Global health and the COVID-19 pandemic: a care ethics approach

ABSTRACT This paper presents a case for a feminist care ethics approach to thinking about ethics and justice in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the existing commentary has been focused on arriving at a universally-acceptable principle of resource allocation – specifically for the global allocation of vaccine doses. A feminist care ethics approach, by contrast, begins not with prescriptive principles, but with the everyday practices of people existing in relations of responsibility for and interdependence with others. It thus gives rise to an expanded moral imaginary beyond the ‘cosmopolitan-nationalism’ binary, encouraging contextualized and multi-scalar inquiry into the enduring hierarchies that perpetuate global injustice.