ABSTRACT
Climate change challenges us to develop new forms of ethics that can provide common frames to underpin global agreements and can help to motivate and guide us in the major social changes that are needed in response.1 In this chapter I will consider how the resources of a dialectically conceived critical realist interdisciplinary ontology (DCRI) might combine with some aspects of communitarian, feminist and ecofeminist ethics of care to provide some ways forward. I am interested in how DCRI understandings of the common human condition (concrete universality) in ecological community interplay with understandings of the concrete singularity of the embodied subject. How might this illuminate the nature of our duties to care, including the relationship between local and more global duties? The latter is of great importance in considering effective moral bases for people’s participation in both agitating for, and helping to fulfil, climate agreements.
