CFP: RESPONSIBILITY AND CARE: WHAT DID WE LEARN ABOUT ETHICS AND MORALITY THROUGHOUT THE PANDEMIC? - CALL FOR PAPERS

A phenomenon such, as an epidemic of an infectious disease undoubtedly leads to different dimensions of the crisis. The events of 2020 affect politics, the economy, and the environment; social and even religious dimensions of our lives. But the question remains, how did the pandemic affect our moral situation? What have we learned through tragic and traumatic events about our morality? Does morality- and what kind of morality? – help us make decisions, provoked by the current situation?

Can some events, like growing interest in Camus’ The Plague in March and April 2020, help us to answer the question of what kind of morality we need in times of an epidemic? Will we remember the pandemic as a time of solidarity, care, and human sacrifice? Or, on the contrary, did the disturbing social phenomena related to the development of the epidemic present us the problematic dimension of the contemporary, related to the loss of trust in authorities or the lack of social responsibility?

We are only beginning to see grounds for answering many of these questions: it is clear that almost all of us have been facing difficult moral dilemmas imposed by the pandemic for more than a year. And if we, ethicists, have learned something about ourselves in these difficult choices, perhaps the time has come to reflect, rethink and ethically review the wider context of our situation.

We would like to invite the authors to enter this wider discussion through the means of two concepts: responsibility and care. They have been with us for the last year and we will certainly need them in the coming months. However, is contemporary morality consistent with the ethical postulates of the ethics of responsibility, emphasizing the need for a broader view of our activities (e.g. forward-looking approach)? Did the ethics of care, so emphasized in the development of feminist thought, emphasizing the sensitivity of a morally mature person, resonate in the world around us, dominated by the fear of contagious disease?

We invite you to discuss not only whether and how the pandemic affected our understanding of care and responsibility, but how did care and responsibility – under the influence of the pandemic – influence our moral view of reality. Thinking about ourselves and others in the context of an exceptionally human problem related to an infectious disease that targets humans, did we manage to spare space for reflection on the problems that engaged us especially before the pandemic? We will be pleased to give voice to those authors, who, in the face of the pandemic, dealt in their research with the problems of responsibility and care in the context of e.g. environmental ethics, and developed research on the ethical dimension of the life of non-human beings.

The deadline for submitting proposals and full texts (approximately 40.000 signs with spaces) is July 31, 2021.

Texts, prepared according to our guidelines for authors, should be sent to the editorial office ([email protected])

All texts sent to the issue will be subject to double anonymous review.

We are looking back for Your research proposals and articles,

Editors of 2021 Ethical Education issue,

Anna Kamińska-Malandain and Maciej Kałuża