What is a good society?
Whatever one’s political positioning, any answer to that question must grapple with two central matters: protection, and punishment. Who does a good society protect? How? Does it respond to violence with punishment, and if so, by what means? What is the central purpose of punishment: preventing further harm, or addressing a perceived injustice by inflicting proportional harm? And what of the purpose of protection: is it to shield individuals from being on the receiving end of violence, or does it go further, setting out to equip them with what they need to flourish?
Around those questions emerge political and ethical fault lines. Everyone sees themselves, often in good faith, as protecting certain values or groups — but who to protect, what from, and by punishing whom are where camps start to form. It is pretty consensual, for example, that a good society prides itself on protecting its children: but from what? Widespread sexual abuse at home, or being taught about sex at school?
Progressive accounts of the role of the state emphasise its responsibility to nurture, to create the necessary conditions for individuals and communities to thrive — or, at least, to grant those disadvantaged by their circumstances no less of an opportunity to try. Conservative accounts point to the state’s role in preserving the social order, notably through the punishment and/or removal of those perceived to threaten that order. It’s the inevitably gendered “Mommy-Daddy divide”, it’s ‘hugs not bullets’ versus the ‘war on drugs’.
Notions of protection and punishment are uniquely effective rhetorical tools because they immediately trigger our moral heuristics — the cognitive shortcuts we use to make rapid ethical judgments. Protecting the innocent is good, letting the guilty run free is bad. At least until the advent of post-carceral societies, achieving one typically calls for doing the other: protection and punishment are inextricably linked. Different political forces simply make different cases for who to place in different categories: those who need protecting; those who protect; and those who must be punished.
Problems arise when we are confronted with the fact that these categories are deeply permeable.
For example, we might realise that those we’ve always painted as protectors — the ‘good family men’ — are perfectly capable of predation. #MeToo triggered a societal shift of planetary magnitude precisely because it flipped on their heads our traditional categories of respectability and abuse. That shift was then met with immense anger, as is customary any time an “old idea system from which the energy is gone but which has the heaped-up force of custom, tradition, money, and institutions behind it”, as Adrienne Rich brilliantly put it, is questioned.
That old idea system so begrudges any attempts to dislodge it that it has an unfortunate tendency to protect those who commit harm, and punish those who ask for protection. In 2025, the European Court of Human Rights condemned France for “secondary victimisation” during a trial for sexual assault; the defense lawyers had treated the woman who came forward as if she was herself guilty. Last month, the ECHR issued another condemnation, regarding a case where a French court gave a formal warning for libel to a young girl whose rape case against a classmate was dismissed.1 Ask the state to protect you, they say.
Going back to our categories, we might also realise that those who we have declared must be punished turn out to need care. This presents another unwelcome blurring of boundaries, which usually results in our desire to punish being stronger than our responsibility to protect. This was evident with the recent news that UK prisons are still handcuffing and shackling women who give birth while in detention, among other grave human rights violations recorded by the Birth Companions charity.
Finally, perhaps most damningly for the credibility of our institutions, we might realise that among those we punish is an over-representation of individuals we failed to protect. Incarcerated women are extremely likely to have been victims of domestic violence, and by extremely I mean basically guaranteed. Children who went through foster care are much more likely than their peers to end up in prison. And though clear research is still scarce, roughly a third of incest victims (which as a reminder concerns at least one in ten people worldwide) were abused not by an adult but by a fellow child, themselves often victims of incest by an older relative. Cycles of abuse and victimhood intertwine in ways our neat categories cannot possibly capture.
Now, the state is not exclusively responsible for the violence that takes place in people’s homes: but it is responsible enough to put into question its monopoly on punishment. Indeed, how legitimate are our justice systems if they primarily function to palliate our failures of care?
The ethics of care offer a transformative new way to approach these failings. As an ethics of the particular, they force us to understand the complex and specific circumstances that surround human behaviour, rather than applying blanket logics.
Thinking about protection and punishment through the lens of care yields at least three very important shifts:
One, needing protection — and vulnerability more broadly, though not all vulnerability calls for protection — is neither a moral failure nor an injunction to passivity. Our societies treat deviations from the norm of being male, white, able-bodied, autonomous and economically productive almost like offences: ‘it’s a bit annoying that you’re having children, not great for company finances’; ‘it’s a shame you’re being abused, sure you aren’t a little responsible?’; ‘it’s too bad you’re homeless, but could you not sleep on that nice bench?’. By showing vulnerability and interdependence to be universal features of the human condition rather than anomalies, care ethics seek to address the enduring stripping of agency that still comes with receiving care. The title of a recent piece by anti-ableism journalist Lucy Webster says it all: “Will you please treat me like a person?”.
Two, relatedly, being in a position to protect others is not an invitation to dominate. It is, rather, a responsibility to put one’s abilities at the service of others’ needs, building with and for them. As philosopher Erica Lucast Stonestreet put it, “asymmetry doesn’t automatically create hierarchy”. The spaces most meant to welcome vulnerability — schools, hospitals, nursing homes, maternity wards — will not stop being spaces where harm is perpetrated against those who seek care until they shed this paternalistic attitude. All the empowerment in the world cannot make a labouring woman’s dignity be respected, be she imprisoned or not, if the people in charge of assisting her are not inherently convinced of her equal humanity2.
Three, having caused harm does not strip one of their right to basic protections. In progressive spaces, rejoicing at countries who introduce the death penalty for pedocriminals or joking about animal testing on rapists because “what are they going to say, no?” is counter-productive. It is merely indulging a deep-seated and understandable desire for vengeance, but it is not practically helping to protect anyone. It also once again flattens reality into ill-fitting boxes, omitting the fact that people have complex relationships even with those who abused them — something that an ethic of the particular does help to take into account.
These shifts all boil down to one overarching horizon: moving from a logic of control to a logic of care. The latter logic doesn’t entirely eschew the possibility of punishment, which can still be necessary. But it treats punishment as a mere means to the central end of protection, rather than a goal in itself; and as only a legitimate one if the avenues of prevention and care have been meaningfully invested in.
That might sound naïve to our ears trained on centuries of punitivism. But it is, in fact, the more rational way to do things. In an interview with Le Monde about former French prime minister Gabriel Attal’s proposal to harshen the sentencing of youth delinquency, historian of childhood and youth Véronique Blanchard said:
“We are witnessing a form of irrationality, decorrelated from all statistical and sociological reality. Like magical thinking. But what we don’t hear as much is that the history of repression and punishment when it comes to youth delinquency is much longer than the choice of education and protection (...), and it has never worked. Our society could make another choice, that of support, education and time. As a former educator, I know how much that allows children to find their place in society and to accept its rules.”
We can choose the logic of care. Millions of people already do, in their thinking, their practice, their activism. We can choose a future that does not throw around vague calls for more “security” for political clout without actually committing the resources that keep people truly safe.
This choice is not a simple one: care is the opposite of the easy way out. It crumbles under any attempt to make broad, sweeping statements; it is not readily grasped through number-crunching. And as Rich said, the logic of control has the weight of centuries propping it up. But it is a choice we can make, and one that has the potential to radically transform how we exist with one another.
Dear all,
Apologies for skipping last month’s letter. These have been intense weeks for a variety of reasons, including a peculiarly human mix of grief and joy, a lot of auntie-ing, and an overdue restructuring of my professional life. But then our April decided to masquerade as July, and Paris now stretches its legs out on the terraces, apricot juice in hand. All is well.
In practice, this restructuring means the care think tank I’ve been working towards — now Cara, soon-to-be a registered nonprofit — will focus on advancing the care society specifically in France, through previously mentioned research and ground action projects. This newsletter, The Fifth Wave, will remain what it has been: a space to imagine a future where care sits at the heart of our lives and our cities, and to explore the transformations needed for caregiving to get the support and recognition it deserves.
I spent a while making sense of the above thoughts, as I considered how the control-heavy ways in which our societies approach protection and punishment limit our ability to develop true logics of care. I hope they resonate — your reflections are always welcome, don’t hesitate to share them.
Finally, on the topic of exiting logics of control in relationships of care, I highly recommend aelle’s posts about authoritative parenting (and all of her writing, really, it is always deeply thought-through and leaves one looking at the world in a refreshed way.)
Thank you as always for being here,
— MM
I didn’t provide sources for all the information mentioned here, mostly because relevant ones tend to be in French — but please message me if you’re looking for specific ones.
People like Ann Ledbetter, and the millions of midwives and care providers that choose compassionate care and non-domination in their work every day!
Thanks for this lovely essay. The logics and ethics of care are looking more and more like the only real way forward. I have my students read Matters Of Care by Maria Puig De La Bellacasa and we talk about the renovation of care, taking away its feminized form and amplifying its reach. We've never directly discussed it, but carceral feminism doesn't come into play in a such an ethics.