“She is my city”: a Care Ethical Interpretation of Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women

Euripides characterizes Hecuba as a protective mother of her biological descendants whose maternal care expands to encompass the entire group of Trojan war captives (Chrysikou, Scodel). Hecuba is, however, not merely a caretaker; she is also deeply invested in systems of justice (Baconicola, Meridor, Mira Mossman, Bohórquez, Zanotti; for an opposing view, see Morwood and Reckford). In both plays she participates in a central trial scene that interrogates ethical issues. She also forces awareness of wartime atrocities by describing in detail the mangled bodies of her family members. In Hecuba, she organizes the other Trojan women into what Helene Foley terms “a community acting collectively to achieve justice.” This paper interrogates the relationship between Hecuba’s maternity and her commitment to justice through the lens of what feminist philosophers have termed care ethics. It has two aims: first, to reinterpret Euripides’ characterizations of Hecuba as both caring mother and relentless justice seeker, and, second, to demonstrate how recent care ethical views might be developed into a text critical lens through which to interpret classical sources more broadly.

In the late 20th Century, feminist ethicists began advancing critiques of the universalist, masculine ethics that had dominated Euro-Anglophone academic discourse over the preceding centuries. Thinkers like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings attacked utilitarian and deontological ethical views for routinely ignoring womens’ experiences of the deeply personal, finely-textured relationships that often stand at the heart of ethical dilemmas and the good life. Thus was born what is now known as “care ethics.” The concerns of care ethics are most easily apparent when we examine what changes about familiar, abstracted ethical dilemmas – for example, so-called “trolley problems” (in which you could save many people standing on a trolley track by rerouting the train to kill one person) – if any of the people in these highly artificial scenarios stand in a real-world relationship to you. What, for example, changes in your ethical reasoning if one of the people is a loved one? Care ethicists encourage us to put relationships and vulnerabilities at the center of our moral decision making, answering ethical dilemmas and questions of how to live from the perspective of our real, lived, and finely-textured experiences of caring for others.

One area of debate in contemporary care ethics is whether it is a complete ethical system unto itself or whether it must appeal to some larger framework, especially to make sense of issues of justice and other mass political goals (i.e. human rights), which by their very nature seem to require impartiality and universalism (cf. Held). By using Hecuba and the Trojan women as a case study, this paper will examine how an ethic of care might extend - and is perhaps prior to - concerns of Justice. In this part of the paper we look at the role of care in the actions of figures like Mamie Till and Rosa Parks in the Civil Rights Movement as a comparandum to argue that care is essential to the recognition of injustice.