Thinker · TH-0418
Virginia Held
Virginia Held was an American philosopher who taught at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A leading…
1929 – 2026 · New York (Hunter College; CUNY Graduate Center)
Traditions: Analytic
Schools: Care ethics
Virginia Held was an American philosopher who taught at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A leading theorist of feminist ethics, she argued that the ethics of care is a full moral theory in its own right, not a supplement to justice-based or utilitarian approaches. Taking relationships of care, such as those between parent and child, as morally central, she extended the view to society, politics and global affairs, and examined how care and justice should be related.
Key ideas
- Care is a practice and a value, and the ethics of care is a distinct moral theory.
- Persons are relational and interdependent, not the independent individuals of liberal theory.
- Care provides the wider framework within which justice and rights have their place.
- Feminist moral theory must take women's experience, including mothering, seriously.
Major works
- Rights and Goods (1984)
- Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (1993)
- The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006)
In the conversation
- Discussion When the woman in labour is your cousin: professional fairness and the ethics of care
- Debate Care ethics has no convincing account of what we owe to strangers far away