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Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global / Virginia Held

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Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global / Virginia Held The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global Virginia Held OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS THE ETHICS OF CARE This page intentionally left blank THE ETHICS OF CARE Personal, Political, and Global Virginia Held 1 2006 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright Ó 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Held, Virginia. The ethics of care: personal, political, and global / Virginia Held. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-518099-2 ISBN 0-19-518099-2 1. Caring. 2. Feminist ethics. I. Title. BJ1475.H45 2005 177'.7—dc22 2005040551 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For my grandchildren Alexander, Owen, Madeleine, Kailey, and Nicolas This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Since the publication of my book Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics in 1993, I became persuaded that the ethics of care I began to examine there merited further development. I wrote a series of papers on various aspects of care, presenting them at conferences and colloquia, dis- cussing them, and publishing most of them. This book is based on many of those papers, though all have been rewritten, and much material is new. I am very grateful to the many people who have given me their thoughts, reactions, criticisms, agreements, disagreements, and suggestions on these papers and on the arguments and observations in this book. I especially want to thank for their valuable comments Elizabeth Anderson, Barbara Andrew, Cheshire Calhoun, Richmond Campbell, Claudia Card, David Copp, Fel- mon Davis, Carol Gould, Kent Greenawalt, Mark Halfon, David Johnston, Alison Jaggar, Eva Kittay, Heidi Malm, Diana Meyers, Jennifer Nedelsky, Hilde Nelson, Martha Nussbaum, Rosamond Rhodes, Sara Ruddick, Susan Sherwin, Robert L. Simon, James P. Sterba, Nadia Urbinati, Jeremy Wal- dron, Iris Marion Young, and the anonymous reviewers of parts or all of the book. For the opportunities they offered to present many of the ideas considered here and have them discussed, I thank the American Philosophical Associa- tion (Central and Pacific Divisions), the American Society for Value Inquiry, the City University of New York Graduate School, Columbia University, Dalhousie University, two IVR (Internationale Vereinigung Fu¨r Rechts-Und Sozialphilosophie) World Congresses, Kutztown University, the New Jersey Regional Philosophy Association, the State University of New York at Brock- port, Suffolk Community College, Tufts University, Union College, the University of Delaware, the University of Toronto Law School, the Uni- versity of Turku (Finland), and Vanderbilt University. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the publishers for permissions to use revised versions or portions of the following papers they published. An earlier version of chapter 1 appears as ‘‘The Ethics of Care,’’ in the Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, edited by David Copp (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as ‘‘Taking Care: Care as Practice and Value,’’ in Setting the Moral Compass, edited by Cheshire Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Chapter 4 includes material from ‘‘Justice and Utility: Who Cares?’’ in Philosophic Exchange 26 (1995–96); ‘‘The Meshing of Care and Justice,’’ Hypatia (spring 1995); and ‘‘The Contribution of Feminist Philos- ophy,’’ Associations (1998). An earlier version of chapter 5, ‘‘Liberalism and the Ethics of Care,’’ appeared in On Feminist Ethics and Politics, edited by Claudia Card (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). An earlier version of chapter 6, ‘‘Caring Relations and Principles of Justice,’’ appeared in Contro- versies in Feminism, edited by James P. Sterba (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). A much shorter version of chapter 7, ‘‘Care and the Ex- tension of Markets,’’ was published in Hypatia 17(2) (spring 2002). Chapter 8 is based in part on ‘‘Rights and the Presumption of Care,’’ in Rights and Reason; Essays in Honor of Carl Wellman, edited by Marilyn Friedman et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media). Chapter 9 includes material from ‘‘Feminist Morality and Rights,’’ in Rechtstheorie, Beiheft 19; ‘‘Rights,’’ in A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998); and ‘‘Feminism and Political Theory,’’ in Blackwell Guide to Social and Political Philosophy, edited by Robert L. Simon (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002). Much shorter and earlier versions of chapter 10, ‘‘Care and Justice in the Global Context,’’ appeared in Associations (2003) and Ratio Juris 17(2) (June 2004): 141–55. I am enormously grateful to the City University of New York for the many years of steady employment, periodic sabbaticals, wonderful students, and committed colleagues that have made it possible for me to work as a phi- losopher aiming to affect the wider world and not just how philosophers think. My graduate teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center and under- graduate teaching at Hunter College have offered countless insights and ar- guments reflected in this book. For steady companionship and a lighter touch, I thank my partner of many years, Robert L. Thompson, and my children, Julia and Philip, and their families. The balance they provide has been indispensable. Contents Introduction 3 Part I Care and Moral Theory 1. The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory 9 2. Care as Practice and Value 29 3. The Caring Person 44 4. Justice, Utility, and Care 58 5. Liberalism and the Ethics of Care 76 6. Caring Relations and Principles of Justice 90 Part II Care and Society 7. Care and the Extension of Markets 107 8. Civil Society, Rights, and the Presumption of Care 125 9. Power, Care, and the Reach of Law 138 10. Care and Justice in the Global Context 154 Notes 169 Bibliography 191 Index 203 This page intentionally left blank THE ETHICS OF CARE This page intentionally left blank Introduction In the past few decades, the ethics of care has developed as a promising alternative to the dominant moral approaches that have been invoked during the previous two centuries. It has given rise to an extensive body of literature and has affected many moral inquiries in many areas. It is changing the ways moral problems are often interpreted and changing what many think the recommended approaches to moral issues ought to be. With interest in normative perspectives expanding everywhere—from the outlines of egalitarian families and workplaces, to the moral responsibilities of parents and citizens, to the ethical evaluations of governmental and foreign policies—the ethics of care offers hope for rethinking in more fruitful ways how we ought to guide our lives. It has the potential of being based on the truly universal experience of care. Every human being has been cared for as a child or would not be alive. Understanding the values involved in care, and how its standards reject vio- lence and domination, are possible with the ethics of care. It need not invoke religious beliefs that carry divisive baggage. It does not rely on dubious claims about universal norms of reason to which we must give priority in all questions of morality. Instead, it develops, on the basis of ex- perience, reflection on it and discourse concerning it, an understanding of the most basic and most comprehensive values. In part I of this book, I develop the ethics of care as a moral theory or approach to moral issues. In part II I explore the implications of the ethics of care for political, social, and global questions, considering also how such at- tempts to use the theory should allow in turn for improvements in it. In chapter 1 I make the case that the ethics of care is a distinct moral theory or approach to moral theorizing, not a concern that can be added on to or included within other more established approaches, such as those of Kantian 3 4 THE ETHICS OF CARE moral theory, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics. The latter is the more contro- versial claim, since there are similarities between the ethics of care and virtue ethics. But in its focus on relationships rather than on the dispositions of individuals, the ethics of care is, I argue, distinct. In chapter 2, I explore what care ‘‘is,’’ or what we mean or should mean by the term ‘care.’ I conclude that it is both a practice, or cluster of practices, and a value, or cluster of values. It takes place in existing caring practices to some extent, although existing practices are usually embedded in unsatisfactory contexts of domination. And it provides standards by which to evaluate these practices and to recommend better ones. Since caring practices and values do require caring persons, I explore in chapter 3 what the characteristics of a caring person should be. I conclude that a caring person not only has the appropriate motivations in responding to others or in providing care but also participates adeptly in effective practices of care. In developing the ethics of care, contrasts have been drawn between care and justice.
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