This seminar is hosted by the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and The Oxford Martin School, and funded by the John Fell Fund.

Speaker: Professor Frans Vosman, Chair Ethics of Care, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands

The ethics of care: a road map
As a young branch of the old tree of ethics, the ethics of care has been interdisciplinary from its conception in the 1980s and fundamentally situates itself as a political ethic − though not yet fully fledged. It introduces critical insights on ethical issues, for example the moral importance of relations between people, of emotions as a source of knowledge, of vulnerability, and of practices of care as sources of moral understanding. This essentially links to the quest for another epistemology: whose knowledge counts and what counts as knowledge? The basic insight in this presentation is that caring and being cared for are the essential constituents of a life lived together.