Care Ethic and the Invisible

Care Ethic and the Invisible Children The plight of the Ugandan children forced to hide or risk abduction by the rebel army for conscription as young soldiers is almost unimaginable in a country like the United States.

Not only the fear and brutality with which these children and their families must contend, but also the absolute lack of a rule of law or any effective means of stopping these child abductions -- or the training and brainwashing of children into merciless and brutal killers themselves -- seem too extreme to really exist anywhere when one is insulated by the security and safety of a more solid government.

Yet this places the problem in the context of an ethics of justice, which has been the prevailing ethical view for millennia but is not, according to many contemporary philosophers and theorists, the only means by which to judge the goings-on in the world.

Though the abduction of children for the purposes of turning them into soldiers is an abhorrent act no matter what ethical perspective it is viewed from, using a different ethical approach entirely leads to an understanding of the central problems that is entirely new and possibly more practical in some regards.

The ethics of care refers to a broad range of ethical theories emphasizing human relationships and emotions as both measures of and means to ethicality, much as the ethics of judgment refers to a broad range of ethics that have right/wrong determinations based on logic and intellectual calculations. Largely associated with feminist schools of thought (while resoundingly rejected by other feminists), the ethics of care understands the world as a network of individuals that are dependent upon each other for the reaching of individual goals.

This view drastically alters the understanding of the situation of the Ugandan abductees, as represented in the documentary Invisible Children. While there are definitely issues of justice at work in the scenario, there is also a fundamental failure within the communities to protect their children from the rebels, and a failure in the relationship with these rebels to help everyone work towards each other's mutual benefice.

Though the rebel army is ostensibly attempting to overthrow the Ugandan government, it appears as though many if not most of the rebels' acts of violence are directed towards the poor and underdeveloped populations form which the rebels themselves came, many of them as abducted children themselves -- the majority of them still children, in fact, as few of them live into adulthood and new kidnapped conscripts regularly replenish the troops. An understanding of the true ills at work in the society that produce and perpetuate this rebel element must.