temporal structure of care, which may cause caring time to degenerate into uncaring time for the one-caring. To avoid such a predicament, it is imperative to develop an emancipatory ethics of time at the heart of the relational ontology of care. I argue that when various modalities of living time in care sediment into a coherentist ontology of time, only then is there a degradation into uncaring time. To positively reconstruct a radical notion of caring time, we must build a disruptive ontology within our conception of caring time, which highlights the significance of rupture, dissonance, disruption, and distortion within the everydayness of care. The argument in the paper serves a normative purpose since it draws our attention to what we owe morally to the one-caring in terms of their time. My analysis weaves together care ethics, feminist phenomenology and feminist writing from India through a philosophical engagement with Amar Jiban by Rassundari Devi.

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References

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 19, Issue 51 - Serial Number 51
Special Issue
Special issue: Care & Time
2025
Pages 137-162

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