In her chapter “Race and Feminist Care Ethics: Intersectionality as Method,” Dr. Parvati Raghuram describes care as the things we do to maintain, contain, and repair our world. She defines our world as our bodies, ourselves, and our environment. Feminist ethics draw on women’s caring roles as the basis for thinking of care as a universal good.

In her chapter “Making Rights Rhetoric Work: Constructing Care in a Post-Liberal World,” Dr. Alison Brysk notes that the rhetoric surrounding human rights is based on an ethos, which she describes as a form of discourse that seeks to shape public action. The human rights ethos is the justification of human rights and their greater purpose, whether that be moral or pragmatic. Dr. Brysk sees human rights as essentially the idea that all humans have inherent and equal moral worth, that social orders exist to promote the humanity of their members, and that authority should be guided and bounded by its impacts on human dignity.