The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global
Virginia Held
Language: English
Pages: 220
ISBN: B000QXD82S
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Virginia Held assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it is by now a distinct moral theory or normative approach to the problems we face. It is relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care.
This book clarifies just what the ethics of care is: what its characteristics are, what it holds, and what it enables us to do. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. Held examines what we mean by "care," and what a caring person is like. Where other moral theories demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of our ties to our families and groups. It evaluates such ties, focusing on caring relations rather than simply on the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can "fit together" with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity.
In the second part of the book, Held examines the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues. She shows how the ethics of care is more promising than Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism for advice on how expansive, or not, markets should be, and on when other values than market ones should prevail. She connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and considers the limits appropriate for the language of rights. Finally, she shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and seeing anew the outlines of international civility.
Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). 68. Kathleen B. Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (New York: Routledge, 1993). 69. See Susan Mendus, ‘‘Losing the Faith: Feminism and Democracy,’’ in Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, ed. J. Dunn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. 70. Held, Feminist Morality, chap. 5. Chapter 10 1. See, for example, Rebecca
more controversial claim, since there are similarities between the ethics of care and virtue ethics. But in its focus on relationships rather than on the dispositions of individuals, the ethics of care is, I argue, distinct. In chapter 2, I explore what care ‘‘is,’’ or what we mean or should mean by the term ‘care.’ I conclude that it is both a practice, or cluster of practices, and a value, or cluster of values. It takes place in existing caring practices to some extent, although existing
responding to proposed recommendations with acceptance or rejection (even children partially grasp this) and capable of being responsible for many of our choices. Moral personhood is also a status conferred on human biological entities by morality, law, and a variety of human practices. There are no persons in nature as conceptualized independently of the human beings experiencing it. But within human history and the social worlds that create it, many practices recognize us as moral persons.
rather than in it (see chapter 7). These are some examples of the kinds of social transformations that the ethics of care might demand. The charge that a feminist ethic of care is particularistic, limited to the contexts of family and friends, or merely descriptive of the kinds of restricted lives of caring for others to which women have traditionally been confined, is based, I believe, on a misunderstanding of this ethic. When one thinks about the restructurings that would be required by taking
the ethics of care seriously, the idea that care ethics is a conservative ethic tied to women’s traditional roles seems very implausible. 66 C A R E A N D M O R A L T H E O R Y Feminism is a revolutionary program, since it is committed to overthrowing the deepest and most entrenched hierarchy of all—the hierarchy of gender. It does not seek to substitute women for men in the hierarchy of domination but to overcome domination itself. The care that is valued by the ethics of care can—and to be