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Family Values
Ethics as Care
Nel Noddings (b. 1929)
High school math teacher for 17 years.
Focus on theory of education at Stanford.
Built on Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982).
An ethics of care first set out with Caring (1984).
From natural to ethical caring
Noddings begins with a reflection on Hume’s theory that all moral action is rooted in basic natural sentiments of sympathy.
Hume’s theory takes morality to stem from a sentiment of natural care that is common to all individuals.
Noddings wants to add a further dimension to this theory by speaking about ethical care, a relation that is different in type from natural care.
Ethical care does not stem from a natural instinct, but rather from a recognition of the care we have received from others in the past.
The point is not to elevate ethical over natural care (as in Kant), but to see ethics is terms of both dimensions of care.
Obligation
Nodding wants to avoid: 1) Kant’s insistence that ethical action must exclude all sentiments and 2) the idea of solitary virtuous actions.
Against this it is argued: 1) all morality has a natural basis and 2) ethics is essentially about how one relates to others.
In cases of biologically driven concern we may speak of obligations as innate to a person, e.g. a mother’s concern for her infant.
In properly ethical care, by contrast, any obligation arises out of an evaluation of the relative importance of a relationship.
In cases of ethical care: “I feel the moral “I must” when I recognize that my response will either enhance or diminish my ethical ideal” (p. 430).
No moral universals
Against Kant’s theory of universal moral maxims, Noddings insists that an ethics of care is always sensitive to a particular relation.
My ethical care is not directed towards humanity in general, but rather towards this specific person before me.
Ethical care also results from a reflection about how I was cared for by other particular persons in the past.
Thus, the Kantian theory of ethical duty and obligation is rejected because it abstracts away from particular social relations.
Noddings also rejects the utilitarian idea that in moral deliberation each person counts as just one and no more; social relations are differently valued.
Right and Wrong
Ethical care is not simply a matter of feeling a particular sentiment, it is also a decision to be open to experiencing and acting on it.
Noddings insists on this in order to avoid an emotivist reductionism in ethics: that is, the idea that ethics is simply about feelings.
There is a rejection of abstract universal ethical principles involved in this theory, but the “caring attitude” it itself universal.
When we label an act morally right or wrong according to this theory, we are evaluating how it enhances or diminishing caring.
For Noddings this means that an ethics of care is nor relativistic in the sense of each person having independent standards of judgment.
Justification
When we think about ethical claims (“this is a good act” etc.), we can worry about the justification of the claim.
Is the claim based on knowledge or true belief? If so, where does this knowledge come from?
Any sentiment theory of ethics is likely to play down the epistemological or truth-claiming function within ethics.
Noddings holds that the inability to provide epistemic justifications for ethical attitudes is a sign that caring comes before knowledge.
For each of us, she says, ethical obligation (openness to care) is prior to our ability to offer ethical justification (saying why we care).
Women and Morality
Traditional accounts of moral development (e.g. Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory) see higher-order reasoning as key.
For Noddings, this betrays a specifically masculine bias, which will tend to label women as morally regressive in some way.
Given women’s traditional role as caregivers and nurturers, a more balanced ethical theory will give due weight to these relations.
But Noddings insists that her ethics of care does not exclude men from the moral community.
The ethics of care rejects the need for a transcendent source of moral authority such as the Judeo-Christian god who commands.
Ruth Macklin, “Artificial Reproduction”
Macklin is interested in how technological advances relating to human reproduction might impact our notions of the family.
In particular, she asks: who is the “biological mother” in cases where two women make a biological contribution?
In cases where an egg from one women is implanted in another, Macklin assumes similar legal provisions as for artificial insemination.
But legal provisions and technical possibilities do not settle the moral question about what can legitimately constitute a family.
Anthropological research suggests that there is no one pattern of family belonging, but a wide variety of possible formations.
Who is the mother?
Macklin contends that it cannot be scientific discovery that determines who is the mother in cases where biological contributions are shared.
Instead, it is a matter of thinking through which moral factors carry most weight when designating one woman most properly as the mother.
One possible decision makes gestation the key consideration, on the basis that this involves the greatest psychological investment in the child.
A second position views genetic contribution as decisive, so that the egg donor is the true mother.
A third position brings in both gestation and genetics: in surrogacy, a women that contributes both egg and womb has a greater claim.
Macklin’s conclusions
Macklin concludes that the possibilities introduced by reproductive technology oblige us to have a broad conception of “family”.
While biological factors must clearly play some role, we cannot appeal simply to scientific fact to settle the moral question of family roles.
Macklin doubts whether egg donation can be proven to present greater emotional problems than adoption or artificial insemination.
She refers to research into adoption going back to cases in the 1960s that demonstrate deep psychological trauma in mothers and children.
“Since there is no single, univocal concept of the family, it is a matter for moral and social decision which determinants [assume] priority.”
Elizabeth Anderson, “Women’s Labor”
Anderson’s article looks into the ethics of commercial surrogacy, and criticisms that this practice reduces mothers and children to commodities.
Treating persons as commodities is at odds with the Kantian prescription never to treat another purely as a means but also as an end in themselves.
Reasons defending commercial surrogacy: 1) giving the opportunity for child rearing, 2) freedom of contract, 3) to allow altruistic acts, 4) similar acts.
Despites these possible justifications, Anderson argues: “[commercial surrogacy] represents an invasion of the market into … women’s labor.”
Commercialization of women’s labor entails its moral degradation, that it is represents significant devaluation of this role.
Parents and Children
In line with Noddings “ethics of care,” Anderson contends that children “belong” to parents as trusts and not as property.
Commercial surrogacy precisely calls on the surrogate mother to see her child as property to be sold to another.
This results in degradation, “where something is treated in accordance with a lower mode of valuation than is proper to it.”
There are also reports that suggest children raised by a surrogate mother are vulnerable to fear of abandonment.
Anderson claims that commercial surrogacy differs from other practices because: 1) a financial incentive is involved from the start (unlike adoption) and 2) it involves giving away a whole child (unlike artificial insemination by donor).
Women as Commodities
Commercial surrogacy does three things to the surrogate mother: 1) makes her repress her love, 2) alienates her from her pregnancy, 3) it manipulates her non-commercial (altruistic) motivations.
While it is tolerable for a person not to like a chosen job done for money, it is ethically intolerable to turn pregnancy into drudgery.
Studies suggest that there is widespread regret, grief, and anxiety experienced by mothers who give up their children for money.
In some cases, women who had previously had an abortion or given up a child for adoption look to surrogacy to heal their sense of loss.
Anderson concludes that commercial surrogacy is both ethically intolerable and legally suspect. The practice should be made illegal.