Relation to others· Morals
Ethics of care
Axis: Criterion of right action — What makes an action morally good?
Morality is rooted in concrete attentiveness to vulnerable people and in the caring relationships that bind us to one another. Rather than abstract, impartial principles, it values responsiveness, responsibility toward others, and sensitivity to particular situations.
Philosophers 3
Humeexplicit
The distinction of good and evil arises from a sentiment of approval or disapproval, not from a deduction of reason: morality is felt more than judged. This sentiment is rooted in sympathy, the capacity to share others' affects, which makes us approve qualities useful and agreeable to oneself and to others. Hence an ethics of care and sentiment, with a virtue component (qualities of character) and a consequentialist concern for utility.
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, sect. I and IX (moral sentiment, utility) · A Treatise of Human Nature, III, part I, sect. 1-2 (morals not derived from reason)
Show inferred positions (2)
Schopenhauerinferable
His ethics describes rather than prescribes: from compassion flow the two cardinal virtues, justice, harm no one, and loving-kindness, help others as much as you can, embodied in characters more than in rules. By its affective, relational grounding, this ethics of anticipates the ethics of care; by its psychology of innate characters, it keeps a family resemblance to virtue ethics; deontological formalism is expressly rejected.
On the Basis of Morality, §§16-22
Nāgārjunainferable
Nagarjuna's Mahayana places at the summit the ideal of the bodhisattva, who renounces his own extinction until all beings are delivered: universal compassion, inseparable from the wisdom of emptiness, becomes the spring of the whole of ethics. A boundless concern for others, borne by virtue, prevails over any rule or calculation.
Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī) · Shantideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra
Argument
- Where does a moral demand get its force? Not from a principle contemplated in the abstract, but from the encounter with another who depends on us, the child, the sick, the one in our charge: it is there that obligation first takes hold, for each of us.
- An impartial principle cannot generate this concern, it presupposes it: 'give each an equal weight' moves only one who already cares about someone, and asks them to extend that care. Remove every attachment, and the principle commands no one.
- And by giving each the same weight, the impartial standpoint abstracts away what creates real obligation: this precise bond, this dependence, this need. What it discards is not moral noise, it is the substance of morality.
Therefore So care is not one moral demand among others, but the ground on which the others stand: morality is rooted in the attentive response to others, and impartial principles are only a derivative extension of it.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- 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.
See the page- PrescriptiveMoral Thought experimentSaving a loved one rather than a stranger
We save the one we love without hesitating; but is what makes that act good a calculation, a rule that permits it, good character, or the bond itself, which no morality should require us to justify?
an act for a loved one - PrescriptiveMoralRivals or facets
Consequences, duty, virtue, care: are these rival theories of which only one can be true, or the facets of a single morality that nothing compels us to unify?
the moral criterion - PrescriptiveMoralIs the moral standpoint impartial?
Is judging morally a matter of rising to principles that hold for everyone regardless of persons, or is concrete attentiveness to those close to us the very heart of morality?
the moral standpoint - PrescriptiveMoralThe rule or the situation
Is acting well a matter of applying principles fixed in advance, or of judging each situation in its singularity, at the risk that rule and case never quite coincide?
moral judgment