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ObjectionAttacks the positionCare can be unjust
Care favors those close to us: with no impartial safeguard, it can turn into favoritism, blind to the stranger and the distant.
Objects to
- Care attends to those close to us, to the one in our charge: that is its strength, but also its natural slope.
- With no impartial criterion to correct it, care can become favoritism: I look after my own, and the stranger, the distant, the one I do not love cease to count. Many injustices thus dress themselves in the colors of love.
- Yet justice requires precisely that we take into account also those who do not move us: it is impartiality, which care rejects, that ensures we do not sacrifice the absent to the present.
Therefore So care alone does not suffice for morality: it needs the impartial standpoint that duty or calculation provide, on pain of being merely a preference for one's own.
Possible resolutions of the objection
Challenges