ethics of care

So much of ethics—Kant’s axe murderer and the trolley problem, to name two famous examples—is bizarrely about finding situations where its permissible to harm others or allow harm to come to them. So I feel refreshed to learn about “ethics of care,” an ethical theory that is actually about minimizing harm to others.

The theory emerged out of Carol Gilligan’s critique of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. Kohlberg saw moral development in terms of increasingly abstract ethical principles. In one experiment asking children (mostly boys) whether it’s permissible to steal medicine from a store if you can’t afford it in order to save a loved one’s life, Kohlberg thought the most advanced moral posture was reasoning that yes, it is permissible, because human life is more valuable than property. But the girls he studied did not always come to this conclusion, thinking less about abstract moral values and instead locating the moral value of an action in its consequences for others. What if you got caught, one argued, and put in jail and couldn’t be with your loved one in their final days? Would anyone be better off? Kohlberg saw this as evidence of women’s moral inferiority and inability to reason abstractly, but Gilligan saw within questions like these a coherent moral theory.

Ethics of care is associated with feminism, though it resists essentialism (i.e. that all and only women can adopt it). Rather, Gilligan argued, it’s simply a legitimate way of reasoning morally that’s tended to be adopted by women in response to the roles and expectations placed upon them by society.

And while there are myriad kinds of caring relationships, I suspect the ethics of care has something useful to say about Parenting.

What is Care?

Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer define care within the literature as

a species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment

The Virtues of Caring

Some consider it a branch of virtue ethics with emphasis on a particular subset of virtues. Joan Tronto developed the theory by highlighting five crucial aspects of care:

1. Attentiveness is a precondition of caring for others, since care requires us first to notice others needs. Tronto draws a distinction between ignorance and inattentiveness: the former, truly being unaware of others’ needs, is not a moral failing; while the latter, a kind of willful ignorance of others’ needs, is.
2. Responsibility: taking responsibility for others’ needs. This reminds me of systems ethics and how diffuse responsibility is within systems. The ethics of care would say that this diffusion of responsibility is not an excuse to not take any, and that you can’t be a good person without assuming at least some responsibility for people or systems beyond your own narrow life. Because we are interdependent we must take some responsibility for each other: not doing so is a kind of moral freeloading.
3. Competence: to adequately care for someone or something, we need the knowledge and skills to be able to attend to their needs. An incompetent caregiver is not a very good one.
4. Responsiveness “of the care receiver to the care” in Tronto’s words. How those we care for respond to our care matters: we can’t just say “Here’s your care” and move on.
5. Plurality, communication, trust and respect; solidarity—caring with. This last quality, introduced later in 2013, highlights that while relations of caring are often one-to-one, caring also happens within—and is often necessitated by—the collective social body and its systems. I’m reminded of the quote from Liberation theology, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” We cannot separate caring for others’ needs from the systems that create or leave unmet those needs in the first place.

Further Reading

• The Philosophize This! podcast episode on the ethics of care which introduced me to it
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_care