Entangling care and justice in practice: The Case of volunteers working with homeless populations in Buenos Aires

Adding to theoretical debates often positioning care and justice ethics in opposition, this study adopts a practice lens persective to explore how these principles converge in ethical judgment. Drawing on a 24-month ethnography with an NGO serving homeless populations in Buenos Aires, Argentina, we examine how volunteers navigate practical ethical tensions when serving homeless individuals. Doing so, we argue that care and justice are dynamically interdependent rather than mutually exclusive in ethical decision-making. Our conceptualization surfaces processes of embodied awareness, relational judgment, and contextually situated resolution, through which care and justice intertwine in practice; there, justice manifests as care for “the other of the other.” By centering the lived experiences of volunteers, this study underscores the critical role of practical judgment in reconciling ethical tensions, whereby justice and relational care do not exclude each other but rather coexist in ethical decision-making.