Care Ethics

The practice of making and sustaining family life: a school of the virtues

by Kim Redgrave

Draft only, do not cite or circulate

In this paper I will develop the idea that the making and sustaining of family is an example of what Alasdair... more In this paper I will develop the idea that the making and sustaining of family is an example of what Alasdair MacIntyre calls a practice, which is any well-ordered and rational form of socially established cooperative human activity. MacIntyre includes the making and sustaining of family life in his list of practices in After Virtue but does not develop the point further. In his later work, Dependent Rational Animals MacIntyre argues that the end of family life is to initiate children into adult activities through various institutions outside of the family. Thus the family does not have its own specific internal good; rather the good of family life is realised through the pursuit of goods internal to the practices of the milieu of associations and institutions in which families participate. This paper will draw on MacIntyre’s theory whilst offering a critical response to his understanding of the internal goods of family life, suggesting that his argument ignores another important aspect of family life: the care of dependent adults.  Recognition of this is crucial to any theory of the family because it has a huge impact not only on family members but also on the wider society in which a family is located. This paper will therefore develop MacIntyre’s Aristotelian approach to identify the internal goods of family life and will examine whether the Western model of the institution of the family sustains or corrupts this end.

The Ethics of Care, Virtue Ethics and the Flourishing Family

by Kim Redgrave

Draft only, do not cite or circulate

Carol Gilligan’s psychological moral theory popularised the idea of a feminist ethics of care during the 1980s, around... more Carol Gilligan’s psychological moral theory popularised the idea of a feminist ethics of care during the 1980s, around the same time that a renewed interest in Aristotelian virtue ethics was sparked by Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Both care ethics and virtue ethics have been fiercely critical of contemporary liberal thinking, such as rights-based theory and the abstract universalism of Kantianism, and, in particular, the focus on the individual at the expense of relationships and community. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the family by mainstream liberal theory, with the exception of David Archard’s The Family: A Liberal Defence and to some extent John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. The key theoretical concern of this paper is how we can conceptualise a flourishing family life. This paper will argue that it is only by drawing on virtue ethics rather than contemporary liberal theory, as many care ethicists currently do, that we can properly give an account of flourishing family life. I will firstly discuss the importance of care ethics for discussion of the family. In doing so I will explore some of the tensions within care ethics on what is meant by care or care-giving and what the relevant values of care ethics are to thinking about the family. The paper will then go on to discuss how some virtue ethics can improve on the insights of care ethics to provide a philosophical account of the flourishing family.

Reassessing Feminist Care Ethics from the standpoint of Contemporary Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

by Kim Redgrave

draft only

Over the past couple of decades feminist care ethics has put forward a substantial critique of the liberal paradigm of... more Over the past couple of decades feminist care ethics has put forward a substantial critique of the liberal paradigm of the self-interested economic man. Care ethicists such as Eva Feder Kittay (2002) and Virginia Held (1995) have proposed that this paradigm be replaced with that of the relationship between mother and child which is essentially other-directed. In this paper I will identify the problems with the mother-child moral paradigm and suggest instead we look to Aristotle’s conception of philia or friendship for an alternative paradigm, of which the mother-child relationship is a particular example. If we look at the mother-child relationship in terms of character friendship, the best kind of philia, we lose the connotation that maternal care is based on irrational feelings of love. Care ethicists have drawn attention to the facts of dependency and the need for care in social relations, not just in the private sphere. However, they continue to debate how care fits with justice and which should take priority (Bubeck, 2002). Another related concern within this field is how we define care. Is it a labour, a feeling, a virtue or all of the above? I will argue that care should not be narrowly defined as labour, as it is by Bubeck, but more broadly conceived as a disposition or virtue which one employs when a particular other is in need. Finally I will argue, along with MacIntyre, that in order to respond to dependency we need a combination of the virtues of justice, generosity and the disposition of affectionate regard which we can only cultivate through practices and intimate social relations. According to MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism, it is through the pursuit of the good life, not an abstract sense of justice or care, that we train our desires and impulses to act for the good of others.

Care to Come Out?

by Lilith Dornhuber deBellesiles

published in APA Newsletter on LGBT Issues in Philosophy Fall 2011, Vol. 11, No. 1

Place Geography and the Ethics of Care: Introductory Remarks on the Geographies of Ethics, Responsibility and Care

by Michael Goodman

In a recent review article, Jeff Popke (2006, p. 510) calls for a ‘more direct engagement with theories of ethics and... more In a recent review article, Jeff Popke (2006, p. 510) calls for a ‘more direct engagement with theories of ethics and responsibility’ on the part of human geographers, and for a reinscription of the social as a site of ethics and responsibility. This requires that we also continue to develop ways of thinking through our responsibilities toward unseen others—both unseen neighbours and distant others—and to cultivate a renewed sense of social interconnectedness. Popke suggests that a feminist-inspired ethic of care might be instrumental in developing this expanded, relational and collective vision of the social, which is particularly prescient given the contemporary economic downturn throughout the globe. Thus, as the ‘moral turn’ in geography continues to evolve, this special issue seeks to bring together geographers working within feminist or feminist-inspired frameworks, and with a shared interest in the changing geographies of ethics, responsibility and care. The collection of papers has its origins in conference sessions on Care-full Geographies, organised by the Guest Editors at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in 2007. In this editorial we seek to position the papers within broader debates about care, responsibility and ethics that have emerged in geography and the wider social sciences in recent years, and to highlight the key issues that have framed these debates.

"Soigner par la souffrance: la prise en charge des auteurs de violences sexuelles"

by Claude-Olivier Doron

Published in Doron, Claude-Olivier, Lefève, Céline & Masquelet, Alain, Soin et subjectivité, Les Cahiers du Centre Canguilhem, n°4, pp. 87-114

In this article, we study the question raised by the care of the sex psychopaths between justice and psychiatry. We... more In this article, we study the question raised by the care of the sex psychopaths between justice and psychiatry. We show the ambiguity of the so-called pathology to which this care is supposed to be directed: a pathology that is not a mental disease and that doesn’t produce any distress to the patient who doesn’t ask for any treatment. This ambiguity, coupled to the fact that this kind of treatment implies the cooperation of the medical staff with justice, explains why so many psychiatrists and psychologists don’t feel at ease with this kind of care. We eventually analyze two ways medical staff have to solve this tension: either they accept to develop a psycho-criminology which aims to reeducation and correction of deviant behaviors, or they try to convert all the resistances and obstacles they meet in their practice in the more familiar vocabulary of disease and care.

The role of love in animal ethics

by Anca Gheaus

forthcoming in Hypatia, Volume 27, Number 3, Summer 2012

Philosophers working on animal ethics have rightly focused on the wrongness of cruelty towards animals and of... more Philosophers working on animal ethics have rightly focused on the wrongness of cruelty towards animals and of devaluing their lives. I argue that the theoretical resources of animal ethics are far from exhausted. Moreover, reflection on what makes animals ethically significant is relevant for thinking about the roots of morality and therefore about ethical relationships between human beings. I rely on a normative approach to animal ethics grounded in the importance of meeting needs in general and, in particular, needs for affection and companionship. I draw on testimonies of shared love between people and animals, and on Raimond Gaita’s work on the importance of emotional connections between creatures who are similarly needy. The ethics of care, which attaches special importance to meeting needs, provides an integrative theoretical framework.

A Liberal Principle for Dependency Care Provision

by Asha Bhandary

Future ethics: risk, care and non-reciprocal responsibility

by Christopher Groves

The Political Imaginary of Care: Generic versus Singular Futures

by Christopher Groves

Care, Commitment and Non-reciprocal Responsibility

by Christopher Groves

Care drain: le piège sexiste du nationalisme

by Speranta Dumitru

in WorldWideWomen. Globalizzazione, generi, linguaggio
vol. 3, T. Caponio, F. Giordano & L. Ricaldone (eds.) Turin, Cirsde and University of Turin, 2011

One decade ago, sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the phrase “care drain” by analogy with the “brain drain” metaphor... more One decade ago, sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the phrase “care drain” by analogy with the “brain drain” metaphor to describe women migration as the extraction of care resources from the Third World by the First World.

This paper argues that there is a bias of representativeness in the focus on migrant women who are both care workers in the North and mothers of children left in the South. In the first section, I argue that the gender stereotypes carried by this bias can be explained by the nationalist approach borrowed from the brain drain criticism. In the second section, I show how a less sexist view on women migration and care could help to better understand skills’ circulation at a global level.

Concept of “Care” in Engineering

by Joshua B. Kardon

Published in ASCE Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities, Vol. 19, No. 3, August 1, 2005.

If the performance of a constructed facility fails to conform with what is intended or anticipated, the... more If the performance of a constructed facility fails to conform with what is intended or anticipated, the engineer-of-record for the facility can be charged with negligence and may bear the liability for damages arising from that failure. An engineer’s negligence is assessed by measuring the engineer’s actions relative to the “standard of care” of the profession. This paper briefly describes the meaning and application of the standard of care, and addresses the question, “What is ‘care’ with regard to engineering?” To examine that question, the paper introduces the five elements of the ethic of care as defined by Joan Tronto: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and integrity, and builds on work by Marina Pantazidou and Indira Nair that identified care as an ethical framework suitable to provide guidance for engineering activities.

The paper explores the applicability of the ethic of care to engineering practice by examining how the elements relate to the performance of engineers described in published case studies of engineering failures. The standard of care question raised in each case study is evaluated within the ethic of care framework, and an assessment is made of the engineer’s exercise of the elements of the ethic of care.

Dependency Relations: Corporeal Vulnerability and Norms of Personhood in Hobbes and Kittay

by Shiloh Whitney

Earlier version of a paper published in Hypatia 26.3 (Summer 2011)

Theories of the liberal tradition have relied on independence as a norm of personhood. Feminist theorists such as Eva... more Theories of the liberal tradition have relied on independence as a norm of personhood. Feminist theorists such as Eva Kittay in Love’s Labor have been instrumental in critiquing normative independence. I explore the role of corporeal vulnerability in Kittay’s account of personhood, developing a comparison to the role it plays in Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. Kittay’s crucial contribution in Love’s Labor is that once we acknowledge the facts of corporeal vulnerability, we must not only acknowledge but affirm dependency in a genuinely inclusive affirmation of personhood. While endorsing Kittay’s “dependency critique”, I discover difficulties that beleaguer Kittay’s development of new norms of personhood. I trace these to a constitutive exclusion determining how Kittay’s argumentative method engages its context in the liberal tradition, revealing a dependency of Kittay’s account on a crucial premise of the model it resists. I argue that in order to affirm dependency in a manner that departs more thoroughly from the criticized aspects of liberal personhood, we must cease to position it in a dichotomy of power and vulnerability. I suggest that attending to the corporeality of vulnerability can aid us in developing the terms of a discourse affirming relational personhood while undermining that dichotomy.

Fatherhood, Feminism, and Family Altruism

by M. Christian Green

In The Equal Regard Family and Its Friendly Critics, John Witte, Jr., M. Christian Green, and Amy Wheeler eds. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 69-94.

The pursuit of a feminist understanding of fatherhood seems, to some, to have a certain oxymoronic quality, or even a... more The pursuit of a feminist understanding of fatherhood seems, to some, to have a certain oxymoronic quality, or even a sense of futility.  Yet this was the journey that I began under the wise and able mentorship of Don Browning.  In this chapter, I sketch out the trajectory of that trip.  First, I describe the genesis of the attention to fatherhood, both in Browning’s work and in my own, in the field of developmental psychology, particularly in that field’s delineation of an ethic of care with separate masculine and feminine instantiations.  Second, I analyze Browning’s understanding of the “male problematic” underlying fatherhood, as articulated in his recent and path-breaking, practical theological writings on marriage and family, situating that “male problematic” and its related “female problematic” in a long line of understandings about fatherhood in Western philosophy, theology, and political philosophy.  Third, I say something about the implications of the male and female problematics in the field of family law and feminist ethics today.  Finally, I offer a critical appraisal of the male and female problematics that will indicate the problems that these relational patterns continue to pose for family altruism and suggest that any revived masculine ethic of care must be accompanied by an ethic of justice for women.

Care Drain: Who Should Provide for the Children Left Behind?

by Anca Gheaus

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy

Care drain brings the traditional problem of carers’ choice between paid work and family at a new level. Taking care... more Care drain brings the traditional problem of carers’ choice between paid work and family at a new level. Taking care drain from Romania as a case study, I analyse the consequences of parents’ migration within a normative framework committed to meeting the needs of vulnerable individuals. The temporary migration of parents who cannot take their children with them involves moral harm, particularly the frustration of children’s developmental and emotional needs.
I use recent feminist work on justice and care in the economy to address the question whose responsibility it is to fill the void of care created by temporary migration. I argue that the moral issues raised by care drain are also issues of social justice and therefore call for rectification by the states involved.

Family, Dependency and The Good Human Life

by Kim Redgrave

draft only to be presented at Martha Nussbaum Conference at Nottingham University 6th-7th May 2010

Martha Nussbaum is critical of political approaches to the family that ‘treat the family as existing “by nature”...... more Martha Nussbaum is critical of political approaches to the family that ‘treat the family as existing “by nature”... and treat the family as a “private” sphere set over against the “public” sphere’ (Nussbaum, 2001, p.252) of politics. She also claims that the female propensity to give love and care is treated as natural, which she argues fails to recognise the role of customs, law and institutions in constructing family and emotions. Though Nussbaum admits that these arguments are not new to feminism, she argues that they have not been addressed in any significant way by theories of justice in the liberal tradition (Nussbaum, 2001, p.252). Family and emotional wellbeing are clearly important to Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach as ‘emotions’ and ‘affiliation’ are both considered by Nussbaum to be capacities which must be secured in order for a human life to have the capability to flourish. In this paper I will firstly question the philosophical grounds on which Nussbaum judges these capacities to be essential to human flourishing. Though Nussbaum’s approach to the capabilities begins with Aristotle, I will argue that the idea that the family and how we express our emotions is socially constructed is in direct tension with any naturalistic justification for the capabilities. Without this naturalistic basis, the argument for capabilities appears to be founded on intuition which I will argue makes the Capabilities Approach doomed to fail philosophically. This philosophical failure makes the argument for the Capabilities Approach weak and vulnerable to dilution. Though Nussbaum claims her capabilities are universal, her intuitive argument comes from a particular standpoint based on her experiences as a white Western well educated female who has worked extensively with women’s collectives in India. Her experience is reflected in her claim that women’s collectives might do better in fostering the capabilities than a Western nuclear family but this claim is based on her own observations of these collectives and without a philosophical argument based on more than intuition, Nussbaum’s claim to universal principles is weakened. I will tentatively argue an alternative approach to the question of the family and its role in the common good which draws on the Aristotelian account of philia. I will also draw directly on MacIntyre’s view of human nature which criticises the liberal notion of rational self-seeking individuals and instead understands that all human beings are dependent or vulnerable to dependency; something most political theories fail to recognise because of their denial of our animality. Using MacIntyre’s approach we can find a middle ground between the naturalist and constructionist ways of interpreting the family.

Care and Counterinsurgency

by Daniel Levine

Working paper version.  Published (in slightly modified form) in Journal of Military Ethics.

The feminist turns in moral psychology: the reworking of Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care into a postmodern care ethics by Joan Tronto.

by Evelien Geerts

In this paper, I looked into the feminist tradition of the ethics of care, and tried to argue that although Carol... more In this paper, I looked into the feminist tradition of the ethics of care, and tried to argue that although Carol Gilligan's work has been extremely valuable for developing this feminist paradigm, she nonetheless relapsed into modernist, binary and essentialist thinking. After sketching and critiquing her project, I defend the position of Joan Tronto, who has succeeded in developing a more feminist and less essentalist approach to the ethics of care.

De feministische (zorg)ethiek. Op weg naar een harmonieuze relatie met de hedendaagse deugdenethiek?

by Evelien Geerts

In this paper (written in Dutch), I argue for a feminist version of care ethics that is compatible with virtue ethics. In this paper (written in Dutch), I argue for a feminist version of care ethics that is compatible with virtue ethics.