Care and the Market: Can We Consume with a Concern for Others?

One question regularly recurs concerning an ethics of care, which is how it can be applied beyond the intersubjective relationship, or otherwise than within the caregiver/care receiver dyad. To the extent that it presumes affects, or an attentiveness to the particular or the individual, is it possible to show concern collectively and bring it to bear on an unknown other? This inquiry is generally approached through the prism of the institutionalization of an ethics of care, of its compatibility with the scale of the state and its logic of universalization. But the question I wish to address here is that of the market. Can care, which I will call concern for others, be deployed on and with the market? This is the proposition advanced by contemporary consumer ethics and the one I would like to critique in this paper. After drawing up a cartography of the objects with which contemporary ethical consumption is concerned, I will show that there is a vainness to ethical consumption as a critique of capitalism insofar as it centers on immoderation. I will then highlight what the market does to care by translating it into the language of prices.