PHI questions

Questions: 1. This approach to ethics was once called "feminist ethics" but the name has changed.  Why do you think calling it an 'ethics of care' is better or more effective than calling it 'feminist ethics'? 2. This approach to ethics is noted for having NO PRINCIPLES.  There is no one central, unbreakable rule to ethics of care like there is in utilitarianism or in Kant's theory.  Is the lack of a central rule/set of rules a GOOD or a BAD thing, in terms of an ethical theory? 3. Ethics of care approaches the resolution of conflicts in a different way than a utilitarian or even a set of legal rules might do it.  Consider the case of a very contested divorce custody battle: how might an ethics of care tell us to resolve this, and compare that to how our legal system might currently do it.

Perspective 2

Nevertheless, Aristotelian virtue ethics also believes that there is such a thing as human nature, something that each one of us is, essentially, “on the inside,” and that virtue has to have a rational component in the fully virtuous individual. The ethics of care reverses these two ideas. The primary moral fact is relationality, and the full development of moral acumen occurs only in the examination of particular experiences of being in relation with others. Think of the various relationships you are in. Do you think and act in the same way in all of them, or do the people you interact with make you “be who you are"?

The Ethics of Care and the Experience of Women

The ethics of care is a recent addition and still under development. In this module, we will draw on how the ethics of care has been presented in two significant authors, psychologist Carol Gilligan and educationalist Nel Noddings. Both authors can be described as participating in a rethinking of feminist philosophy in terms of the distinctive experience of women.

 

Most proponents of the ethics of care are women. They have argued that the experience of maternal care and attachment is essential to understanding human morality and ethics. Yet it has largely been passed over as being of secondary importance or irrelevant. Proponents of the ethics of care find such a position suspect. What do you think?

Care as Relational

First, what is care? It can be characterized as a relational activity and experience that is rooted in being open to the other and responsive to another's needs. Care is a mode of feeling by which one puts oneself in the presence of the being for which one cares (the cared-for). This is described as an affective-receptive mode, which is an awareness of and commitment to the needs of another. It is directed toward the welfare, protection, and enhancement of the cared-for (Noddings 2-35). Care calls for completion in the response of the cared-for, since it is a relational activity and experience.

Relationality and Dependency

The outlook of the ethics of care finds its beginnings in the original fact that we all begin our lives in a state of dependency, and many of us experience dependency at various points throughout our lives and at the end of life. That we begin our life in a state of dependency is one of those inescapable facts of human life. None of us would be alive if others had not taken it upon themselves to provide care for us. This sets the tenor of human experience as being fundamentally relational and to a large degree asymmetrical.

 

Relationality and the fact that individuals are embedded in overlapping cycles of attachment and separation (Gilligan 151), are the fundamental assumptions of the ethics of care. It is these fundamental phenomena that ground its conception of moral life and ethical reflection. The ethics of care sees individuals through the lens of the relations they form and maintain. The individuals could not exist without being embedded in some relation or other. It is in this sense that relations are primary. Claire, a physician that Gilligan had interviewed, is quoted as saying, “by yourself, there is little sense of things…You have to love someone else, because while you may not like them, you are inseparable from them” (Gilligan 160). What do you think of this? How can we be inseparable from those we do not like?

Dependency: Starting Points for Ethics

What does the basic biological fact of dependency have to do with ethics? It provides us with three important starting points: First, it recognizes the importance of natural feelings of empathy for the suffering of others. Second, it recognizes that we all have the memory of being cared for. Finally, it recognizes that the experience of caring and being cared for is a source of one of the most satisfying affective experiences, which is joy (Noddings 6).

Joy and the Commitment to Care

These feelings must be present in order to sustain the burden that people who provide care, the ones-who-care, bear in favor of those for whom they care, or the cared-for (Noddings 79-80). The feeling of joy taken in providing care is important for developing an ethics of care that goes beyond empathy and beyond the phenomenon of natural caring. Nevertheless, in the ethics of care, closeness of relationship does make a difference in judgments as to whether one is responsible for offering care or not.

 

The experience of joy and the memory of care provides one with the longing for caring. We want to be caring in order to remain in a caring relation and to enhance the ideal of ourselves as ones-who-care (Noddings 5). This provides us with the motivation to be moral. The moral being is one who seeks commitment to caring.

Moral Maturity and the Ethics

If morality is motivated by living up to ideals of maintaining relations of care, full moral development is realized in 1) a progressively greater understanding, through experience, of one’s relationships with others; 2) an increasing differentiation between self and others; and 3) a growing comprehension of the dynamics of social interaction (Gilligan 87). There is no linear progression from a state of dependency to the assertion of individual autonomy. There is, rather, a widening network of relations of interaction, sustained by an increased differentiation of self from others and a growing insight into the dynamics of relationships.

No General Principles

The ethics of care, by design, proposes no general principle. In fact, it would be contrary to what it stands for to do so, since it views care as arising in non-generalizable, particular relations of care between particular individuals. What it recommends is that we live by an ideal of oneself as being one-who-cares, an ideal that finds its origin in the memory and joy of the experience of care. This requires working on situations in such a way that care will be allowed to flourish (Noddings 5). The following pages outline what the ethics of care would recommend.

Empathy, Not Exploitation: Preventing Harm, Avoiding Isolation

The ethics of care, by design, proposes no general principle. In fact, it would be contrary to what it stands for to do so, since it views care as arising in non-generalizable, particular relations of care between particular individuals. What it recommends is that we live by an ideal of oneself as being one-who-cares, an ideal that finds its origin in the memory and joy of the experience of care. This requires working on situations in such a way that care will be allowed to flourish (Noddings 5). The following pages outline what the ethics of care would recommend.

Networks Versus Hierarchy, Connection Versus Opposition

Young girls and women, Gilligan found, describe their ideals in terms of other people. Thus, eight-year-old Amy says she wants to study science to help others: “I think everybody should try to help somebody else… and the way I’m choosing is through science” (Gilligan 34). She does not see science as a way of dominating nature or asserting herself over others. Relations form a network of connections. The ethics of care advocates working on maintaining these networks and building up interconnections instead of relations of opposition.

Interaction Through Narrative Rather Than Through Abstraction

The ethics of care presents ethical reflection as a matter of developing a narrative construction of interpersonal interactions. Ethical reflection is framed in terms of stories of how particular people respond to one another in particular situations. Young girls, when asked about how they would go about resolving conflictual situations, think of them in terms of a story of relationships that extends over time (Gilligan 28-30). Their approach is open-ended and targeted to the specific context provided in the narrative (Gilligan 16-22). The ethics of care proceeds to address problems by introducing facts, the feelings of others, and personal histories, rather than by abstracting away from particular persons, places, and circumstances (Noddings 35).

Conflict Resolution Through Negotiation and Communication

Girls see the task of resolving conflict by resorting to communication. Telling a compelling story about how the interaction among people involved can be maintained is how conflict can be resolved. Conflicts do not present win/lose situations. They present occasions on which to activate and strengthen networks of relationships through communication (Gilligan 29-31). Think of a personal situation in which a conflict was successfully resolved. Was it resolved in the way advocated by the ethics of care? What about conflicts in your professional life? If you are familiar with Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s advocacy of peaceful conflict resolution, do you see any similarities between their views and the ethics of care?

Cyclic Conception of Human Life in Terms of Attachment

Finally, the ethics of care views human life in terms of cycles of attachment. Overlapping relations and cycles of relations make up who we are as individuals. We do not get a sense of who we are by detaching ourselves from our relations with others. This contrasts with the conception of defining the self in separation from and even opposition to others, through a linear progression that goes from dependency to autonomy (Gilligan 151-152). Do you agree with the idea that we are who we are in terms of our relations, and that we are neither independent nor separate?