The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (review)

In this important book, Virginia Held assesses the current state of the discussion on care, presents her own thoughtful recent take on this discussion, and in so doing, suggests the contours for future avenues of disputes and thinking about care. Held, president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2001–2002, has already made important contributions to this field with her pathbreaking book Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (1993) and edited volume Justice and Care (1995). In this new book in which Held describes care as both a value and a practice, she goes much further than previous theorists in asserting that care is more fundamental an ethical approach than are approaches based on justice, utility, or virtue.¹ As Held writes,

I now think that caring relations should form the wider moral framework into which justice should be fitted. Care seems the most basic moral value. . . . Without care . . . there would be no persons to respect and no families to improve. . . . Within a network of caring, we can and should demand justice, but justice should not push care to the margins, imagining justice's political embodiment as the model of morality, which is what has been done.

(71–72)

In the end, Held both succeeds in taking the ethics of care to a new level of philosophical seriousness and in pointing toward unresolved issues and new questions.

The book is divided into two parts. In part 1, Held takes up the questions of the nature of an ethics of care. She argues that care raises moral perspectives that are impossible to understand from the standpoint of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics. The profundity of this change arises from the fact that the ethics of care primarily consider human relations that grow out of needs for care to be fundamental to human existence. Although Held devotes a chapter to what it means to be a caring person, mainly she argues that care is about relationships, and that "care and its related considerations are the wider framework, or network, within which room should be made for the liberal individualism that has contributed so much to our understanding of justice and well-being" (88). Thus, for Held, one of the critical questions is not about how to maintain autonomy but about how to widen the bonds of caring among people. She explores these questions in greater length in part 2.

What does Held say that defines and situates the ethic of care, then? In the first place, she insists that the care ethic is a feminist ethic (66). Although other nonfeminist authors have written about issues that are similar to care ethics (for example, MacIntyre 2001), Held insists that the connection of women to the work of care means that something is lost by eliminating the feminist dimension from care ethics. She responds both to liberal and radical feminist critiques of care, showing them to misunderstand the claims of care, and to nonfeminist liberal critics. She spends several chapters refuting claims that care is anti-universalist and cannot serve as an ethical theory. She also answers virtue ethics by making clear that while care has some resemblances to virtue ethics it is also not reducible to dispositions within a particular individual, since care is by its nature oriented toward practices of care and toward relationships that go beyond the individual whose virtue is usually the concern of virtue theories.

Held defines care as both a value and a practice, but not a disposition that may be overly individualistic and may overvalue caring motives at the expense of appropriately caring action (55). She is primarily concerned with the care competent adults give to the vulnerable, that is, children, the infirm, and the aged. Although there is a passing reference to care for the self (135), primarily Held endorses accounts of care that see it as an activity that meets the needs of those who cannot care for themselves, combined with the attitudes and values that grow...