ABSTRACT
In recent years, a number of feminist scholars have promoted an ‘ethics of kindness’, or even ‘love’, as a cultural response to what is seen to be the increasing selfishness, competitiveness and isolation of contemporary constructions of self and family. In some cases this is articulated as an act of resistance to the logic of capitalist systems, where success is measured in individual achievements, not group relationships. 1 An ‘ethics of kindness’ of this sort is a social investment, by both society and its individuals, in behaving in a particular manner – one where we remember to ‘be kind’, to think of others when we act and, as importantly, to see kindness as a key value to be taken into account in our decision-making. If the contemporary world embraces kindness as a cultural value, a historian might describe it as the mentalité of an age, an attitude or mindset that fundamentally underpinned, and so can be used to explain, how individuals engaged with the world around them. 2 But kindness is also an emotion or emotional practice, a set of thoughts and actions that is tied to and operates reciprocally with felt experience. 3 Given this, we could describe a widespread social and political commitment to kindness as a form of ‘emotional regime’, to use William Reddy’s term, a dominant norm for emotional life in relation to which other emotions and emotional practices are defined. 4 Yet, in some ways, it exceeds this definition, acting not just as a norm, but an ethic or value – an emotional aspiration, as well as a constraint.
