Nel Noddings (1929–2022) was an American philosopher and educator who developed care ethics as a systematic philosophical position. Her Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984) provided the phenomenological and philosophical grounding for the moral orientation that Carol Gilligan had identified empirically.
Core ideas
- The caring relation: the ethical primitive is not a principle or a virtue but an encounter between the one-caring and the cared-for, constituted by engrossment (receptive attention) and motivational displacement (the shift to acting on behalf of the other).
- Completion by the cared-for: the caring relation requires that the cared-for receive and recognize the care. Care is structurally relational — it cannot be accomplished unilaterally.
- Natural and ethical caring: natural caring is the spontaneous impulse; ethical caring is the effort to care when the natural impulse has been depleted, sustained by the “ethical ideal” built from past experiences of caring and being cared for.
- Care and education: Noddings argued that schools should be organized around caring relations rather than around the transmission of content. Moral education begins in being cared for.
Significance for this research
Noddings’s phenomenology of the caring relation — the insistence that care is relational and requires completion by the cared-for — connects directly to the letters-to-the-web on care loops that don’t close. Her account of engrossment as receptive attention to the particular other parallels prehension in process philosophy.
Notable works
- Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984)
- Women and Evil (1989)
- The Challenge to Care in Schools (1992)
- Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (2002)
Related
- Care Ethics — the tradition she grounded philosophically
- Noddings school — her school within care ethics
- Carol Gilligan — whose empirical work Noddings formalized
- Joan Tronto — who politicized the framework
- Virginia Held — who systematized it as a distinct moral framework