Virginia Held is an American moral and political philosopher who provided the most systematic defense of care ethics as a genuinely distinct moral framework. Her The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006) argues that care ethics is not a supplement to justice-based theories but a comprehensive alternative with its own ontology, epistemology, and political implications.
Core ideas
- Care ethics as distinct framework: care ethics differs from deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics along multiple axes — relational persons, attention to particular others, emotion as moral knowledge, practice as the site of moral understanding.
- Critique of the public/private divide: the assignment of care to the private sphere and justice to the public is an ideological construction that devalues care and insulates political institutions from the demands of dependency.
- Care as the wider framework: justice operates within care, not the other way around. Formal equality without attention to actual needs produces the hollow procedural liberalism that care ethics challenges.
- Relational persons: the “autonomous rational agent” of contract theory is produced by ignoring the dependency relations that sustain every person from birth.
Significance for this research
Held’s insistence that persons are constituted by relationships aligns with relational ontology — the philosophical position that relations are prior to entities. Her critique of the autonomous subject parallels process philosophy’s rejection of substance metaphysics. Her argument that practice generates moral understanding connects to the broader processual epistemology that this research develops.
Notable works
- Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (1993)
- The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006)
- How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (2008)
Related
- Care Ethics — the tradition she systematized
- Held school — her school within care ethics
- Carol Gilligan — the empirical origin
- Nel Noddings — the phenomenological grounding
- Joan Tronto — the political expansion
- Eva Feder Kittay — fellow care ethicist focused on dependency