Towards a Complex Ethics: Interdependence, Global Citizenship and Ethics of Care

Abstract

In our globalized societies, interdependence has become increasingly clear as a dimension that runs through the entire human existence, in the form of a network of relationships based on mutual care. This network occurs in an evolving socio-political context that has to be understood as an ecosystem. The construction of a new globalized citizenship, which responds to the ecosystemic nature of all social and human phenomena, demands an ethics that is also complex and ecosystemic: the ethics of care. An ethic that goes beyond the scheme of material ethics as well as formal or discursive ethics, to become an ethic of the balance of systemic principles that adaptively evolve along with life itself. The ethics of care, as a complex ethics, then, is more than an ethical theory: it is an alternative way of managing human problems derived from interdependence and the systemic and non-linear nature of the effect we exert on others in the network of our processes of human and social construction.