Join us for a lecture by Sarah Clark Miller, a professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.
A Constructivist Account of Care Ethics
In her 2006 review of Virginia Held’s The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global, Carla Bagnoli asks: “Is the ethics of care an autonomous ‘moral theory’?” Nearly twenty years later, the answer to Bagnoli’s pivotal question remains unclear. While Bagnoli originally concluded that “[a]s an independent theoretical approach, the ethics of care is not yet justified,” in this paper, I argue that not only does care ethics serve as a meaningful alternative to moral theories, as many feminist philosophers have observed, but it also contains the seeds of an autonomous moral theory. To this end, I offer one aspect of what it would take to justify the ethics of care as a unified, independent moral theoretical approach: a constructivist grounding for the ethics of care.
Recent developments in the ethics of care have made strides toward advancing care ethics as a moral theory. For example, after observing a lack of a “precise analysis of care ethics’ central normative commitment,” Stephanie Collins engages the care ethics literature to generate the normative core of care ethics, captured by what she calls the “slogan” of care ethics: “dependency relationships generate responsibilities” (2015, 2), which she later articulates as a principle. In another important intervention, Steven Steyl provides a theory of right action for care ethics. He holds that “[a]n action is right if and only if it is caring” (2021, 512), with caring further being stipulated in terms of promoting the flourishing of those being cared for (2021, 516; cf. Steyl 2020). Both contributions are substantial. Neither, however, addresses the more fundamental question of why one is morally required to adhere to the dependency principle or what it is that makes caring action a morally required action.
In response, I develop a restricted constructivist justification (Street 2010) of care ethics. I argue that the truth of normative claims of the sort that Collins, Steyl, and other care ethicists wish to make rests on the recognition that the situation of humans as inextricably related, inevitably dependent, and vulnerable beings necessarily entails the acceptance of a set of substantive normative claims required to maintain their abilities as reasoning moral agents. That is, it implies acceptance of a responsibility to care for one another, in which others’ needs or interests (and perhaps sometimes even desires) warrant consideration in moral deliberation.