School
Care ethics
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Justice should start from dependency, not from independent adults making a deal
Every baby born on our ward is completely dependent, and so is the mother for a few hours, and so, at the end of life, most of us will be again. Reading Eva Kittay's Love's Labor this year, I felt someone had…
Started by Farhana Akter7 replies -
Frankfurt is right that we don’t love our children for their qualities, and all love works that way
Raising two children has given me a lot of time with the evidence. Harry Frankfurt argues in The Reasons of Love that love is not a response to the beloved's value. It is a form of caring, and caring is what makes…
Started by Thamarai Raman6 replies -
Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
The crane logs were falsified and reporting them might shut the terminal: what each theory told me
Last spring, as union delegate, I found out that maintenance records for one of the older gantry cranes at our terminal had been filled in for inspections that never happened. The crane was probably fine. The risk was small but real: a…
Started by Hugo Marchetti6 replies -
One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
Three weeks ago a mother I was sitting with delivered a baby who was clearly unwell. The doctor had been called and was twenty minutes away. The mother, exhausted, held my hand and asked: “Is my baby all right?” I did not…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Care ethics has no convincing account of what we owe to strangers far away
Working alongside GPs persuaded me that care is morally basic in the consulting room. What I'm not persuaded of is that it can be a whole ethics. The thesis: if moral obligation is grounded in particular relationships and the responsiveness they call…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Reading group: Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor and the dependency critique of Rawls
Eva Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) is one of the books that turned care ethics from a set of intuitions into a challenge to political philosophy. I have dipped into parts of it for years, but I've…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, ubuntu and relational autonomy: one discovery made three times, or three ideas?
I've been reading Watsuji Tetsurō's Ethics (Rinrigaku) slowly, with a friend from the temple who reads more Japanese philosophy than I do. Watsuji's starting point is that the Japanese word for a human being, ningen, is written with characters meaning "person" and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Who is left out when morality is a bargain?
I came to this question with a personal stake. I've used a wheelchair since I was fourteen. The Hobbesian strand of contract theory says morality is what rational, self-interested people would agree to for mutual advantage. David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986)…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies -
What did Bernard Williams mean by ‘one thought too many’?
A book on care ethics I borrowed keeps quoting Bernard Williams's phrase "one thought too many", and I think I understand it but I want to be sure. As I understand the case: a man can save only one of two drowning…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
When the woman in labour is your cousin: professional fairness and the ethics of care
Last month my cousin came in to our district hospital to deliver her second child. It was a busy night: four other women in labour, one of them in difficulty, and only two of us on the ward. Everyone expected things of…
Started by Farhana Akter4 replies -
Filial duty, but whose? In most families I know, the daughter-in-law pays it
In my family, and in almost every family I know, when parents grow old the care is done by a woman who is not their daughter. The son has the duty; the son's wife does the work. Nobody says this out loud.…
Started by Thamarai Raman2 replies -
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…
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Nel Noddings
Nel Noddings was an American philosopher of education who taught mathematics in schools before becoming a professor at Stanford University. Her book Caring set…
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Eva Kittay
Eva Feder Kittay is an American philosopher, long based at Stony Brook University, who works on feminist theory, care ethics and the philosophy of…
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Carol Gilligan
Carol Gilligan is an American psychologist who taught at Harvard and later at New York University. In a Different Voice challenged Lawrence Kohlberg's stage…