Burdened Relationality: A Critical Examination of the Paternalism Inherent in the Care Ethics of Posthumanism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the paternalism embedded in care ethics within post-humanist thought, focusing on Sunaura Taylor’s “Beasts of Burden.” Though care appears morally necessary, it often sustains the hierarchies it aims to undo. When filtered through humanist values, care can infantilize marginalized beings and reinforce their dependence. The essay critiques this dynamic through 3 lenses: Indigenous reciprocity, the production of the corpse, and new materialist assemblages. These frameworks expose how able-bodied humans assign worth and decide who receives care. The result is a selective, conditional ethics that centers on human benefit. True post-humanist care, the essay argues, demands a collapse of anthropocentric boundaries; it calls for co-agency, not management. In this, reciprocity must replace domination. All beings, human and non-human, ought to be recognized as active participants in care, not passive recipients. Only then can we move beyond moral control toward ethical coexistence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".