Ethics of Care: Feminist Philosophy

The Voice That Was Not Heard

In 1982, psychologist Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice — a book that changed the landscape of moral philosophy by asking a simple question: What if the dominant theory of moral development is based on a biased sample?

Lawrence Kohlberg’s highly influential theory of moral development (1958, 1981) described a six-stage progression from self-interest to universal justice — from “I follow rules to avoid punishment” to “I follow universal ethical principles regardless of law or convention.” The highest stage was abstract justice: the ability to reason from universal principles about rights, fairness, and the social contract.

There was a problem: in Kohlberg’s research, women consistently scored lower than men. They appeared to be “less morally developed” — stuck at lower stages, unable to reach the heights of abstract justice reasoning.

Gilligan asked: What if women are not less morally developed? What if they are reasoning from a different moral framework — one that Kohlberg’s scale, designed around male responses, cannot measure?

When Gilligan listened to women describe moral dilemmas, she heard not deficiency but difference. Women tended to reason not from abstract principles of justice and rights but from concrete relationships of care and responsibility. Their moral question was not “What is the just rule?” but “What will maintain the relationships and minimize the harm?” Their morality was not less developed. It was differently organized — around care rather than justice, around relationship rather than principle, around the particular rather than the universal.

Gilligan did not argue that all women reason this way or that no men do. She argued that the “care voice” and the “justice voice” are two distinct moral orientations, that both are mature and valid, and that Western moral philosophy had systematically valued one (justice) while dismissing the other (care).

The Ethics of Care

Nel Noddings: Caring as Foundation

Nel Noddings, in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), developed the ethics of care into a full philosophical framework. She argued that the foundation of morality is not reason, not principle, not social contract — it is caring.

The caring relation has two parties: the “one-caring” and the “cared-for.” Genuine caring involves:

Engrossment: The one-caring pays full attention to the cared-for — not thinking about themselves, not planning what to say, not evaluating or judging, but receiving the other person’s reality as fully as possible. This is what the Vietnamese call thấu cảm — deep empathetic understanding.
Motivational displacement: The one-caring’s energy flows toward the cared-for’s needs. The one-caring is moved to act on behalf of the other — not from duty, not from principle, but from genuine care.
Recognition by the cared-for: The cared-for recognizes and responds to the caring. This completes the relation. Caring is not a one-way act — it is a relation that requires both parties.

Noddings made a crucial distinction: caring is not a feeling (though it often involves feeling). It is an orientation — a way of being with another person that prioritizes their well-being, attends to their reality, and responds to their needs. You can care for someone you do not like. You can care in situations where you feel nothing. What matters is the quality of attention and response, not the emotional state.

Virginia Held: Care as Political

Virginia Held, in The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006), extended care ethics from personal relationships to political and social institutions. She argued that care is not merely a private virtue (what mothers do) but a public necessity (what societies must do).

Key arguments:

1. All human beings begin in dependency and end in dependency. The autonomous, independent individual that liberal political philosophy takes as its starting point does not exist. Every person was once a helpless infant, cared for by others. Many will become dependent in old age, illness, or disability. Independence is a phase, not a condition. A society designed for autonomous individuals fails the people who are, at any given moment, dependent — which is to say, it fails everyone at some point.

2. Care work is real work. Raising children, tending the sick, supporting the elderly, maintaining households, providing emotional support — this is essential labor without which society cannot function. It has been systematically devalued precisely because it has been assigned to women and excluded from economic measurement. GDP does not count a mother’s care for her child. It does count the salary of a prison guard. This is not a measurement choice. It is a value statement — and it reveals what the dominant system actually values.

3. The public-private divide is a fiction that serves power. The separation between the “public” sphere (politics, economics, governance — coded as male) and the “private” sphere (family, relationships, care — coded as female) is not natural. It is a political construction that keeps care invisible and women subordinate. Care ethics demands that what happens in the “private” sphere — how children are raised, how the sick are tended, how relationships are maintained — be recognized as political and subject to justice.

4. Markets cannot provide care. Care requires relationship, attention, and responsiveness to particular needs — qualities that markets systematically erode. When care is commodified (daycare, nursing homes, therapy for hire), it is stripped of the relational quality that makes it care. The nurse’s aide paid minimum wage to change diapers in a for-profit nursing home is not providing care in Noddings’ sense — she may be providing competent service, but the caring relation (engrossment, motivational displacement, recognition) is structurally prevented by the conditions of her employment.

Care vs. Justice: A False Binary?

The early debate around care ethics was framed as care vs. justice — as if communities must choose between fairness and kindness. This is a false binary that both Gilligan and later care ethicists rejected.

Justice and care are not opposites. They are complementary orientations that together produce good governance:

Justice asks: Is this fair? Are rights respected? Are principles applied consistently? Does everyone receive their due?

Care asks: Is this kind? Are relationships maintained? Are vulnerable people protected? Are needs being met?

A governance system that applies justice without care produces bureaucratic cruelty — rules applied uniformly regardless of circumstances, without compassion for the people affected. A system that applies care without justice produces favoritism — some people cared for more than others based on personal connection, without fairness or consistency.

The integration is what Vietnamese wisdom calls “Có lý, có tình” — having both reason and heart, both principle and feeling. Good governance requires both: the structural fairness of justice AND the relational attentiveness of care.

Relational Ontology: A Different View of Reality

Care ethics implies a different understanding of what human beings are. Western liberal philosophy begins with the individual — an autonomous, rational agent who enters into social contracts with other autonomous agents. This ontology (theory of being) produces individualism: the belief that the individual is the primary reality and society is a secondary construction.

Care ethics begins with relationship. The human being is not first an individual who then forms relationships. The human being IS relationship — constituted by, sustained by, and meaningful only within the web of relationships that make human life possible. The mother-child relation is not a social contract between two individuals. It is the primary human reality from which individuality gradually emerges.

This relational ontology aligns with:

Vietnamese philosophy: The concept of tình nghĩa — the web of mutual affection and obligation — assumes that relationship is the primary social reality. “Con người ta sống vì tình” — humans live through feeling/connection.

Ubuntu philosophy: “I am because we are.” Personhood is constituted through community. An isolated individual is not a full person.

Buddhist interdependence: No being has independent existence. All beings arise in dependence on conditions, which include other beings. The self is not a substance but a process of relational becoming.

Ecology: No organism exists independently. Every organism is constituted by its relationships with other organisms and with its environment. The “individual” tree is actually a community of cells, fungi, bacteria, and insects in constant exchange.

A society built on relational ontology looks fundamentally different from one built on individualism. It prioritizes connection over competition, care over accumulation, community over personal advancement. It measures well-being not by individual achievement but by the quality of relationships — between people, between generations, and between humans and the living world.

Practical Application: Building a Care-Based Society

Care as Governance Principle

Embed care in governance structure:

1. Every governance decision is evaluated through both justice and care lenses. Before adopting a policy, ask: “Is this fair?” (justice) AND “Does this maintain and strengthen relationships? Does it protect the vulnerable? Does it respond to actual needs?” (care).

2. Governance includes care portfolios. The community’s governance structure explicitly includes circles or committees responsible for care: child care, elder care, health care, emotional support, conflict care. These are not secondary to “real” governance (land, water, defense). They ARE governance.

3. Care work is valued and shared. In a care-based society, the labor of raising children, tending the sick, preparing food, and maintaining the emotional life of the community is recognized as essential work — valued as much as farming, building, or governing. This work is shared across genders rather than assigned to women by default.

Care as Economic Principle

1. The care economy is the primary economy. The care that community members provide to each other — childcare, elder care, food preparation, emotional support, teaching, healing — is the foundation on which all other economic activity rests. Measure it. Value it. Protect it.

2. No one is left out. A care-based economy does not abandon people who cannot produce market value — the very young, the very old, the sick, the disabled. Everyone receives care because everyone is a person in relationship, not because they have earned it through production.

3. Time for care is protected. Work schedules, labor expectations, and economic arrangements are designed to allow time for care — for children, for elders, for relationships, for community. An economy that requires all adults to work full-time while care goes unattended is an economy that eats its own foundation.

Care as Ecological Principle

Care ethics extends beyond humans to the living world. If care means attending to the needs of the other and responding with appropriate action, then caring for the soil, the water, the forest, and the animals is a moral obligation — not because they are useful to us, but because we are in relationship with them and they are vulnerable to our actions.

This connects directly to the Honorable Harvest (Kimmerer), to Indigenous governance, to regenerative agriculture, and to biomimicry. The ethics of care provides the philosophical foundation for the ecological practices described throughout this library: we care for the earth because we are in relationship with the earth, and that relationship carries responsibility.

The Care Revolution

A society built on care ethics would be revolutionary — not because care is new (it is the oldest human practice) but because organizing a whole society around care would reverse the values that currently organize the world.

Instead of: wealth accumulation as the measure of success → quality of relationships as the measure of success. Instead of: autonomy as the highest value → interdependence as the highest value. Instead of: competition as the engine of progress → cooperation as the engine of well-being. Instead of: care as women’s unpaid labor → care as the community’s shared sacred work.

This is not utopian dreaming. It is the way most human societies operated for most of human history — before the industrial revolution reorganized social life around production and consumption rather than around care and relationship.

In the polyvagal framework: care activates the ventral vagal system — the neural circuits of safety, social engagement, and health. A society organized around care is a society that produces ventral vagal safety at the systemic level — reducing chronic stress, improving health outcomes, and creating the conditions in which human beings thrive. The ethics of care is not just morally right. It is biologically optimal.

In the Four Directions: the ethics of care is the South — the direction of the heart, of relationship, of emotional wisdom. But care without justice (West) becomes favoritism. Care without vision (East) becomes aimless. Care without practical structure (North) becomes exhausting. The ethics of care needs all four directions to become the foundation of a society that works. When it does — when care is the organizing principle of governance, economics, ecology, and community life — the result is a society grounded in what matters most: the quality of our relationships with each other and with the living world.

References

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press.
Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford University Press.
Kittay, E. F. (1999). Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Routledge.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. University of California Press.
Noddings, N. (2002). Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. University of California Press.
Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge.