Rehabilitating Care

The feminist ethic of care has often been criticized for its inability to address four problems--the problem of exploitation as it threatens care givers, the problem of sustaining care-giver integrity, the dangers of conceiving the mother-child dyad normatively as a paradigm for human relationships, and the problem of securing social justice on a broad scale among relative strangers. We argue that there are resources within the ethic of care for addressing each of these problems, and we sketch strategies for developing the ethic more fully.