LESSON 9:

ETHICS OF CARE

Today, we will discuss about the ethics of care.
Points to be covered in this lesson:
• Concept of ethics of care
• Male and female ethical perspectives
Do Women and Men Think Differently about Ethics?
• Traditional assumption about male female difference
• Stereotypes
• Men are rational
• Women are emotional
• A cause — or justification — or imposition
• Women are inferior
• Aristotle
• Can obey reason: suited to be followers
• But can’t formulate original reasons: not
suited to be leaders
• Kant
• Women “lack civil personality”
• They’re biologically mentally unsuited to take part in
public life
• A woman’s place, rather, is in the home
• Rousseau
• Said men and women are different, but neither is
superior
• Nevertheless the differences
• Make men most suited to take part in public affairs
• And suit women more to private and domestic
concerns
• Initial feminist reaction: They deny such differences
altogether
• More recent tendency:
• They acknowledge that there are differences
• But they insist nevertheless that women are by no means
inferior and men superior
• Women are perfectly well suited to take part in
public affairs
• They know how to exercise command and authority
What Could Account for Such a Difference Between the
Sexes?
Difference is socialization of boys and girls
• Women are socialized for more for home and hearth
• Men are socialized more for impersonal cooperation
and competition in the public arena
Resulting psychological difference: “women are more attracted
than men to the values of the nuclear family.”
Psychologists Carol Gilligan and Lawrence Kohlberg (and
Freud, much earlier) discovered some evidence that males and
females reason differently when confronted with moral
problems. Their results are as follows:
Female Ethical Perspectives
Personal
Partial
Private
Natural
Feeling
Compassionate
Concrete
Responsibility
Relationship
Solidarity
Male Ethical Perspectives
Impersonal
Impartial
Public
Contractual
Reason
Fair
Universal
Rights
Individual
Autonomy
In essence, the female (ethics of care) is concerned most of all
with the concrete individuals who are affected as well as the
importance of negotiation, dialogue, compassion, and main-
taining relationships. In contrast, the male (ethics of justice) is
most concerned with abstracting from the particular circum-
stances to universal moral laws, duties, or “rights” and much
less interested in compromising and thinking in terms of the
individuals affected.
The approaches to ethics that we have seen, all assume that ethics
should be impartial and that, consequently, any special
relationships that one may have with particular individuals – such
as relatives, friends, or one’s employee should be set aside when
determining what one ought to do. Some utilitarian, have
claimed that a stranger and your parent both are drowning and
you could save only one of them, and if saving the stranger
would produce more utility than saving your parent, then you
would have a moral obligation to save the stranger and let your
parent drown. Such a conclusion, many people have argued, is

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perverse and mistaken. In such a situation, the special relation-
ship of love and caring that you have with your parents gives
you a special obligation to care for them in a way that overrides
obligations that you may have towards the strangers.
This view, that we have an obligation to exercise special care toward
those particular persons with whom we have valuable close
relationships, particularly relationship of dependency, is a key
concept in an “ethic of care”, an approach to ethics that many
feminist ethicists have recently advanced. Carol Gilligan, a
psychologist says that a morality of care “rests on an under-
standing of relationships as response to another in their terms.
According to this “care” view of ethics, the moral task is not to
follow universal and impartial moral principles, but, instead, to
attend to and respond to the good of particular concrete person
with whom we are in a valuable and close relationship.
Thus an ethic of care emphasizes two moral demands:
1. We each exist in a web of relationships and should preserve
and nurture those concrete and valuable relationships we have
with specific persons.
2. We each should exercise special care for those with whom we
are concretely related by attending to their particular needs,
values, desires, and concrete well being as seen from their own
personal perspective, and by responding positively to these
needs, values, desires, and concrete well being, particularly of
those who are vulnerable and dependent on our care.
It is important not to restrict the notion of concrete relation-
ships between two individuals or to relationships between an
individual and a specific group.
Many advocates of an ethic of care have noted that an ethic of
care should also encompass the larger systems of relationships
that make up concrete communities. An ethic of care, therefore
can be seen as encompassing the kinds of obligations that a so-
called “communitarian ethic” advocates.
A communitarian ethic is an ethic that sees concrete communi-
ties and communal relationships as having a fundamental value
that should be preserved and maintained. What is important in a
communitarian ethic is not the isolated individual, but the
community within which individual discover who they by seeing
themselves as integral parts of a larger community with its
traditions, culture, practices and history. The concrete
relationships that make up a particular community, then,
should be preserved and nurtures just as much as the more
interpersonal relationships that sprung up between people. An
ethic of care can be based on the claim that the identity of
the self – who I am – is based on the relationships the self has
with other selves.
It is also important in this context to distinguish three different
forms of “caring”: “caring after someone,” and “caring for
someone.” The kind of caring demanded by an ethic of care is the
kind expressed by the phrase “caring for someone.”
Two additional issues are important to note:
1. Not all relationships have value and so not all would
generate the duties of care. Relationships in which one
person attempts to dominate, oppress, or harm another,
relationships that are characterized by hatred, violence_
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disrespect and viciousness, and relationships that are
characterized by injustice, exploitation, and harm to others
lack the value that an ethic of care requires. An ethic of care
does not oblig-ate us to maintain and nurture such
relationships. On the other hand, relationships that exhibit
the virtues of compassion, concern, love, friendship, and
loyalty do have the kind of value that an ethic of care requires
and an ethic” of care implies that such relationships should
be maintained and nurtured.
2. Second, it is important to recognize that the demands of
caring are some-times in conflict with the demands of justice.
Consider two examples. Sup-pose, first, that one of the
employees whom a female manager supervises is a - friend of
hers. Suppose that one day she catches her friend stealing
from the company. Should she turn in her friend as company
policy requires or should she say nothing in order to protect
her friend? Or suppose, second, that a fe-male manager is
supervising several people, one of whom is a close friend of
hers. Suppose that she must recommend one of these
subordinates for promo-tion to a particularly desirable
position. Should she recommend her friend sim- ply because
she is her friend, or should she be impartial and follow
company policy by recommending the subordinate who is
most qualified even if this means passing over her friend?
Clearly, in each of these cases, justice would require that the
manager not favor her friend. The demands of an ethic of
care would seem to require that the manager favor her friend
for the sake of their friendship. How should conflict of this
sort be resolved?
There is no fixed rule that can resolve all such conflicts. One can
imagine situations in which the manager’s obligations of justice
toward her company would clearly override the obligations she
has toward her friend. One can imagine situations in which the
manager’s obligations toward her friend override her obligation
towards the company but although no fixed rule can resolve all
conflicts between the demands of caring and the requirements of
justice, nevertheless, some guidelines can helpful in resolving
such conflicts. Consider that when the manager was hired, she
voluntarily agreed to accept the position of manager along with
the duties and privileges that would define her role as a manager.
Among the duties she promised to carry out is the duty to
protect the resources of the company and to abide by the
company policy. The manager, therefore, betrays her
relationships with the people to whom she made these promises
if she now shows favoritism toward her friend in violation of
the company policies she voluntarily agreed to
uphold.
Critical Evaluation of Care Ethics
• It can degenerate into unjust favoritism.
• Excess of care can result in self-neglect or “burnout”.
Demands of Ethic of care can lead to “burn-out”. In
demanding that people exercise caring for children, parents,
siblings, spouses, lovers, friends, and other members of the
community, an ethic of care seems to demand that people
sacrifice their own needs and desires to care for the well-being
of others. However, proponents of caring can respond that
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 an adequate view of caring will balance caring for the caregiver
with caring for others.
• Case for care is more compelling at the level of individual
than of institutional morality
• Possible conflicts with other values
• Possible conflicts with utility
• Hire the most qualified applicant
• Hire your useless brother-in-law
Constructive Evaluation of Care Ethics
The advantage of an ethic of care is that it forces us to focus on
the moral value of being partial toward those concrete persons
with whom we have special and valuable relationships, and the
moral importance of responding to such persons as particular
individuals with characteristics that demand a response to them
we do not extend to others. In these respects, an ethic of care
provides an important corrective to the other approaches to
ethics that emphasize impartiality and universality. An ethic of
care, with its focus on partiality and particularity, is an important
reminder of an aspect of morality that cannot be ignored.
Overview
• A key concept in ethics of care is to exercise special care
towards people with whom we have valuable relationship.
• Females are more concerned about relationships (ethics of
care), while males are more concerned about moral laws
(ethics of justice).
Activity
What do you understand by ethics of care? What are the moral
demands of ethics of care?

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