Ethics of Care Flashcards
Decision Rule
Focus on Relationships and Responsibilities
Biggest pro
Protects the weak and dependent
Biggest con
Neglects justice
Ethical reflection should focus on…
the quality of caring relationships
A leading feminist, Gilligan argued…
that the language of individual rights and justice did not accurately capture how many people, women in particular, understand ethics in terms of the concrete relationships interwoven throughout life
Ethics, she and others argue, requires…
relationships where people care about one another - where attitudes and motivations are the responsibility of both men and women but, more often, become minimized in men and emphasized in women
Descriptive Psychological Theory
Men and women reason differently about morality
Normative Theory
Attitudes about caring within relationships is an alternative and better approach, for both men and women, for thinking about the demands of ethics than abstract consequentialist or deontological theories
Many ethical problems arise just because…
people do not appropriately care about one another
- ethics is about actual relationships with others
Both the “ethics of care” and “virtue ethics” emphasize that…
analyzing actions identifies only the surface of ethics
- People attain depth by understanding the underlying motives, outlooks, and character that leads to those actions
Most “eudaimonistic” approaches to ethics, and the ethics of care, emphasize
the importance of emotional development required to be ethical in daily living
Ethics of care places special emphasis on…
relationships of caring
Proponents of ethics of care take good relationships between family and friends as…
paradigm cases for thinking about good relationships in general
- Good caring relationships should shape the conduct of market relationships
- Corporations and work-place environments create inter-dependencies that are more complex than the imagery of people contracting for mutual benefit
- A model of healthy parental and friend relationships, rather than healthy contract relationships, yields an alternative ethical and value framework for assessing markets and capitalism
The Ethics of Care focuses on…
preserving the relationships that the ethical decision-maker values most
