Joan Tronto expanded care ethics from a moral psychology and interpersonal ethics into a political theory. In Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993), she argued that care is not merely a personal virtue or a feature of intimate relationships but a political practice whose organization reflects and reproduces structures of power. The question is not only “how should individuals care?” but “who cares for whom, under what conditions, and at whose expense?”
Tronto defines care as encompassing everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. This definition is deliberately broad: it includes the material labor of care work, the political labor of organizing who provides and receives care, and the moral labor of attending to needs and evaluating responses.
She identifies four phases of care, each with a corresponding moral quality:
- Caring about — recognizing that care is needed (attentiveness)
- Taking care of — assuming responsibility for meeting the need (responsibility)
- Care-giving — the actual work of meeting the need (competence)
- Care-receiving — the response of the cared-for (responsiveness)
Tronto’s critical insight is that these phases are typically split across social positions: those with power “care about” (express concern) while delegating the actual labor to those with less power. The moral boundary between “caring about” and “care-giving” maps onto boundaries of class, race, gender, and citizenship. Political care ethics demands that these boundaries be made visible and that the distribution of care be reorganized.
For this research, Tronto’s framework connects care ethics to settler colonialism and late liberalism: the managed acknowledgment of need without structural redress is precisely the split between “caring about” and “care-giving” that Tronto names. The letters-to-the-web on care and control describe this dynamic — governance that mistakes managed concern for care.
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- Gilligan — whose work Tronto politicized
- Noddings — whose interpersonal framework Tronto extended
- Held — fellow political care ethicist
- Joan Tronto — person page
- Care work — the labor Tronto theorizes
- Elizabeth Povinelli — whose analysis of abandonment complements Tronto’s