See the axis · Criterion of right action

ObjectionAttacks the position

Care 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

  1. Care attends to those close to us, to the one in our charge: that is its strength, but also its natural slope.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

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