Ethics of care
| Ethics |
| Theoretical |
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Meta-ethics |
| Applied |
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Medical ethics / Bioethics |
| Core issues |
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Justice / Value |
| Key thinkers |
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Aristotle / Confucius |
The ethics of care is a normative ethical theory; often considered one of virtue ethics among normative ethics. It is one of a cluster of normative ethical theories that were developed by feminists in the second half of the twentieth century. While consequentialist and deontological ethical theories emphasize universal standards and impartiality, ethics of care emphasize the importance of relationships.
Characteristics
Ethics of care is sometimes called "ethics of love" or "relational ethics," which has several notable characteristics in contrast to two traditional normative ethical theories: Utilitarianism and Kantian deontological ethics. While ethics of care is considered as a virtue ethics, it is also different from traditional Aristotelian virtue ethics. Although some care ethics theorists reject generalization, ethics of care has some notable common characteristics.[1]
Dependency and interdependency
Traditional ethical theories presuppose that moral agent is an autonomous, independent individual. Care ethics, however, points out the fact that human being is essentially dependent to others in the course of life. Children are dependent upon parents, elderly is dependent on their children or other care takers, and handicapped persons have to rely on others. Each human being goes through a process of dependency according to his or her age or physical or mental conditions. Traditional ethical theories do not take into account the fact dependency.
Human life presupposes and is possible only by the care and support of others. Furthermore, each individual also supports and cares others. Parents have moral responsibility to care their children and children have moral responsibility to care elderly parents. Thus, human being exists interdependent relationships and ethical responsibilities, virtues exist in these human relationships.
Emotion
Traditional ethics are built upon the idea of the primacy of reason. They value reason as a stable faculty of mind over emotion, which they viewed as unstable, changeable, ephemeral, and less important element. While care ethics recognizes the value of reason, it recognizes the importance of feeling or emotion such as benevolence, compassion, sensitivity, responsiveness, and sympathy. Emotions traditional ethics rejected are egoistic, impartial emotional attachments which brings about favoritism, resentment, hatred, and other negative or destructive feelings.
Prioritization
Traditional theories focus on establishing abstract, universal rules and principles for the consideration of impartiality requirement. Yet, in human life, not all human relationships are equal. For example, caring one's own child is a direct, immediate responsibility of a parent. One can certainly prioritize one's relationships with all children on the earth and determine a degree of moral responsibility among them. While caring all children on the earth is noble and important, caring one's own child is an immediate and direct responsibility of his or her parent. One can also choose and determine to give a gift to a friend among all individuals in a society.
Care ethics recognizes the importance of limited impartiality and prioritization of human relationships. It limits the realm where universal rules can be applicable.
Family
Traditional ethics makes ethical discourses within the framework constituted by two units: individuals and a society or a public sphere. Those primary ethical concepts such as justice, universality, impartiality, duty are all discussed within the relationships between the individual and the public sphere. Family, which is the primary sphere where human beings build intimate human relationships, does not play any specific role in this framework. In fact, they made family a "private" realm where a public or a government does not and should not interfere.
The ethics of care takes family as the primary sphere where the questions of ethics should be discussed. Family is ontologically, epistemologically, and morally important sphere ethical discourses should be carried out. It takes a family place where virtues are cultivated and inherited.
The care ethics shares a similar family-based perspective with Confucian ethics. Comparative studies are also carried out. There are, however, some differences. First, because care ethics developed within western traditions, it has more critical, analytical elements than Confucian ethics. Second, while the concept of family in care ethics is usually limited to immediate family members, it is extended to ancestors in Confucian ethics. Third, Confucian ethics has patriarchal elements, care ethics challenges this tenet. Some attempted non-patriarchal readings of Confucian ethics.
Interdependent concept of the person
The concept of person in the traditional ethical theories tend to be independent, isolated, rational, self-interested individual. The care ethics, however, views a person as interdependent, integral (emotion, reason, and will), and relational. It argues that the concept of self can be properly defined only when the person is understood as interdependent and relational being. The concept of liberal individual is an abstract, illusory concept.
Historical background
The ethics of care was initially inspired by the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan.[2] Early in her career, Carol Gilligan worked with psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg while he was researching his theory of moral development.[3] Gilligan's work on women's moral development arose in response to the seemingly male-based results that arose from Kohlberg's studies.
Gilligan and others have suggested that the history of ethics in Western culture has emphasized the justice view of morality because it is the outlook that has traditionally been cultivated and shared by men. By contrast, women have traditionally been taught a different kind of moral outlook that emphasizes solidarity, community, and caring about one's special relationships. This "care view" of morality has been ignored or trivialized because women were traditionally in positions of limited power and influence.
The justice view of morality focuses on doing the right thing even if it requires personal cost or sacrificing the interest of those to whom one is close. The care view would instead say that we can and should put the interests of those who are close to us above the interests of complete strangers, and that we should cultivate our natural capacity to care for others and ourselves.
Carol Gilligan's Stages of Moral Development
| Stage | Goal |
|---|---|
| Pre-conventional | Goal is individual survival |
| conventional | Self sacrifice is goodness |
| Post-conventional | Principle of nonviolence: do not hurt others or self |
Comparing ethics of care with traditional ethical positions
Ethics of care contrasts with more well-known ethical views, such as utilitarianism and deontology or Kantian ethics. This sort of outlook is what feminist critics call a 'justice view' of morality. A morality of care rests on the understanding of relationships as a response to another in their terms. It focuses on the moral value of being partial toward those concrete persons with whom we have special and valuable relationships, and on the moral importance of responding to such persons as particular individuals with characteristics that demand a response to them that we do not extend to others.
Ethics of care and feminist ethics
Although the ethics of care was developed as part of a feminist movement, some feminists have criticised care-based ethics for reinforcing traditional stereotypes of a 'good woman'.[4]
Nel Noddings' Relational ethics
Following Carol Gilligan’s seminal work in the ethics of care In a Different Voice (1982), Nel Noddings developed "relational ethics" in her Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984).
Like Carol Gilligan, Noddings accepts that justice based approaches, which are supposed to be more masculine, are genuine alternatives to ethics of care. However, unlike Gilligan, Noddings' believes that caring, 'rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness' is a more basic and preferable approach to ethics.[5]
The key to understanding Noddings' ethics of care is to understand her notion of caring and ethical caring in particular.
Engrossment
Noddings believes that it would be a mistake to try to provide a systematic examination of the requirements for caring, nevertheless, she does suggest three requirements for caring (Caring 1984, 11-12). She argues that the carer (one-caring) must exhibit engrossment and motivational displacement, and the person who is cared for (cared-for) must respond in some way to the caring[6]. Noddings' term engrossment refers to thinking about someone in order to gain a greater understanding of him or her. Engrossment is necessary for caring because an individual's personal and physical situation must be understood before the one-caring can determine the appropriateness of any action. 'Engrossment' need not entail, as the term seems to suggest, a deep fixation on the other. It requires only the attention needed to some to understand the position of the other. Engrossment could not on its own constitute caring; someone could have a deep understanding of another person, yet act against that person's interests. Motivational displacement prevents this from occurring. Motivational displacement occurs when the one-caring's behavior is largely determined by the needs of the person for whom she is caring. On its own, motivational displacement would also be insufficient for ethical caring. For example, someone who acted primarily from a desire to accomplish something for another person, but failed to think carefully enough about that other person's needs (failed to be correctly engrossed in the other), would fail to care. Finally, Noddings believes that caring requires some form of recognition from the cared-for that the one-caring is, in fact, caring. When there is a recognition of and response to the caring by the person cared for, Noddings describes the caring as "completed in the other" [7].
Natural caring and ethical caring
Nel Noddings draws an important distinction between natural caring and ethical caring.[8] Noddings distinguishes between acting because "I want" and acting because "I must." When I care for someone because "I want" to care, say I hug a friend who needs hugging in an act of love, Noddings claims that I am engaged in natural caring. When I care for someone because "I must" care, say I hug an acquaintance who needs hugging in spite of my desire to escape that person's pain, according to Noddings, I am engaged in ethical caring. Ethical caring occurs when a person acts caringly out of a belief that caring is the appropriate way of relating to people. When someone acts in a caring way because that person naturally cares for another, the caring is not ethical caring[9].
Noddings' claims that ethical caring is based on, and so dependent on, natural caring[10]. It is through experiencing others caring for them and naturally caring for others that people build what is called an "ethical ideal," an image of the kind of person they want to be.
Diminishment of ethical ideal and evil
Noddings describes wrong actions in terms of "a diminishment of the ethical ideal" and "evil." A person's ethical ideal is diminished when she either chooses or is forced to act in a way that rejects her internal call to care. In effect, her image of the best person it is possible for her to be is altered in a way that lowers her ideal. According to Noddings, people and organizations can deliberately or carelessly contribute to the diminishment of other's ethical ideals. They may do this by teaching people not to care, or by placing them in conditions that prevent them from being able to care[11]. A person is evil if, in spite of her ability to do otherwise, she either fails to personally care for someone, or prevents others from caring. Noddings writes, "[when] one intentionally rejects the impulse to care and deliberately turns her back on the ethical, she is evil, and this evil cannot be redeemed."[12]
Criticisms of Noddings' relational ethics
Nel Noddings' ethics of care has been criticized by both feminists and those who favour more traditional, and arguably masculine, approaches to ethics. In brief, feminists object that the one-caring is, in effect, carrying out the traditional female role in life of giving while receiving little in return. Those who accept more traditional approaches to ethics argue that the partiality shown to those closest to us in Noddings' theory is inappropriate.
Noddings tends to use unequal relationships as a model for understanding caring. Philosopher and lesbian-feminist Sarah Lucia Hoagland argues that the relationships in question, such as parenting and teaching, are ideally relationships where caring is a transitory thing designed to foster the independence of the cared-for, and so end the unequal caring relationship. Unequal relationships, she writes, are ethically problematic, and so a poor model for an ethical theory. Hoagland argues that on Noddings' account of ethical caring, the one-caring is placed in the role of the giver and the cared-for in the role of the taker. The one-caring is dominant, choosing what is good for the cared-for, but gives without receiving caring in return. The cared-for is put in the position of being a dependent, with insufficient control over the nature of the caring. Hoagland believes that such unequal relationships cannot be morally good.
See also
Notes
- ↑ Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
- ↑ Gilligan, Carol: "In a Different Voice: Psychological theory and women's development." Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982.
- ↑ Kohlberg, Lawrence and Carol Gilligan: 'The Adolescent as a Philosopher: The Discovery of the Self in a Post-conventional World', Daedalus, 100, 1971: 1051-1086.
- ↑ Bartky, Sandra Lee: Femininity and Domination, page 104-5. Routledge, New York, 1990.
- ↑ Noddings, Nel. Caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley u.a: Univ. of California Pr, 1984: 2.
- ↑ Ibid. 69
- ↑ Ibid. 4
- ↑ Ibid. 81-83.
- ↑ Ibid. 79-80.
- ↑ Ibid. 83, 206 fn 4.
- ↑ Ibid. 116-119.
- ↑ Ibid. 115.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. Thinking gender. New York: Routledge, 1990. ISBN 9780415901864
- Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982. ISBN 9780674445444
- Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-518099-2.
- Kohlberg, Lawrence, and Carol Gilligan. The Adolescent As a Philosopher: The Discovery of the Self in a Postconventional World. [Boston, Mass.]: Dœdalus, 1971.
- Li, C.2008. "Does Confucian Ethics Integrate Care Ethics and Justice Ethics? The Case of Mencius". ASIAN PHILOSOPHY. 18, no. 1: 69-82.
- Li, C.1994. "The Confucian Concept of Jen and the Feminist Ethics of Care: A Comparative Study". HYPATIA -EDWARDSVILLE-. 9, no. 1: 70.
- Noddings, Nel. Caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley u.a: Univ. of California Pr, 1984. ISBN 9780520050433
- Slote, Michael A. The Ethics of Care and Empathy. London ; New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN 9780415772006 (hardback).
External links
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Feminist Ethics
- Ethics of Care article at Carnegie Mellon website
- Gilligan's stages of moral development
- Nel Noddings biography
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