Care Ethics and Impartial Reasons

Care Ethics and Impartial Reasons

Editor's note: It is with great sadness that we note the untimely death of Betsy Postow, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her colleague, Richard Aquila, wrote:

Those who knew her even slightly will remember her as one of the most brilliant, yet also gentle and generous, and one of the most delightfully excitable, individuals they will ever know. Betsy graduated summa cum laude from Harpur College of the State University of New York, Binghamton, in 1966, and received her Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1970 from Yale. After a year of teaching in the University of Wisconsin system, she spent the rest of her career at the University of Tennessee, where, outside of her extremely conscientious devotion to the Philosophy Department, her impact was by no means limited, but was strikingly characterized by early and consistent dedication, to the advancement of women in academics and society at large. Her first public presentation was a talk on "Philosophy and Women" in 1973; one of her last was as a discussion leader on "Feminist Ethics" for the Association of Women Faculty. In between, she published an influential anthology of articles on women in sports; a major book on reason and action; sixty academic papers and reviews, several of which have been reprinted (and one translated into Russian); and she gave eighty professional presentations in addition to numerous appearances on campus and before local organizations, besides service to the Faculty Senate, endless committees, and the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Betsy believed in the power of human reason like few others, and she was in her own person as fair-minded and reasonable a friend and colleague as one could possibly imagine. In the words of a colleague, "Although for years she turned away practical ethical questions with the caveat that she did not do 'applied ethics,' she nonetheless tried in every way to make her daily living conform to what she rationally saw as the good way to live." To her colleagues in philosophy at the University of Tennessee and afar and to her students she will also be long remembered for the generous time that she was ever willing to contribute to individual collaboration, instruction, and commentary. Her loss has been a shock and a sorrow from which it will be difficult to recover.

The paper "Care Ethics and Impartial Reasons" was given at the United Kingdom SWIP (Society for Women in Philosophy) meeting in Stirling, Scotland, on April 21, 2007, and while in her lifetime she would surely have reworked this piece thoroughly before allowing it to appear in print, we publish it here as an expression of sorrow and affection.

As envisioned by Virginia Held, the ethics of care takes care as the fundamental (set of) value(s) (2006, 17).¹ The broad framework of moral thought, on this view, rightly gives priority to considerations of care and to the evaluation and nurturing of caring relationships. But Held's care ethics also recognizes that there is a place for impartial reasons, such as those drawn from considerations of justice and from utilitarianism. To reach an all-things-considered moral judgment in some particular cases, then, it seems there must be some way to give due weight both to considerations of care and to other moral considerations, such as those of justice. Some way must be found, at least in particular circumstances, to subordinate one sort of consideration to the other, or somehow to balance or otherwise mesh them. Held does not claim to offer a wholly satisfactory account of a procedure of this sort. Instead, she claims that we need new theories. But what if no such new theories are forthcoming? In this paper, I shall explore both the prospects for finding a satisfactory account and the stakes involved. I shall suggest that we can live with the situation without much distress even if no new theories of the sort...