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FOREGROUNDING THE RELATIONAL DOMAIN — PHENOMENOLOGY, ENACTIVISM AND CARE ETHICS

Abstract
Despite the emphasis on the relational and interpersonal domain found in the phenomenological tradition, a genuinely relational phenomenological ethics is still a desideratum. The aim of this paper is to call attention to care ethics as an already developed relational moral theory built on the idea of the centrality of the relational domain and to suggest a reason why phenomenologists and care ethicists should care more about each other. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, we focus on the phenomenological views of the lived body, intersubjectivity and mutual incorporation. Second, we discuss the current applications of the phenomenological insights in the so-called enactive approach to social cognition and pose the question of its ethical implications. The final section introduces the ethics of care as a current relational moral theory and highlights some points of commonality between care ethics and phenomenology. The paper concludes that the dynamics of care and mutual concern central to the ethics of care might be well analysed and further developed in terms of phenomenological and enactive views of intersubjectivity. Care ethics, on the other hand, might provide a well-elaborated framework for developing a phenomenological ethics ascribing a central place to the relational and interpersonal dimension of moral phenomena.

Key words
Phenomenology, care ethics, phenomenological ethics, enactivism, the lived body, intersubjectivity, relationality.

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