Abstract
Care Ethics needs to make clear and defensible normative claims. Michael Slote’s work shows how accounts taking care as a sentimental motive can do the needful. Such motive accounts of care can also provide a way to capture the important distinction between care and justice approaches to morality. However, it is important for Care Ethics to establish harmony between caring motives and acting rightly. Slote’s account does so at the cost of an unintuitive account of obligation. We propose another way to capture this harmony.
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Notes
Deontic evaluation concerns duties and obligations and uses terms like “right”, “wrong”, “morally (im)permissible/obligatory”, etc. It stands in contrast to aretaic evaluation of actions by which we mean evaluation in terms of “good”, “bad”, “praiseworthy”, “admirable”, “worthy”, etc. The terminology is borrowed from Slote (2001, p. 4).
We do not mean to suggest that being embedded in common practice is necessary for the legitimacy of a normative ethical enterprise, but only that it is sufficient for it.
While this may yield a virtue ethics of a kind, this is distinct from how certain care ethicists have thought of CE and virtue ethics. For example, Halwani (2003) has argued that we should think of caring as a virtue in the Aristotelian sense, i.e. as one of the many virtues that go into constituting a flourishing life. However, in Halwani’s view, caring is just one of the many virtues, thus only a relatively small aspect of being moral and acting morally. This is quite contrary to establishing an alternative approach to morality.
Thus, even though our push has been that in order to be normative ethical a theory does not need to provide a way for a deontic evaluation of actions, a claim about aretaic evaluation of actions readily follows.
The idea is that in CE it is relationships which must be seen as having independent and underived moral worth.
She says “so much depends on the subjective experience of those involved in ethical encounters, conditions are rarely ‘sufficiently similar’ for me to declare you must do what I must do”. (Noddings 1984, p. 5).
To some care ethicists this may not be acceptable. But, we cannot see what would be the point of opposing principles in this capacity. As we have seen the emphasis on context sensitivity, concreteness and the role of the relationships one finds oneself enmeshed in, all keep their due place in the description of what governs the actions of the moral agent. See, (Slote 1999) and (Bubeck 1995, Ch 5) for detailed discussions on why principles playing some role may not be problematic for CE. Also see (Slote 2001, Ch 1) for a discussion of principles in virtue ethics.
We should note that we understand moral worth as an aretaic notion. The claim here is that caring motives are the basis of an aretaic evaluation of actions, relationships, etc. Later, we will argue in brief that the deontic evaluation of actions on the basis of caring motives is problematic.
We owe gratitude to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this point to our attention.
We are not suggesting that Noddings had precisely (the given formulations of) these issues in mind in making the distinction. In fact, it is hard to see whether and how Noddings’ distinction could address the second issue. Nonetheless, we think that each of these issues demands some such distinction.
A rider is in order here. We must understand this as subject to epistemic limitations. You ought not to feed babies phenyl solution. But, a person caringly trying to feed a baby under epistemically compromised conditions may be led to do just that. However, this should not be considered an issue since to think about what one’s obligation is and acting then in accordance with it is similarly subject to epistemic limitations with respect to acting rightly.
To our knowledge, when it comes to caring motives only Slote has presented such an account. In any case, the discussion of Slote’s account should generalize to any account of this kind.
Hursthouse (1991) offers such an account of right actions in terms of what a virtuous agent would characteristically do.
Note that this is not to say that needs are inherently good (or bad), only that the meeting of needs of our fellow beings is inherently good.
Slote (ibid, p. 64) differentiates between “intimate caring” and “humanitarian caring”. The distinction is the similar to Noddings’ (1984, p. 18) distinction between “caring for” and “caring about”. Intimate caring is the caring for specific individuals, a “face to face” caring, that you have for your close loved ones or can have for people that come in close contact with you. Humanitarian caring is the caring one may feel for animals in general, or the environment, or with humans when they are not positioned to us as specific individuals. It is in the humanitarian sense that one cares about issues and causes. Slote has pointed out that it is personal caring that does not aggregate. That is, intimate caring is not simply a matter of stacking up all the needs of all the others in question and then meeting the most needs possible. Our notion of care is one of personal caring.
An anonymous reviewer, very pertinently, asks what makes needs worthy of being addressed. Would, for example, extravagant needs of a greedy person have to be met as well? Is care itself good if it is directed towards needs that are bad? For us the answer to that is that while the meeting of needs of our fellow beings is indeed inherently good, the needs that are to be met are not inherently good or bad, though they may very well be more or less fundamental. Here any understanding of what contributes the fundamentality of needs may be appealed to. The key factor is the balancing required to meet the needs of the salient others given the resources available. A greedy person’s extravagant needs are extravagant precisely because given the resources they can only be met by ignoring those of others. If such needs are met out of motives that involve care, then such motives are also bound to involve the lack of care for those whose needs have been ignored. Care in being directed towards meeting the needs of the other is always inherently good, but that does not mean that the motives it constitutes are overall good or ethical. They would not be if they also involve substantial lack of care or opposing sentiments like malice. Thus motives to meet greedy needs cannot be overall ethical. Of course, much more discussion is warranted, but this would not be the place for it.
We owe much gratitude to two anonymous reviewers whose comments have helped us improve the paper greatly.
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Shukla, A., Bora, M. On Motive Accounts of Care. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 35, 175–192 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-017-0108-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-017-0108-8