The voices of care. Resources and critical issues of the ethics of care

Lecture: The voices of care. Resources and critical issues of the ethics of care

Lecturer: Silvia Dadà (Università di Pisa)

Date: Friday, May 16, 2025, 6:30 p.m.

Place: Monte Verità (Ascona), Auditorium

Cycle: Eranos-Jung Lectures 2025 - A Jungian Lexicon for our Times: Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge

Language: Italian

Moderator: Fabio Merlini (Fondazione Eranos, Ascona / SUFFP, Lugano)

Followed by discussion with the audience and aperitif

The video recording of the conference will be viewable on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.

Lecture Presentation

Starting in the 1980s, the so-called Ethics of Care movement was born in the United States, focusing on the concept of “care” and exploring its role both on a psychological and philosophical level. In addition to the “mother” of this perspective, Carol Gilligan, many other voices have contributed to its development, bringing out the potential of this proposal and also its critical issues. In this article we will retrace the history of the ethics of care, highlighting some of its fundamental and problematic core elements: the relationship with autonomy, the relationship with justice and the theme of motherhood as a paradigm of the care relationship.

Lecturer' Bio-bibliography

Silvia Dadà is a researcher in Moral Philosophy and teaches Bioethics and Ethics of Technology at the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge at the University of Pisa. She is currently a member of the national project PNRR FAIR (Future Artificial Intelligence Research), where she deals with the ethical and legal aspects of Artificial Intelligence from a relational perspective. She has studied the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida on the subject of justice, and has also explored the ethics of care and issues of applied ethics. The common thread of this research is the concept of vulnerability as the basis for an ethics and bioethics of care, with particular attention to the relationship with new technologies. On these topics, she has published Il paradosso della giustizia: Levinas e Derrida (2021), Maternità e alterità: per una biotetica della cura (2021), Etica della vulnerabilità (2022), and Vulnerabilità digitale. Etica, Intelligenza Artificiale e medicina (2024).

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On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of C.G. Jung (1875-1961), the Eranos Foundation dedicates its Eranos-Jung Lectures - the public conferences held at the Monte Verità Conference Center in Ascona - to the exploration of a Jungian micro-lexicon, with which we wish to map some problematic nodes of our present. These are six words - Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge - to which Jung, during his intellectual and human journey, dedicated pages of great clarity and depth. For us today, they are precious notions through which we can shed light on ourselves, on our relationship with others and with the surrounding world. In this way, Jung will accompany us on a journey of discovery inside and outside ourselves, to help us better understand what went wrong in the process of civilization to which we owe both our power and our fragility, in the face of a reality that no longer seems to respond as we would like to our hegemonic designs.