Care ethics

1.

Something you may have noticed about using the utilitarian and Kantian moral principles is that they make our reasoning impartial and impersonal. That is, they don’t seem to make room for giving extra weight to our own interests or the interests of those close to us (this is what leads to impartiality). And they don’t require or suggest forming relational ties to those impacted by our actions (this is what leads to impersonality).

This may strike you as a bit odd or alienating. Shouldn’t our ethical reasoning lead us to value close relationships and to make room for preserving and sustaining such relationships? And shouldn’t these relational ties then form the basis of our ethical reasoning? These are the starting points for the “care ethics” tradition, which offers us a third principled approach to ethical reasoning that we should consider seriously.

2.

The care ethics tradition starts with the experience of caring for, and being cared for, by someone. This is a fundamental kind of relationship, insofar as we typically start and end our lives being cared for by others, and it underlies the proper structure of a wide range of relationships of central importance to our lives, including friendships, romantic relationships, and relationships with teammates, mentors, and neighbors (Held 2006). Of course, what exactly care demands of us will vary across these different kinds of relationships. But the care ethics traditions detect a basic commonality in all of them—the attitude of care, understood as an attitude of looking out for someone’s welfare for their own sake.

How does this provide guidance for our ethical reasoning? Note that we may find it difficult to genuinely care about many persons we encounter, particularly if their lived experiences sharply diverge from our own. We may find their outlook and pursuits strange or even offensive. What room is there, in this case, for us to be guided by care for them?

Care ethics recognizes that maintaining a full-fledged attitude of care for all those we encounter, or who are impacted by our decisions (who may number in the thousands if, e.g., we work in a large industry), is not feasible. What it recommends is not trying to gin up an attitude of care toward everybody, but rather to engage in decision-making from the perspective of care. We imagine what someone who did care for everyone impacted by our decision would prioritize and think about, and how they would behave. This gives us:

What this requires is a robust understanding of what it’s like to experience and be guided by an attitude of care and how this involves balancing the welfare of those impacted by your decisions. Absent this understanding, it is very difficult to apply the care ethics principle. For it is difficult to provide finer-grained rules stipulating what exactly it is to think and reason as a care-minded person in different kinds of situations, such as professional, hierarchical relationships between managers and employees (Slote 2001). (This is a point to which we will return in the next section on virtue ethics.) You already need the ability to think and reason as a care-minded person would in order to apply the care ethics principle.

This does not mean we cannot articulate the common kinds of reasons or priorities that are manifest in care-guided decision-making. We know that the attitude of care is generally non-instrumentally concerned with others’ welfare, or well-being. Their welfare bears weight independently of how well it serves one’s goals. The attitude of care does not allow for harming people only for the sake of marginal gains to oneself. It is a good question, though, whether the attitude of care more strongly weights preventing harm than pursuing comparable gains in welfare. That is, suppose that we can quantify harms and benefits, and you face a situation where causing someone a harm of magnitude 10 would bring a benefit of an even greater magnitude, 11, to oneself. Does the attitude of care more strongly weight the fact of harm, so that it would require you to forego the greater gains in welfare to prevent the harm? Probably to some extent, although it is a good question how far it does so.

One way to work through this is to imagine a situation where, as a manager, you are faced with the opportunity to do what is good for you professionally but would set back the prospects of one of your employees. Perhaps you worked with the employee on a project, and the higher-ups are very happy with it, but they are only giving you credit for it. Staying silent and just receiving the credit would be good for you, but it would be harmful to your employee, who still needs to establish themselves and their reputation in the company. Speaking up and shining the spotlight on your employee will mean foregoing some or much of the praise you would have received, but would protect your employee from the harm of having their contributions ignored.

Notice also that the attitude of care extends to non-human animals and, perhaps, the segments of the natural world just as well as it does to fellow human beings. They, too, are beings with welfare (or well-being), and we can and should care about them for their own sakes. This raises another tricky question for care ethics: How does care ethics justify prioritizing human interests, as we tend to think we are justified in doing, over non-human interests? Or does care ethics point to a revisionary, radical conclusion that human interests should be balanced equally alongside non-human interests?

References

Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford university press.

Slote, M. (2001). Morals from motives. Oxford University Press.