Grammars of Care

Contributions to the Grammars of Justification from the Ethics of Care

Abstract

This article proposes a dialogue between the ethics of care and Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of grammars of justification, with the aim of exploring new ways of understanding how notions of justice are constructed in social life. It starts from the premise that the ethics of care and the ethics of justice are not poles opposing, but rather dimensions in complementary tension that express different conceptions of moral responsibility and legitimacy. Within this framework, feminisms have played a decisive role in making visible the centrality of care and the reproduction of life, revealing how abstract notions of justice rest upon a foundational division between the public and the private that obscures the material and affective conditions of common life. Building on these discussions, the article introduces the notion of grammars of care –an original proposal that seeks to challenge the classical construction of grammars of justification by incorporating the affective, embodied, and situated relations that sustain moral action. These grammars make it possible to analyze how meanings of justice are negotiated in concrete contexts, where recognition