A ética do cuidado e a justiça restaurativa: força mobilizadora para uma democracia do cuidado

Abstract

In her work, Carol Gilligan (1982), American philosopher and psychologist, revealed the limits of the traditional theory about moral development, derived from Lawrence Kohlberg’s studies. Unconsciously, Kohlberg universalized for all human beings moral experiences typical of the male universe (ethics of justice), thus ignoring the ethics of care – specific to the experience of women – based on interconnection, empathy, communication and responsibility in face of the concrete needs and expectations of the other. In view of this concept, and due to the fact that Restorative Justice, an expanding model of justice in Brazil and in the world, is defined as based on relationships (ELLIOT, 2018; ZEHR, 2008, 2012; COSTA, 2019), the following research problem was launched: does restorative model intertwine with ethics of care? Our initial hypothesis was affirmative; however, from Gilligan’s work, we realized ethics of care had consequences in the most diverse fields of knowledge, such as psychoanalysis, ecology and political science. In this last field, we highlight the theory of caring democracy by author Joan Tronto (2015), who, after criticizing the allegedly classist and racial bias of Gilligan’s work, deepened the issue of care as the last major challenge of democratic theory, as the maintenance of care in the individual private sphere perpetuates socioeconomic inequalities inherent in the distribution of care activities in current market democracies. This way, we expanded our hypothesis, suggesting that Restorative Justice is not only intertwined with ethics of care, but it also has a potential to transform feelings and actions of the parties, the community and institutional actors, which makes it a potentially mobilizing force of a caring democracy. Therefore, using the hypothetical-deductive method, we eventually reached the following conclusion: the values of Restorative Justice and ethics of care are interconnected, but ethics of justice is also important for the restorative model, considering the provision of universal principles and guarantees with a view to protecting human dignity; as well as these predictions: 1) Restorative Justice stimulates social skills proper to a citizen in the caring democracy, in addition to that 2) the concept of institutional action stimulated by Restorative Justice (joint work between justice system and safety networks) coincides with caring democracy through the induction of public policies that promote the coverage of the multiple needs of the parties, which arise during the restorative process.