Care Ethics
March 25, 2022 | SARA BIZARRO
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975
The Fundamentals of Caring, 2016
The Ethics of Care or Care Ethics has its origins in feminist thinkers like Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Anette Baier, and Virginia Held. The ethics of care recognized the essential aspect of care and dependency in human life. We all need care at several stages in our life, we all need care as children and infants, when sick and in old age. Traditional Ethical theories present a picture of individuals as independent, autonomous and rational, and they overlook the fact of human dependency, the fact that we live in relationship with one another, and that emotions are important, if not crucial, to these relationships.
Individualism, reason, and autonomy are essential in traditional theories such as Kantian Ethics, which requires us to reason using universal laws, and Utilitarianism which requires us to calculate the greatest happiness of the greatest number. These characteristics of autonomy and reason are presented as neutral or impartial. However, thinkers such as Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held, among others, noted that this so-called impartiality really stems from a make experience, rather than a female experience. Women have been caretakers, which is an essential aspect of human life, and caretaking involves emotion and relationship rather than reason and autonomy. Therefore, feminists argued, traditional ethics are actually biased towards the male perspective, rather than neutral.
Gilligan also added in her book In a Different Voice, that the male perspective does not reflect men’s needs and experiences as human beings. Men also create relationships, have emotions, and engage in care providing, therefore the traditional male role exhibited in the classic ethical theories did not represent men either. This is why Gilligan called her book In a Different Voice and not In a Woman’s Voice.
The Ethics of Care can be somewhat connected to two classical ethical theories, Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics and David Hume’s Emotivism or Noncognitivism. Some thinkers in the Ethics of Care follow these traditions, while others do not.
Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics recognized our special relationships by including and giving a front-seat place to the virtue of friendship. Aristotle thought true friendship was a mutual relationship that creates a bond between people who consider their friend as they do themselves when a real friend archives something we are happy for them when something bad happens to one’s friend, we feel bad for them - we feel these things as if it was ourselves. Friendship is crucial to practice the virtues because with our friends it is easier to be virtuous, so to be virtuous we need friends (we also can only have friends if we are virtuous since bad people can’t have real friends, which is a bit circular, but like every other virtue, this needs to be trained and it will eventually come to be by degrees). Aristotle then does recognize relationships as essential to becoming a good person and does not think of individuals as purely autonomous. Furthermore, Aristotle does also think that morality is political and that virtues need political conditions to flourish, but he does not simply have a straight line between individual and society, he mediates that line with friendships, which are also essential. Notice though that these friendships are not relationships of caretaking such as taking care of children or the elderly, they are interactions between adult individuals, so in that sense, it is indeed different from Care Ethics.
David Hume is another philosopher that is used by Care Ethics philosophers, for instance, Anette Baier is a specialist in Hume and follows his Ethical Theory. Hume famously said that “reason is and ought to be a slave to the passions.” He thought that when we say something is right or wrong, this is an expression of a feeling of approval and disapproval, and that reason comes after to justify whatever feeling we already have. Arguments and reasons can be constructed for any position, and we can use them to justify whatever feeling we already have. Actions are motivated by feelings and not by reason, and even though maybe some people will change their minds because of a good argument, that is not what most people do. Therefore Hume argued that if we want to change the morality of an era, we need to change its sensitivity, and instead of creating good arguments, we must cultivate good emotions and educate our feelings. Art, music, theater, literature, etc are better at this than philosophy. In sum, Hume did underline the importance of emotions, even though he did not focus on the activity of care, like the modern Ethics of Care philosophers do.
In 1982 Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice. Gilligan was responding to psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg who had created an understanding of moral development that went from the less abstract to the more abstract. Kohlberg argued that children in stage 1 focus on obedience and punishment, in stage 2 on individualism and exchange, in stage 3 on good interpersonal relationships, on stage 4 on social order, in stage 5 on social contract and individual rights, and in stage 6 on universal principles. He then argued that boys are able to reach the higher levels on the scale but girls are not.
The experiment conducted by Kohlberg is known as the Heinz example, in this example, Heinz is a man who needs medicine for his wife, without the medicine his wife will die. The medicine costs $6000, but he is only able to raise $3000. What should Heinz do? Should he steal the medicine? Kohlberg asked this to boys and girls (around 10 years old) and the boys would say that he should steal the medicine because life is more important than money, while girls would give more circumstantial reasoning such as, if he steals he may get caught and then if the wife gets sick again there is no one to take care of her and so on. Kohlberg concluded that boys were in a more advanced state of moral development since they were using principles to think, while girls did not abstract out. Gilligan argued that this research was biased. Kohlberg is assuming that circumstantial reasoning is at a lower level of development when this is not necessarily the case. Gilligan then proposed her own “women-centric” stages of moral development. These are Gilligan’s stages:
Preconventional morality – During this stage, there is a strong focus on survival and self-interest.
Conventional – During this stage, women prioritize selflessness and caring about others.
Postconventional – In the final stage of moral development, women emphasize taking responsibility for the consequences of their choices and gaining control of their own lives. Caring for others is a strong component of this high stage of moral development.
Virginia Held, another Care Ethics philosopher, published a book called The Ethics of Care in 2007. Held also criticized traditional ethical theories as creating an image of the moral agent as autonomous and rational, overlooking human dependency. Humans need care at several stages of their life, and there is value in providing care. Emotions are important in human relationships, and they should not be seen as something that simply gets in the way of impartiality. Emotions such as sympathy, empathy, responsiveness, and sensitivity have in themselves moral value. Furthermore, the word care includes both caring for and caring about, and we care for something better if we care about it. We can educate our emotions and learn to care not just for our own children, but for others as well, creating policy based on empathy rather than based on individual rights and responsibilities.
Care Ethics is an interesting and exciting ethical theory. There is no doubt that care work is essential for all human life and it is probably because it was so often relegated to women that it didn’t get the attention it deserved. Care Ethics is well equipped to look are healthy relationships of care that respect and recognize both the caregiver and the care receiver, preventing abuses of both. By focusing on creating the conditions for healthy and respectful relationships, we can then model them in larger political settings as well, possibly creating much better negotiation techniques and encouraging peaceful and emotional connections between countries and political powers. Virginia Held is a philosopher who has worked on expanding Care Ethics beyond the private sphere, and this is a tradition that is just beginning. If both men and women start embracing more their care roles, the benefits would be immediate and significant for both.
REFERENCES
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, Harvard University Press, 1982
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care, Personal, Political and Global, 2006