Care Ethics

Western ethical theories have been oriented toward the perspective of men, and, generally, have ignored the distinctive orientation that women bring to ethical questions. Carol Gilligan's psychological research helped to bring that neglect into clearer focus and highlighted some of the distinctive elements of care ethics.

While care ethics does not deny the importance of individual rights and universal principles and ethical reasoning, it also emphasizes the ethical significance of maintaining relationships, nurturing those who are less able to care for themselves, preserving and strengthening ties of affection and friendship, and paying close attention to the details and to the specific people affected in a situation, rather than focusing on how the case fits under abstract rules and universal principles.

While there are significant dangers in supposing that there is a distinctive "ethics for women" or peculiarly "feminine virtues," there is also much that is lost when an orientation toward care is subordinated or ignored.

Although we can label individuals “caring” and “trusting,” this is not how these terms are understood in care ethics. In care ethics, caring depends upon the mutuality of relationships and so is essentially relational. Similarly, the trust that caring depends upon is essentially relational. Because of their relational nature, neither trust nor caring understood in the care ethics sense can arise as individual virtues. Both involve moral qualities that can be achieved only within relationships. Care ethics cannot be derived from virtue ethics.
Care ethics is undoubtedly right to criticize our society as too uncaring. In their vision for changing our institutions and practices, however, many care theorists also hope to change the way we conceive of ourselves as masculine and feminine. Their hope is that as we