The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global (review)

Different interpretations of Kantian and utilitarian theory have long dominated philosophical discussions of ethics. Virtue theory, revived and revised from its ancient roots in Aristotle, also has joined these discussions. Feminist contributions to ethics have been associated with the early work of Sara Ruddick, Nel Noddings, and Carol Gilligan, each of whom emphasizes caring relationships to particular others as essential to moral behavior. Some feminists have voiced concern that this emphasis supports the exploitative, stereotypic practices toward women that have prevailed throughout history; other feminists claim that a critique of these practices is consistent with their endorsement of an ethics of care. Because feminism necessarily opposes injustice toward women, the latter group construes gender justice and care as compatible or complementary principles.

Into the mix of feminist views about an ethics of care, Virginia Held emerges as a philosopher who long has championed a justice-based account of equal rights for women. In The Ethics of Care, she argues convincingly for the priority of care, properly understood, not only in the domain of interpersonal relationships but also in political and global affairs. Although I have generally considered care-based ethics as a necessary corrective to the dominant ethical theories but not as an adequate replacement for them, Held's account has led me to amend this view. Those who think, as Frances Kamm allegedly believes, that Held's approach amounts to little more than a cry for "Mommy" to help settle ethical difficulties, have failed to adequately grasp or appreciate Held's well-informed and cogent arguments.¹

For Held, "care is both a practice and a value" (42). Her description of the practice is reminiscent of Aristotle's notion of virtue as a habit of good actions and of C. S. Peirce's notion of belief as a disposition to act in a specific way. Care, she says, "develops, along with its appropriate attitudes," through persistent efforts to "express the caring relations that bring persons together" (42). The primordial relationship that evokes the development of this practice and shows how essential it is to all human beings occurs between children, especially infants, and their caregivers. Here, of course, she echoes Noddings' account of care, along with the liability of using this relationship as paradigmatic for adult relationships. Consistent with the mother–child paradigm, Held also contends that an affective component is crucial to the practice of care.

Care as a value, for Held, refers mainly to the social relations on which we all rely throughout our lives. As such, it is a universal value, whose role for individuals and society is practically and morally indispensable. The great strength of Held's account, in my opinion, is that she couples her critique of traditional theories with skillful elaboration of how an ethics of care remedies their failings. With regard to rights theory, for example, Held maintains that the ethics of care involves "a criticism of the conceptually imperialistic role that law has played in moral thinking. It is not directed," she says, "at overthrowing rights in the domain of law but at keeping legal thinking where it belongs: in the domain of law" (141). Additional problems of traditional approaches that Held's account addresses are their excessive stress on rationality and impartiality, their neglect of the role of emotion, as well as relationships in ethical decision making, and their use of the public/ private distinction to mask injustices that occur within the private realm.

For Held, theories of justice, utility, and virtue all fit into "the wider tapestry of human care" (72). Priority can be given to a particular theory within a limited arena, such as justice within the domain of public law, but this does not mean that one is reducible to the other or interchangeable. Care remains "the most basic of moral values" because "without some level of caring concern for other human beings, we cannot have any morality" (73). Of necessity, therefore, the sphere of an ethics of care extends beyond...