Care ethics is the tradition in moral philosophy that takes the experience of caring for particular others as the starting point for ethical reasoning. Against dominant frameworks that ground morality in universal principles (Kantian deontology), aggregate outcomes (consequentialism), or individual character (virtue ethics), care ethics insists that moral life begins in relationships of dependency and responsiveness — and that any adequate ethical theory must account for the asymmetric, embodied, and ongoing work of maintaining those relationships.
The tradition originates in Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982), which documented a moral orientation — attentive to context, relationship, and responsibility — that had been systematically excluded from developmental psychology’s models of moral maturity. Nel Noddings developed this into a philosophical ethics grounded in the phenomenology of the caring relation. Joan Tronto expanded care ethics into political theory, arguing that the devaluation of care is structurally necessary to maintain existing distributions of power. Virginia Held situated care ethics within broader debates in moral and political philosophy, arguing that it represents a genuinely distinct moral framework rather than a supplement to existing ones.
Care ethics matters for this research on several fronts. Its insistence that relations precede and constitute moral agents aligns with relational ontology — the position that relations are prior to entities. Its attention to dependency and vulnerability refuses the fiction of the autonomous rational subject that underlies procedural liberalism. And its grounding in practice rather than principle connects to the letters-to-the-web on care as practice rather than governance and on care loops that exceed understanding. The sociological concept of care work names the material labor that care ethics theorizes.
Schools
- Gilligan — the “different voice” that initiated the tradition
- Noddings — the phenomenology of the caring relation
- Tronto — care as political concept
- Held — care ethics as distinct moral framework
Terms
Curriculum
Related
- Relational ontology — relations prior to entities
- Process philosophy — becoming prior to being
- Grievability — Butler’s framework for whose lives count
- Care work — the material labor care ethics theorizes
- Procedural liberalism — what care ethics challenges
- Natality — Arendt’s concept of beginning, which Held connects to care