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Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics

Profile image of Raja HalwaniRaja Halwani

2003, Hypatia

https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1527-2001.2003.TB00826.X
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Abstract

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.

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References (40)

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  2. Of course, merely saying that virtuous people are just says nothing about what laws and institutions a society ought to have; this is a claim different from the one I advocate. Also my claim that justice to strangers is met under VE might seem cavalier, since Aristotle's remarks were about justice to members of one's polis (Annas 1993, 312-16). However, I believe, but cannot argue for it here, that there is nothing in Aristotle's account that would prevent extending Aristotle's remarks about justice to strangers.
  3. The type of impartiality under discussion here is what is sometimes called "level 1" impartiality, which is at the level of day-to-day decisions regarding our actions. This is opposed to level 2 impartiality, which is a higher-order level concerned with which rules and principles to be adopted; see Baron 1991.
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  7. I am not claiming that in these cases the agent must invoke a moral principle before acting; to claim this is to go against CE's emphasis on acting directly. Indeed, in the first three cases at least, the agent need not even deliberate about what to do, need not have one thought too many, in the words of Bernard Williams (1981, 18). 28. 1 borrow this case from McFall 1987.
  8. One referee of this journal objected to the use of such highly fictitious examples on the grounds that they are not very common in life, and that many such situations can actually be resolved. I agree that in many actual cases that seem to be irresolvable dilemmas, they are not. However, I do not agree that there are no irresolvable dilemmas in our actual lives. Moreover, the point in giving such examples is not to say that they are common, but to highlight a conceptual issue, an issue which is important given that people do face irresolvable dilemmas.
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