Ethics of Care and Ordinary Language Philosophy: Intersections in Moral and Linguistic Practices

Dear Colleagues,

Ethics of care and ordinary language philosophy are both highly productive and subversive philosophical movements that have significantly reshaped contemporary approaches to ethics, normativity, and social forms of life and have put forward the very concept of the Ordinary (Cavell, Sherringham, and Das). Ethics of care has offered a major reorientation of moral philosophy by foregrounding vulnerability and relationality, and the moral significance of ordinary practices of attention and response, and of everyday domestic and care work. Ordinary language philosophy has provided a rigorous methodological framework for attending to how meaning, normativity, and understanding emerge from everyday uses of language within shared forms of life (Wittgenstein, Hadot, and Lorenzini).

Both traditions reject idealized models of moral reasoning in favor of descriptive, context-sensitive approaches that take lived experience seriously. They share a concern for how moral claims are articulated, acknowledged, and responded to in ordinary situations, as well as an interest in the ethical significance of voice, responsiveness, and mutual recognition (Murdoch and Diamond). These shared orientations suggest a natural and fruitful convergence: care ethics can benefit from the fine-grained attention to language and moral description developed by ordinary language philosophy, while ordinary language philosophy can draw substantive orientation from the ethical insights and the everyday realities of care.

This Special Issue hence proposes to bring ethics of care and ordinary language philosophy into dialogue in order to rethink moral normativity as grounded in ordinary practices, linguistic uses, and forms of life. While ethics of care and ordinary language philosophy have developed as now significant traditions within distinct philosophical lineages (see Laugier 2013 and Crary and De Lara), they share a resistance to idealized, and principle-driven approaches and a common commitment to understanding moral life as it is lived and spoken, in everyday contexts and by human voices.

The Special Issue builds on established work in ethics of care (Gilligan, Noddings, Tronto, Paperman, and Laugier) and ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle, Cavell, Diamond, and Crary), as well as contemporary research on the ethics and politics of the ordinary. Starting with the classic French collection Le souci des autres, éthique et politique du care (2006), it draws in particular on work that has argued for the centrality of ordinary language philosophy in ethical and political thought, studies of the legacy of Stanley Cavell, and analyses of the ethical and political significance of ordinary practices.

Over the past years, a rich debate has emerged in the study of ethics over the importance of the ordinary (Cavell and Das). Many continue to think of ethics as principally concerned with producing a list of rules to follow and infringe upon and as a domain constituted by judgments that take a step back from the whirl of activity in everyday life. But in contrast with this conventional view, proponents of ordinary ethics, often in conjunction with the ethics of care, have argued that ethics can be grasped neither by reference to an enumerable set of pre-existent rules nor by attending to a metaphysically autonomous realm of moral action. Rather, they see ethics as embedded in human situations, affects, and practices—that is, in a whole human form of life continually being remade. Most significantly, this perspective has given due representation to an ethics of care rooted in the ordinary (Cavell) and to an ordinary ethics articulated to anthropological method (Lambek and Fassin).

Ethics of care has emphasized that moral agency is fundamentally relational and that ethical responsibility arises from practices of attention, responsiveness, and concern for concrete others. Ordinary Language Philosophy, drawing on Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, has approached ethical questions through careful attention to how moral concepts function in everyday language (Diamond, Benoist) and within shared forms of life (see Floyd, Laugier eds. 2025). This Special Issue starts from the claim that these approaches are mutually illuminating and that their conjunction offers a powerful and transforming framework for contemporary ethical theory. By bringing ordinary language analysis into dialogue with care ethics, the Special Issue offers a non-ideal, practice-based approach to moral normativity; a methodological framework for care ethics attentive to language and forms of life; and a philosophically rigorous account of the ethical and political significance of ordinary language (Crary and Donatelli).

An important intellectual resource for this project is the work of Veena Das and the tradition of ordinary or anthropological approaches to moral life that attend closely to everyday practices, suffering, voice, and forms of expression. It builds on collective and interdisciplinary work engaged for a decade on care, vulnerability, and social suffering, bringing together philosophy, ethics, and sociology and anthropology, which analyze care in contexts of extreme vulnerability and collective distress (Das, Han, Lovell, and Buch Segal). Ordinary anthropology, as developed by Das and others (Lambek, Motta, and Brandel), resonates strongly with both ethics of care and ordinary language philosophy in its attention to how ethical life unfolds in fragmented utterances, silences, situations, and gestures rather than in explicit moral theorizing. This perspective emphasizes the embeddedness of ethical meaning in forms of life marked by vulnerability, violence, care, and repair. The dialogue between ordinary language philosophy and ordinary anthropology is a background of the present project by extending attention to language beyond philosophical analysis to details and descriptions of how people live with, speak through, and suffer in everyday contexts (Das 2007, 2014, and 2020).

The Special Issue invites contributions addressing, among other topics, the following:

• Ordinary language and moral perception;
• Vulnerability, dependency, and forms of life;
• Care as a linguistically embedded moral practice;
• Acknowledgment, voice;
• Performative and passionate utterances and ethics;
• Power relations and the politics of ordinary language;
• Moral disagreement, misunderstanding, arguments, and silence;
• Care ethics as a non-ideal ethical methodology;
• Ordinary narratives and moral sensibility;
• Cultural forms and the ethics of the ordinary;
• Detail, description, methods;
• Wittgensteinian approaches to care ethics;
• Anthropology and ordinary ethics;
• Anthropology of/as care.

This Special Issue is aligned with the interdisciplinary scope of Philosophies and responds to growing interest in non-ideal ethics, vulnerability, and the role of language in moral and political life. It aims to consolidate care ethics as a philosophy of the ordinary. It also aims to make a significant contribution to contemporary ethical theory by showing how attention to ordinary language is at the core of care ethics and how care ethics and moral attention to care work can provide a new orientation for ordinary language philosophy.

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Prof. Dr. Sandra Laugier
Guest Editor

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• ordinary language
• forms of life
• ethics of care
• moral practice