Ethics of Care and Emotions

Advancing Global Bioethics, 2024

This book offers a set of reflections on the ethics of care in full articulation with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Several themes are analyzed, such as medical care, self-care, justice, economics, politics, and technology. All of them, however, are permeated and united by a common philosophical purpose, namely: an ethics of care not only allows the conception of behavioral relationships and human values but also puts into play the theoretical foundations of ethics itself. It is in this sense that the ethics of care proposed in this volume can be considered metaethics. Since they present multidisciplinary contents and concepts, the chapters of this volume are relevant theoretical tools for researchers, professors, and students, as well as specialized caregivers, who want to deepen the new theoretical and practical implications of care in contemporary society.

Hypatia, 2003

The paper argues that care ethics should be subsumed under virtue ethics by construing care as an important virtue. Doing so allows us to achieve two desirable goals. First, we preserve what is important about care ethics (for example, its insistence on particularity, partiality, emotional engagement, and the importance of care to our moral lives). Second, we avoid two important objections to care ethics, namely, that it neglects justice, and that it contains no mechanism by which care can be regulated so as not to be become morally corrupt.

Nursing Ethics, 2011

Ethics of care is a normative theory of ethics based on particular relationships between people, rather than universal principles. It is put forward as a rival theory to those based on universal principles, including utilitarianism and Kantianism. Ethics of care proponents argue that we have duties of care toward others, and that these duties of care are more crucial when the people for whom we care are closer to us (especially family members), or when we have taken responsibility for them (e.g. patients or children in daycare). Caring relations are recognised, including caring-for and cared-for relations between moral agents. The theory as a whole allows for partiality in our actions in cases when they involve people for whom we care. Ethics of care proponents criticise normative ethical theories - and the field of ethics in general - on how much they may overlook our duties of care and inclinations to care. All proponents of ethics of care share these foundational claims. Claims about justice, justification for actions and feminist ethics differ among the theory’s proponents. This arguably makes two versions of the theory distinguishable: the Gilligan/Noddings version and the Slote/Held version. This thesis outlines the ways that ethics of care can be useful in practice and the ways that it should be further developed.

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2018

Care Ethics needs to make clear and defensible normative claims. Michael Slote’s work shows how accounts taking care as a sentimental motive can do the needful. Such motive accounts of care can also provide a way to capture the important distinction between care and justice approaches to morality. However, it is important for Care Ethics to establish harmony between caring motives and acing rightly. Slote’s account does so at the cost of an unintuitive account of obligation. We propose another way to capture this harmony.

2022

This essay describes the ethics of care, a philosophical theory originally born out of psychological studies on development. For much of psychological history, women were seen to be ‘less developed’ on standardized tests of morality. In response, Carol Gilligan produced a study that examined how women’s conceptions of moral responsibility differ from men, especially in terms of care, connection, and interdependence. This relationality has been developed into a complex ethical theory which this paper opposes against consequentialism and Kantian ethics; two ethical theories that instead favour impersonality. Further, it is argued that not only is unequal interdependence central to human experience; it is also a natural human drive to care for ourselves and the people closest to us. Ethical theories that oppose this fail to serve their purpose in providing a framework that is possible for humans to follow and must make concessions or sub- justifications to avoid complete alienation in ...

Texto Aberto, 2019

Human beings, and their lives, are impossible to be understood without otherness. It is only in the contextual, particular and historic interactions that we can try to comprehend society. Changing our point of view to understand the world is not only desirable due to its theoretical accuracy, but it is also urgent for its moral, ethical, and political implications. Nonetheless, we have a philosophy built on an individual anthropology, rooted on independence and autonomy as inner conditions, which leads to individualistic epistemologies and ethics, and, therefore, to the naturalization of privileges and inequalities shown; for example, in our visions of health, sickness, attention, or inattentiveness´ dynamics. In this paper we will explore come consequences of accepting the ontological foundation of the ethics of care for biomedical ethics, focalized on examples from the Mexican research laboratory: Actores Sociales de la Flora Medicinal en México. Texto Aberto: https://www.uc.pt/en/fluc/ief/publications/texto_aberto/

Bioethics, 2003

In recent years philosophers and bioethicists have given considerable attention to the concept of care. Thus we have seen important work on questions such as: whether there is a uniquely female approach to ethics, whether ethics should be partial or impartial, and whether care must be supplemented by justice. Despite this valuable and extensive work, however, some important distinctions have gone largely undiscussed. This paper tries to fill a gap left in our understanding of the concept of care itself by distinguishing between compassion and two kinds of pity. While all three are kinds of caring, we should not give them similar moral evaluations. Consequently, the distinction between compassion and different kinds of pity gives us an important insight into the question of whether we can consider care a virtue for health care professionals.

International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, 2009

With a focus on caring ethics, the aim of this study was to see if and how experienced nurses in care for the elderly described caring and whether they included any theoretical basis to their caring acts. Questions that guided the research were: Does ethical caring theory have any relevance in nurses' clinical work? How do experienced nurses describe care in general, their intentions and motives in particular? In order to enter into the meanings of caring, a reflective lifeworld research approach based on phenomenology was utilized. Eleven experienced nurses were interviewed and the resulting transcripts were analysed for meaning. The findings revealed caring as a seamless integration of different levels, or embodied moments, of knowledge. In caring that is understood as a practical, aesthetical and ethical field of force, there is room for ''being'', ''becoming'' and ''doing''. Theory and practice can and must intertwine to enable the caring goal of health as well-being. A conclusion that may be drawn from this study is that there is a potential for connecting ethical caring concepts and theories into practical everyday care. Nurses' basic intentions for a care-giving profession, as well as hidden/forgotten theory and concepts, are viewed in this study as a possibility of turning from a pre-reflective state to a more conscious level. This study gives new nuances to the understanding that existence affects caring and caring affects existence, and contributes to the more general claim that it now is high time for ethical caring science theory to be visible and make a change in care. Highlighting the experience of existential caring intentionality, and relating the experience to theoretical caring substance, this study may contribute to the development of a more consciously ethical and individualized caring culture.

2008