Virtue and lifeworlds
• Aristotle’s warrior prince
– courage, generosity,
magnificence, high mindedness,
gentleness, friendliness,
truthfulness, wittiness, wisdom
• Christian monk
– faith, hope, charity, chastity,
piety, humility, obedience
• Confucian family subject
– humanity, propriety, filial piety,
broadmindedness, dignity
The world of the market
• The competitive individualist
– Disciplined, hard working,
entrepreneurial, organized, driven
to succeed
The Caring Community
• Humans are essentially social
creatures.
• Doing the right thing means
creating and sustaining caring
communities.
• Care is a basic human capacity
to recognize and respond to the
needs of others.
• Care begins at home and
extends to distant others.
Empathy and Care
• Empathy is basic human
capacity
• Must be developed through
– past care
– caring interactions with others
• Commitment to be a caring
person
Care as Virtue
• Care as foundational virtue
– Disposition to be good friend, family
member and citizen of caring
community
• Care is a disposition to respond to
others by
– Not inflicting harm
– Alleviating suffering
– Cultivating caring communities
• Requires the cultivation of empathy
and its extension to distant others
Central features of care
• Moral attention
– attention to the facts
• Sympathetic understanding
– awareness of what the other would
want you to do, and of what would be
best for the other.
• Relationship awareness
– awareness of existing relationships, of
need to create and sustain community
• Accommodation and harmony
– Balancing interests and preserving
harmony in so far as you can.
Failures of Empathy
• Deliberate blunting of feeling of
empathy: e.g. blaming the
victim
• Here and now bias
• Empathic over-arousal
Failure to Develop
Empathy
• “can be destroyed by powerassertive childrearing,
diminished by cultural valuing
of competition over helping
others, and overwhelmed by
egoistic motives…
nonnurturant, excessively
power-assertive life experiences
may well produce individuals
who cannot empathize.” (M.
Hoffman, Empathy and Moral
Development 281-2)
Responding to Failures of
Empathy
• In oneself:
– Call up feeling of empathy
• e.g. by imagination
• In Society and family
– Share care work
– Sensitive childrearing
– Emphasize helping over
competition
• Limit “power-assertive life
experiences”
“Care and Justice
voices”: Moral
reasoning
• Care: moral development as
emotional maturity.
• Justice: moral development as
cognitive.
• Care: moral reasoning is
contextual.
• Justice: moral reasoning is
finding the right principles to
apply to each case.
“Care voice”: persons
• The caring community
• Embedded persons
• Particular social context
• Some relationships are given.
• Connected selves
• Self-understanding in terms of
relations with others.
“Justice voice”: persons
• The world of the market
• Autonomous individuals
– Capable of self-definition in all
social contexts.
– Relationships are contractual.
• Separate/Objective Self
– Self-understanding in terms of
individual characteristics and
desires.
Care and other Moral
Perspectives
• Different perspectives reveal
different aspects.
• Care as practice and care as
moral perspective
What to do?
• Direct your moral attention to
others.
• Be open to sympathetic
understanding.
• Be aware of the need to sustain
and preserve networks of care.
• Try to preserve harmony.
• Short cut: What would my ideal
caring self do?
Feminism and Care
• Taking the experiences of
women and girls seriously.
• Autonomy and its limits
• Who is doing “care” work?
– In the household
• Domestic work
• Emotional work
– In the larger society
• Who loses when care work is
limited in these ways?