How can care ethics help internet health advocacy work incorporate more ecological stakeholders and have a broader view of home and participation? How can care ethics help reframe internet health issues such as: Digital inclusion, Decentralization, Openness, and Web literacy? By using an ecofeminist ethic of care to understand internet health I hope to spark new ideas, new focuses, re-frame existing ideas, and extend and explore internet health advocacy from an ethical standpoint which considers humans and matter together.
Technologies are manifestations of the politics, values, and ethics of their creators, users, and environments. Those politics, values, and ethics inevitably make and unmake futures for people and non-human matter. As such, there is an ethical imperative to recognize those relationships and to account for the ethical and unethical conditions created by them. To produce, reshape or critique a technology means claiming a stake in the production or erasure of futures. We need ethical frameworks that go beyond the ‘golden rule’ of justice to entail particular and non-just-human centered handling of questions around what is considered “good,” “right” or “just” rather than prescribing those universally.
Feminist care ethics is not about how to care more. It is a political, ethical, and material engagement with the excluded or devalued. It is about attending to what, how, and when things get caring attention—and come to matter—and what/how/when things don’t. The ethical imperative to co-operatively maintain relationships through concrete acts of care labor is an inescapable condition of those relationships—not a moral judgment administered on top of them.