Abstract

The care ethics developed mostly by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings posits two distinct ethical orientations---care and justice. Care ethics view the self as in relation and moral conflict as conflicts in moral responsibilities grounded in particular relationships. A care orientation focuses on emotional engagement in the personal and particular. This is contrasted with the justice orientation in which selves are seen as autonomous rights-bearing individuals, moral conflicts as conflicts of rights, and moral reasoning as impersonal application of abstract principles and rules. ;The care-justice debate has generated extensive literatures in sociology, psychology, child development, education, and ethics. Despite extensive feminist and non-feminist criticisms of care ethics, the theory continues to be commonly cited in bioethics and nursing ethics. While caring sentiments are laudable, care ethics qua ethical theory makes substantive claims beyond just advocating for caring sentiments. These theoretical claims are explicated and challenged to reject care ethics on both theoretical and practical grounds. ;Care ethics' central claim that all moral responsibilities arise from, are grounded in, particular relationships is refuted: A good many of our morally relevant interactions are with proximal strangers in relations insufficient to ground those persons' moral status or our moral responsibilities toward them. Care ethics' premise that the ethics of personal relationships can be extended to all moral interactions is shown to be both incoherent and impractical. The maternal-child relation as a model for all moral relations is specifically rejected as infantalizing, oppressive, from the disabilities rights perspectives. Care ethics is also shown to be as racialized as the Enlightenment tradition it challenges. Against care ethics' excessive particularism, relationalism, and sentimentalism, I argue for a more political moral psychology that confronts the problems of parochialism and prejudice so frequently evident in our failures to care, and which allows for the motivation of resisting evils such as those.