Abstract

One of the issues insufficiently discussed in the contemporary virtues ethics is whether it is pertinent and possible to draw up a systematic board of virtues, and, in this context, to analyze what new skills or character traits can be included on it. Having as context the relationships between virtue ethics and the ethics of care, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the theoretical conditions that allow conceiving and defining care as a virtue. The move from natural caring to ethical caring, especially by extending its scope and range to strangers and distant people, opens and invests a particular field of ethical “demands of the world”, and a specific form of moral “excellence”, that is, a virtue. Care as a disposition and a practice presents a triple cognitive, affective and volitional dimension conducive to morally relevant actions. This same functional structure is recognized in the most common definitions of virtue. Intrinsically empathetic and altruistic, aiming, in the first instance, at the well-being of the other, we may call it a “relational virtue” that challenges the constitution of the moral agent as a “relational self”.