The ambiguity of care ethics
Published:
I recently took a deeper dive into care ethics, and was slightly surprised by how ambiguous it is.
In general, a theory aims to tackle a particular research question and offers an answer that sets it apart from other theories in its field. There are also specific criteria to evaluate it (that can differ based on the research area). In ethics, for example, utilitarianism asks “What should I do?” and gives a straightforward reply: you should act to maximize global well-being in the world. This response is distinct from other views, and we have various methods, like thought experiments and conceptual analysis, to evaluate it.
Some theories, on initial inspection, seem well-defined but turn out to be more nebulous on closer examination. I think this is true for care ethics. It is often portrayed as a distinctive theory, competing with other theories such as utilitarianism,1 but there are actually several questions care ethicists are interested in answering: how do moral judgments develop in humans (and are there gender differences)? what ethical frameworks do some groups and individuals endorse? does their ethical deliberation reliably lead to good decisions? what kind of considerations should we factor in our ethical and political deliberation? what motivates people to act ethically? what should we do? what kind of person should we be? what topic of research should ethicists prioritize?
One common thread to all their writings is obviously the notion of care, which is generally seen as a good thing, but when we try to go further we end up with a disparate set of claims.2 Overall I think it’s a bit misleading to call it a theory.3 To be clear, I’m not saying that we can’t find well-defined theories within care ethics, but rather that care ethics itself is more of a nebulous category than a theory.
Also, the notion of care itself is not always clear, to put it mildly.4 For example, one popular definition of care is this one:
On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (Tronto & Fischer, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Care”, p. 40, in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives eds. Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson (1991)).
Defined in such a broad way, the notion of care doesn’t look like a good starting point for fruitful theorizing.5 Now, perhaps there are some temporal/historical patterns at play. It seems that it took quite some time for utilitarianism, as an ethical theory, to distill into the sentence before, so maybe care ethics will evolve similarly. But there are strong counteropposing forces as well: authors have incentives to modify their favorite theory to respond to critics and broaden its scope to apply it to new areas, which can further dilute its distinctive features through time.
In fact, maybe it’s this lack of clarity that partly explains their popularity. Care ethics has garnered significant attention outside philosophy, in various social sciences and among practitioners, so it seems that its foundational notion – care – resonates with many people. Its ambiguity may turn out to be a strength as it makes it more accessible (no need to get a PhD in philosophy to understand) and versatile. However, this is not without risk: drawing on it might make you feel like you’re on solid ground, but this is a false sense of security if its content is actually pretty vague.
For example, Held, in The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006), seems to insist on considering the ethics of care as a moral theory. ↩
According to Held (2006), the ethics of care (1) recognizes “the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility” as well as (2) the importance of emotions “in the epistemological process of trying to understand what morality would recommend” (p. 10), (3) rejects the idea that “the more abstract the reasoning about a moral problem the better because the more likely to avoid bias and arbitrariness” (p. 11), (4) “reconceptualizes traditional notions about the public and the private” (p. 12), and (5) endorses “a conception of persons as relational, rather than as the self-sufficient independent individuals of the dominant moral theories” (p. 13). Another care ethicist, Collins (2017), singles out the following ideas: “that responsibilities derive from relationships between particular people, rather than from abstract rules and principles; that decision-making should be sympathy-based rather than duty- or principle-based; that personal relationships have a value that is often overlooked by other theories; that at least some responsibilities aim at fulfilling the 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 ongoing patterns of actions and attitudes. Most importantly, care ethicists believe morality demands ongoing actions and attitudes of care”. ↩
Compare with the capability approach, which fully deserves its label. ↩
See chapter 5 of The Core of Care Ethics (2015) by Collins, for a review of different definitions. ↩
Maybe it shouldn’t be taken to be a definition in the strict sense of the term. In this case it illustrates a common ambiguity in what a definition is supposed to do: give some necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a term, just some necessary conditions, or a controversial, theory-laden take on the notion. ↩