What Is Care Ethics and Why Does It Matter?

What is the ethics of care? And why is it an important theoretical approach for the law?

The 'ethics of care' or 'care ethics' is an approach in moral philosophy, with feminist roots, that can be traced back to Carol Gilligan’s foundational 1982 text in developmental moral psychology, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. In this text, Gilligan investigated the implications of excluding the perspective of women and girls from research in developmental psychology by examining why women scored consistently lower than men under the hierarchal model of moral progress developed by her mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg. Gilligan argued that women were not inferior to men in terms of moral maturity as the results of the Kohlbergian study indicated; instead, they spoke in a “different voice” from their male counterparts. The contents of this different voice are revealed through a series of narrations by female participants in Gilligan’s study. Broadly speaking, the participants all emphasise a view of the self as being constructed by intimate relationships, and an ethical perspective that highlights the moral value of care. These psychological findings received considerable philosophical attention, and paved the way for the development of the “ethics of care”.

What is Care Ethics?

Gilligan's empirical work in the 1980s had clear philosophical significance, and during that decade, her findings garnered significant attention in philosophical circles. Early philosophical investigations on care by scholars such as Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto, Diemut Bubeck, Eva Kittay, Sara Ruddick, and Virginia Held gradually established care ethics as a prominent theoretical approach in feminist ethics. Care ethics continues to be of significant philosophical interest today. Contemporary work by care ethicists like Steven Steyl, Stephanie Collins, Tove Pettersen, Daniel Engster, Maurice Hamington, and Sarah Clark Miller has all contributed to the project of building care ethics into a compelling moral theory in its own right.

There are several claims at the heart of care ethics (all which it is impossible to discuss in this post) that distinguish it as a unique moral theory, and ongoing efforts continue to refine and expand it. Despite the various strands of research, and some contestations about the very aims of the theory, the core claim of the care ethical approach, I argue, should be as follows:

Core Claim: Caring is somehow morally valuable.

It is this claim that care is morally valuable that distinguishes care ethicists from other scholars who study care. While care is a social practice of immense importance to anthropologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, and psychologists, care ethics uniquely positions care as not just an important social phenomenon—as a type of action, labour, work, or social practice that takes different cultural forms—but as something of moral value. The assertion that caring is morally valuable is the central tenet of the care ethical approach and is essential for care ethics to function successfully as a moral theory.

Why Does it Matter for the Law?

With this rough idea in place regarding the core tenet of the approach, we can now ask how and why this theoretical framework is important for the law. There are two potential ways in which care ethics, I suggest, can have important implications for work in law.

First, care ethics can introduce a new and helpful perspective to debates in jurisprudence. Beyond its moral dimensions (or its role as a moral value), the concept of care holds clear political significance. Joan Tronto, one of the pioneering care theorists who integrated care ethics into political theory, argued that characterizing care ethics solely as a moral theory obscures its immense political relevance, especially concerning care work and its significance for political theory. The idea of a ‘public ethic of care’ has been developed by the likes of Grace Clement, Eva Kittay, Daniel Engster, and Nel Noddings, and applied to questions of citizenship, global responsibility and cosmopolitanism, and debates around the role and value of democracy and justifications for the welfare state. Contemporary jurisprudence – that combines theoretical approaches from moral, political, and legal philosophy – deals with important questions about the nature of law and legal systems, the problem of law’s normativity, and questions around legal and political obligation. While it may seem that there is nothing that care ethics can particularly add to philosophical questions around the nature of law, these questions about law’s nature are intrinsically connected, as legal philosophers tell us, with questions of law’s force and our obligations towards the law and legal systems. Care ethics may thus provide a new and important theoretical lens to the “normative branches of jurisprudence that overlap with moral and political philosophy”, to use Leslie Green’s terminology, and can meaningfully inform discussions about the function of the law, and/or our obligations towards co-citizens and the state. 

The second way in which care ethics is relevant to the law is through its application to a range of questions in doctrinal areas of law. Notably, Jonathan Herring’s writings provide a comprehensive exposition of how care ethics pertains to doctrinal areas, particularly in medical law and family law. Care ethics can play an important role, for instance, in examining the normative foundations of family law. Herring and some others have argued “in favour of focusing the interventions of family law on caring relationships, rather than sexual ones”. On this view, the very foundation of family law should revolve around the mandate of maintaining and promoting caring relationships, rather than conjugal and/or sexual ones. Let us call this the ‘care-proposal’.

The care-proposal rests on two claims: first, that family law must promote 'valuable' relationships; and second, that caring relationships are valuable in ways that other relationships, such as conjugal relationships, are not. If one of the core functions of family law is to promote valuable relationships, for the care-proposal to be successful, it must be shown that care has moral value in a way that other candidate concepts—such as marriage, cohabitation, or sex—do not. Material from care ethics can be crucial here. If caring relationships are intrinsically linked with moral value, then the care-proposal is justified. If not, and if caring relationships are only morally valuable in some cases and not others, the success of the proposed reconceptualisation depends on the circumstances under which caring actions are morally valuable and whether these 'valuable caring relationships' can become the primary focus of family law. All this shows that care ethics has immense significance when applied meaningfully to legal debates—an endeavour that has only just begun.

Much work remains to be done to strengthen care ethics as a moral theory and to clarify its central ideas. Alongside, I suggest that there are (at least) these two avenues of dialogue between care ethics and questions in the law.