Protecting the World: Military Humanitarian Intervention and the Ethics of Care

Feminist care theorists Virginia Held and Joan Tronto have suggested that care is relevant to political issues concerning distant others and that care can provide the basis for a more comprehensive moral approach. I consider their approaches with regard to the policy issue of military humanitarian intervention, and raise concerns about exceptionalist attitudes toward international law that entail a collection of costs that I refer to as the problem of global worldlessness. I suggest that an ethic of care can overcome these concerns, and offer an Arendt-inflected rereading of some of Tronto's work to show how this is possible.