The Core of Care Ethics

S. Collins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137011459
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The ethics of care has flourished in recent decades yet we remain without a succinct statement of its core theoretical commitment. This study argues for a simple care ethical slogan: dependency relationships generate responsibilities. It uses this slogan to unify, specify and justify the wide range of views found within the care ethical literature.

1

Introduction

Moral theories tend to have slogans. Consequentialists maximise (or satisfice) the goodness of their actions’ consequences; deontologists respect certain rights and abide by certain duties; and virtue ethicists cultivate flourishing characters. This book is about the slogan of a hitherto under-explored moral theory: care ethics.

Care ethics seeks to explain the imperative to enter into and maintain caring relations. This book aims to provide a new synthesis of the normative commitments that have emerged, over the last thirty years, as being central to care ethics. The goal is to use the tools of analytic philosophy to specify, unify, and justify these normative commitments, in a way that sheds new light on the theory.

To that end, Part I of the book surveys the vast literature that has arisen over the last thirty years within care ethics. It seeks to construct – in a way that is clear and accessible to those unfamiliar with the theory – the most plausible version of the key normative commitments that have emerged within that literature. Part I ultimately arrives at four key claims of care ethics, explaining how this version of care ethics arises out of critical reflection on the existing literature. These four claims, though, will be somewhat under-specified and only loosely connected.

Part II seeks to give a justification of these four claims that will serve to both specify and unite the claims, thus removing their under-specified and loosely connected appearance. The aim is to bring these four claims under a single theoretical slogan. Although the slogan of care ethics remains elusive, most care ethicists agree that relationship – between caregivers, care recipients, supporters of caregivers, and care-giving institutions – lie somewhere near the normative heart of the theory. Part II makes this general claim more precise, arguing that care ethics’ slogan is ‘dependency relationships generate responsibilities.’ I start Part II by presenting a new, detailed vision of precisely what dependency relationships consist of. I then use that conception of dependency relationships to unify, justify, and further specify the four claims developed in Part I.

As well as providing a unified systematisation of care ethics, this book has another, subsidiary aim: to bring care ethics into the mainstream of analytic theory. Scholars have recently explored the similarities between care ethics and the mainstream theories of consequentialism (Driver 2005), Kantian deontology (Bramer 2010; S.C. Miller 2012), and, most often, virtue ethics (Halwani 2003; Slote 2007; though see Sander-Staudt 2006 and Noddings 2010, ch. 5 for rebuttals). Care ethics’ fraught relationship with liberal social contract theories has also been assessed (Kittay 1999; Silvers and Francis 2005; Stark 2007; Bhandary 2010). Scholars have also explored the relation between care ethics and non-mainstream moral theories, such as Confucian ethics (Li 1994; Luo 2007; though see Star 2002; Yuan 2002; and Noddings 2010, ch. 5 for rebuttals) and African ethics (Harding 1987). At a more applied level, the care ethical approach has been used to great effect in analysing real-world ethical and political problems (Barnes 2012; Robinson 2011; Sevenhuijsen 1998; Tronto 2013).

Despite this, we do not have a precise analysis of care ethics’ central normative commitment. Care ethics remains a somewhat shadowy entity at the outskirts of debates in analytic moral philosophy, often mentioned in connection to feminism and to virtue ethics, but without a definitive statement of precisely what its advocates are committed to – without a slogan. (See, for example, chapter 12 of James Rachels’ (2003) widely-used textbook on moral philosophy, where care ethics is described as an ethics purely of the ‘home and hearth’ before being folded into virtue ethics.) My hope in writing this book is that we can bring care ethics into the framework of mainstream analytic moral philosophy by crystallising its conceptual core, without simplifying (or worse, ignoring) its key feminist and phenomenological insights.

Some readers – some care ethicists – will be wary of the task I have set myself. Care ethicists have tended to deride the idea that their theory might be explicable in terms of a precise, unitary, abstract slogan. Marian Barnes is correct when she says ‘[i]t is those philosophers who have responded to the real life and often messy moral dilemmas that people have struggled to make sense of in their everyday lives who have developed an ethic of care, not those who seek to determine moral principles through a process of logical argumentation.’ (Barnes 2012, 17–18) And Anca Gheaus is correct when she asserts that ‘“care,” as it is employed in the feminist ethics of care literature, is better understood as a group of concepts with strong family resemblance but no essential trait in common.’ (Gheaus 2009, 64; see similarly Bowden 1997, 2–6) Care ethicists seem to suspect something important would be lost in the assertion of a slogan, so they do not attempt to provide a clear statement of the normative core of the theory. (This is not to say theorists do not give clear definitions of ‘care’ itself. Those abound, as we shall see in Chapter 3. And a few have given general formulations of the imperative to care but, again as we shall see, this tends to be done in a derisory or not wholly general fashion – see Chapter 2.)

It is my contention that the gulf between Barnes’ two sets of philosophers is not so wide – indeed, that almost all moral philosophers aim to respond to messy details and use logical argumentation to determine principles – and that the insights of the former can be translated into the language of the latter. Contra Barnes, I believe that care ethics can be ‘encompassed in abstractions’ (2012, 18) – or at least, its core normative commitment can. And while I agree with Gheaus about how the notion of care has been employed in the literature, contra Gheaus, I believe the group of care ethical concepts does have an essential trait in common. The aim of this book is to defend these beliefs.

Why should we want to crystallise care ethics in this way? There are two main motivations. The first is that, unless care ethics has a core normative commitment, we might wonder whether it is a moral theory in any meaningful sense. As long as care ethics is simply a collection of statements that have been made by people who happen to call themselves ‘care ethicists,’ it will be unclear what is in the theory and what is not. There is no way to know if a new claim made by a self-proclaimed care ethicist is true to the theory’s guiding commitment, or whether existing claims should be rejected as not truly care ethical. The second motivation is more humble. This is that we should not simply assume care ethics lacks a slogan. We should at least hear out attempts to establish a unified, precise, explanatory statement of care ethics’ core slogan. This requires that someone attempts to establish the theory’s slogan. If my proposed slogan does not work, the ball is back in the court of the anti-unifiers.

This introductory chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section, I give a broad overview of the range of claims typically associated with care ethics. This will serve to give the reader a ‘feel’ for the view that is to be unified, specified, and justified as the book proceeds. The following section makes some methodological remarks about the relationship between care ethics, ethical and political philosophy, feminism, and the history of philosophy. The chapter closes by giving an overview of the argument that is to come.

1.1 Care ethics: The general picture

Care ethicists start by taking the experience of decision-making as crucial data for ethical and political theorising. They point out that, when deliberating about what we morally ought to do in some concrete scenario, we typically take account of the particularities and complexities of the relationships between the unique persons in the dilemma. We do not apply abstract rules or perform regimented calculi. These decision-making processes often strike us as coldly lacking in moral qualities or not quite suitable for the given situation. Rather, we consider concrete, particular others in complex webs of relationships. Because of their complexities, our relationships with particular others (and those particular others themselves) seem to be an irreducible part of moral justification and deliberation. Principles – understood as conditionals (‘if X, then Y’ statements) with an imperative (‘do this’) consequent – are at best insufficient, and at worst distortive, for proper moral justification and deliberation.

Famously within care ethics, this approach to moral deliberation is revealed by the data of psychologist Carol Gilligan (1982), who investigated the thought processes of women facing moral dilemmas. In contrast to findings about men in earlier studies (Kohlberg 1973), Gilligan found that many women did not appeal to general principles or make categorical assertions about right and wrong. They instead used ‘the responsibility conception,’ which ‘focuses on the limitations of any particular resolution and describes the conflicts that remain.’ (Gilligan 1982, 22) This seeming lack of decisiveness was a result of women subjects’ perception that each dilemma involved many conflicting responsibilities. Paradigmatically, Gilligan described ‘Amy’ as a subject who saw a particular dilemma as ‘a narrative of relationships that extends over time’ in ‘a world that coheres through human connection rather than through systems of rules.’ (1982, 28–29) (The approach of using real people, facing real problems of care, is more recently deployed by Barnes (2006).)

Through reflection on such thought processes, care ethicists are led to the following general claims: that responsibilities derive directly from relationships between particular people, rather than from abstract rules and principles; that deliberation should be empathy-based rather than duty- or principle-based; that personal relationships have a moral value that is often overlooked by other theories; that at least some responsibilities aim at fulfilling the particular needs of vulnerable persons (including their need for empowerment), rather than the universal rights of rational agents; and that morality demands not just one-off acts, but also certain ongoing patterns of interactions with others and certain general attitudes and dispositions. Most importantly, care ethicists claim that morality demands actions and attitudes of care, in addition to or even more importantly than those of respect, non-interference, and tit-for-tat reciprocity (which care ethicists generally see as over-emphasised in other ethical and political theories). These views will be elaborated upon in Part I.

Not all care ethicists hold all of these views, different theorists define them differently, and different theorists emphasise different ones. Nonetheless, this loose cluster of claims gives us some sense of what care ethicists believe matters morally. It is difficult to be more precise, as there is no generally agreed-upon statement of what care ethics is – providing a much more precise statement is the aim of this book, and refining this preliminary cluster of claims is the aim of its early chapters.

It is equally hard to specify exactly what care ethics is not. From early in its history, care ethics was contrasted to ‘traditional’ (e.g., utilitarian and Kantian) approaches to moral theorising. (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Ruddick 1980; Ruddick 1989) It is sometimes unclear exactly which other theories or theorists are being opposed here: the derogatory term ‘traditional’ is attached by those writing on care ethics to the views that caring is not morally required (Engster 2005, 57), that morality is impartial through and through (Driver 2005, 183, though Driver defends consequentialism against this charge), that all moral demands are demands of justice (Held 2006, 17), that infants do not contribute to the moral value of parent-child relationships (Noddings 1999, 36), and that humans are autonomous and independent (S.C. Miller 2005, 140). Of course, many contemporary self-described utilitarians and Kantians would reject some or all of these claims. And almost all contemporary (and some early) care ethicists accept that care must be in some way fused or combined with its early opponent, justice, where ‘justice’ can be understood as primarily concerned with liberty and reciprocity (Clement 1996; Held 2004, 65, 68; Held 2006, 15–17; Pettersen 2008, ch. 6 (Pettersen also discusses Gilligan’s ambiguous attitude towards the care/justice distinction); Robinson 1999, 23ff; Ruddick 1998; Tronto 1987, 167).

We should, I suggest, see care ethicists as attempting to point out certain important moral truths that tend to have been neglected by other theories. We should not see them as claiming that other theories get nothing right. It is consistent with care ethics to think that noncare ethical considerations are appropriate in some circumstances. It is also consistent with care ethics to think that some combination of care and non-care considerations is appropriate in all circumstances. This is important: as I read them, care ethicists do not take themselves to be giving an account of the whole of morality.¹ Care ethicists rather take themselves to be pointing to an interrelated set of concerns that have hitherto been inadequately appreciated. The aim of this book is to clarify what makes those concerns interrelated – what, that is to say, makes care ethics a theory, even if a theory of only part of the moral landscape.

1.2 Care, ethics, politics, feminism, and history

In opening this chapter, I mentioned one political theory (liberalism) and five ethical theories (consequentialism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, Confucian ethics, African ethics). This might lead one to ask whether care ethics is a political or an ethical theory. The distinction between ethical and political theory is generally thought to lie in their guiding questions. Ethical theories answer the question ‘what is the right thing for me to do?’ or ‘what is the right way for me to live?’ while political theories answer the question ‘what is the right thing for us to do?’ or ‘what is the right way for our shared life to be organised?’

Care ethics eschews this distinction. Building on the feminist insight that ‘the personal is political’, care ethicists tend to believe experiences in our individual ethical lives must inform the principles that guide our political institutions, and that the nature of our political institutions condition possibilities within our individual ethical lives.² Care is both an ethical and a political value. One only needs to consider the titles of key books within care ethics to see this. Consider Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, or Eva Feder Kittay’s Love’s Labor: Essays in Women, Equality, and Dependency, or Nel Noddings’ Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. Part II of this book will similarly run the gamut of individual and institutional life, by explaining exactly how and when it is possible for (what I will argue is) the core slogan of care ethics to generate responsibilities for institutions. To keep the terminology straightforward – though at the risk of departing from the standard meanings of the terms – I will use ‘moral theory’ or ‘moral philosophy’ to include normative theories of both ethics and politics.

Another important initial clarification concerns care ethics’ relation to feminism. As stated earlier, this book will argue that care ethics’ conceptual core is the view that dependency relationships generate responsibilities (I will say much more about what these relationships are in Part II). Care ethics, we might say, is therefore a relational ethics. It claims that obligations derive from relations between persons. Not all ethical or political theories that are used to further feminist ends are relational. Much liberal feminism is characterised by the concepts of individual autonomy and individual rights (Baehr 2004). These feminists choose not to focus on relationships (especially dependency relationships), the value of giving and receiving care, and the role that caregiving inevitably plays in all societies. It would therefore be incorrect to say that all feminist moral theorists do or should embrace care ethics, or that most care ethicists endorse all feminist moral theories. To describe care ethics as the feminist moral theory is to present only one understanding of the theory behind feminism, and to present only one understanding of the proper political and social uses of care ethics. (See similarly Pettersen 2008, ch. 2.) Not all feminist moral theories are relational, and relational moral theories – including care ethics – can legitimately be used for non-feminist purposes. (I say ‘non-feminist’ rather than ‘anti-feminist’: it is difficult to imagine a relational moral theory that had upshots that were opposed to, rather than simply different from, the ends of feminism(s).)

Yet it cannot be ignored that care ethics arose as a theory that s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The Claims of Care Ethics
• Part II Crystallising the Claims
• Notes
• References
• Index