The Ethic of Care vis-â-vis the Ethic of Rights: A Problem for Contemporary Moral Theory

Carol Gilligan has delineated two ethics, the ethic of rights and the ethic of care. In this article I argue that the two ethics are part of one overall system, the ethic of care functioning as a necessary base for the ethic of rights. 1 also argue that the system is seriously flawed. Because women are held accountable to both ethics and because the two ethics frequently conflict, women recurrently find themselves in a moral double bind.     

Imagining ethical globalization: The contributions of a care ethic

Approaches to global ethics have drawn on a number of diverse theoretical traditions, such as Kantianism and utilitarianism. While emerging frameworks contribute to a growing awareness of and interest in ethics within a global society, the values that they prioritize are not adequate for realizing a just, equitable and fair system of global governance. This article considers the possibilities of an alternative ethic—a feminist ethic of care—and explores how it can bear on present circumstances, including global inequity and injustice. This care ethic has been put forward as a viable normative approach to politics and policy. Little attention, however, has been paid to the potential of a care ethic within the globalization and ethics debate. This article illustrates how the values and corresponding principles of care, grounded in relationships and responsibilities, are essential to responding adequately to the current challenges of globalization. By examining the relevance of care in this context, the article seeks to broaden dominant ethical worldviews and contribute to the articulation of normative tools for examining globalization while at the same time avoiding the trappings of conventional universality—the abstract and a priori thinking typically associated with conceptions of global ethics.     

Caring and Evil

Nel Noddings, in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), presents and develops an ethic of care as an alternative to an ethic that treats justice as a bask concept. I argue that this care ethic is unable to give an adequate account of ethical relationships between strangers and that it is also in danger of valorizing relationships in which carers are seriously abused.     

An Existential Foundation for an Ethics of Care in Heidegger’s Being and Time

Martin Heidegger’s existential account of care in Being and Time (2010) provides us with an opportunity to reimagine what the proper theoretical grounding of an ethic of care might be. Heidegger’s account of care serves to deconstruct the two primary foundations that an ethic of care is often based upon. Namely, that we are inevitably interdependent upon one another and/or possess an innate disposition to care for fellow humans in need. Heidegger’s account reveals that both positions are founded upon an ontic (meaning factual existence), as opposed to an ontological (which refers to the nature of being), understanding of care. The distinctions between an ontic and ontological understanding of care are significant. Yet, I maintain that they are not completely incompatible. Both Heidegger and care ethicists contend that our existence with others is understood through a relational ontology. Furthermore, there are certain ontological structures from Heidegger which resonate with an ethic of care. Two key existential structures are leaping-ahead and being-guilty. These existential structures are latent in care ethics, and by explicitly revealing them I reinforce the connection between Heidegger’s account and care theory. Lastly, I develop the theoretical foundations of care ethics by proposing an existential ethic of care.

     

The Unhappy Marriage of Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics

The proposal that care ethic(s) (CE) be subsumed under the framework of virtue ethic(s) (VE) is both promising and problematic for feminists. Although some attempts to construe care as a virtue are more commendable than others, they cannot duplicate a freestanding feminist CE. Sander‐Staudt recommends a model of theoretical collaboration between VE and CE that retains their comprehensiveness, allows CE to enhance VE as well as be enhanced by it, and leaves CE open to other collaborations.     

The ethic of caring: the moral response to suffering

An ethic of care can be distinguished from an ethic based on autonomous rights, utilitarian principles, or indeed principles of any kind, since care has less to do with intellect than with emotions and will. Moreover, an ethic of care is consistent with the example of Jesus and the virtues advocated by the apostle Paul. Emily A. Hitchens and Lilyan S. Snow make their case with particular reference to accounts by Civil War nurses, who developed the skills of care without precedent and without the expectation of cure that scientific medicine has aroused.     

Hearing the Difference: Theorizing Connection

Hearing the difference between a patriarchal voice and a relational voice defines a paradigm shift: a change in the conception of the human world. Theorizing connection as primary and fundamental in human life leads to a new psychology, which shifts the grounds for philosophy and political theory. A crucial distinction is made between a feminine ethic of care and a feminist ethic of care. Voice, relationship, resistance, and women become central rather than peripheral in this reframing of the human world.     

Caring,Gender Role Orientation,and Volunteering

The current studies were conducted to examine two questions regarding the development of an ethic of care versus an ethic of justice, where the former is associated with being female and the latter is associated with being male. First, does gender role orientation in adolescence predict the ethical orientation one adopts better than gender itself does? Second, does adolescents' ethical orientation predict their volunteering behavior? To answer these questions, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, adolescents completed Bem's Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and Jensen's World View Questionnaire (WVQ) which assesses ethical orientation. Girls and individuals high in femininity were higher on the ethic of care than were boys and individuals high in masculinity. In addition, individuals with a feminine gender orientation received higher care scores than individuals with an androgynous orientation. Regression analyses indicated that gender orientation accounted for more of the variance in the ethic of care than did gender. In Study 2, older adolescents completed Jensen's WVQ and were subsequently asked to volunteer in one of two settings: a personal setting or an impersonal setting. Individuals high in the ethic of care were more likely to volunteer and volunteered for more hours, but volunteered equally often in the two types of settings. Individuals who “apologized” for being unable to volunteer were higher on caring. The results are discussed in the context of Gilligan's theory of socialization to morality.

     

ICU向患者家属开放的理论研究

ICU实行的基本是封闭式管理,这不仅带来了一些伦理问题,也容易引发医疗纠纷,从伦理学的需要、预防医疗纠纷、改善医患关系等方面探讨ICU向患者家属开放的必要性,分析开放存在的问题,论证了ICU向患者家属开放的可行性。     

如何消除团队中的搭便车现象

团队中出现搭便车现象的主要原因是工作伦理和管理制度存在问题。本文提出了借鉴清教徒工作观以重整工作伦理的观点。同时,运用团队有效性模型进行了问题诊断并提出了相应对策。     

Welfare, Work Requirements, and Dependant-Care

abstract This article considers the justice of requiring employment as a condition of receiving public assistance. While none of the main theories of justice prohibits work requirements, the arguments in their favour are weak. Arguments based on reciprocity fail to explain why only means‐tested public benefits should be subject to work requirements, and why unpaid dependant care work should not count as satisfying citizens’ obligations to reciprocate. Arguments based on promoting the work ethic misattribute recipients’ nonwork to deviant values, when their core problem is finding steady employment consistent with supporting a family and meeting dependant care responsibilities. Rigid work requirements impose unreasonable costs on some of the poor. A welfare system based on a rebuttable presumption that recipients will work for pay, conjoined with more generous work supports, would promote justice better than either unconditional welfare or strict requirements [ 1 ].     

Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgments

The best framework for moral and political thought is the one that creates the best climate for good political judgments. I argue that universalistic theories of justice fall short in this regard because they cannot distinguish idealization from abstraction. After describing how an ethic of care guides judgments, I suggest the practical effects that make this approach preferable. The ethic of care includes more aspects of human life in making political judgments.     

The competent community: Toward a vital reformulation of professional ethics

Psychologists are ethically obligated to ensure their own competence. When problems of professional competence occur, psychologists must take appropriate steps to regain competence while protecting those they serve. Yet conceptualizations of the competence obligation are thoroughly intertwined with Western ideals of individualism and a model of the person as self-contained, self-controlled, and perpetually rational. Research in health care, education, and multicultural and social psychology raise serious doubts about psychologists' capacity for consistently accurate self-assessments of competence. To address this problem, the authors advocate that education, training, professional ethics standards, and credentialing criteria be infused with a robust communitarian ethos and a culturally pervasive ethic of care. The authors propose a shift in discourse about competence to incorporate both competent individuals and competent communities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Care Ethics and Obligations to Future Generations

A dominant area of inquiry within intergenerational ethics concerns how goods (and bads) ought to be justly distributed between noncontemporaries. Contractualist theories of justice that have broached these discussions have often centered on the concepts of mutual advantage and (indirect) reciprocal cooperation between rational, self‐interested beings. However, another prominent reason that many in the present feel that they have obligations toward future generations is not due to self‐interested reciprocity, but simply because they care about what happens to them. Care ethics promises to be conceptually well‐suited for articulating this latter reason: given that future generations are in a perpetual condition of dependency on present‐day people's actions, this is precisely the kind of relational structure that care theorists should be interested in morally evaluating. Unfortunately, the care literature has been largely silent on intergenerational ethics. This article aims to advance this literature, offering the blueprints of what a care ethic concerning future generations—a “future care ethic”—should look like. The resultant ethic defends a sufficientarian theory of obligation: people in the present ought to ensure the conditions needed to encourage and sustain a world that enables good caring relations to flourish.     

Live Kidney Donations and the Ethic of Care

In this paper, we seek to re-conceptualize the ethical framework through which ethicists and medical professionals view the practice of live kidney donations. The ethics of organ donation has been understood primarily within the framework of individual rights and impartiality, but we show that the ethic of care captures the moral situation of live kidney donations in a more coherent and comprehensive way, and offers guidance for practitioners that is more attentive to the actual moral transactions among donors and recipients. A final section offers guidelines for the practice of live kidney transplants that emerge from an ethic of care.     

Justice,Care, and Questionable Dichotomies

Throughout the development of an “ethic of care” different from an “ethic of justice,” the relationship between the two has been problematic. Are they theories between which one must choose? Are they complementary? Are they domain-specific? In support of my view that neither is adequate by itself, I here examine the private domain of care of the dying by intimates, and find there important issues both of care and of justice.     

A Pandemic of Terror and Terror of a Pandemic: American Cultural Responses to HIV/AIDS and Bioterrorism

Abstract. The cultural construction of American societal responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic and terrorism is addressed. The use of metaphors of war, survival, extinction, and of those related to God in public narratives is analyzed. Issues of gender, sexuality, money, and power are also discussed within the context of the religion‐science dialogue. Suggestions are made about a possibility for a global ethic of survival based on an ethic of care.     

Illness, the problem of evil, and the analogical structure of healing: on the difference Christianity makes in bioethics.

A Christian bioethic needs to place the medical approach to sickness, suffering, and death within the context of redemption and the renewal of humanity in the image of God. This can be done by accounting for the way in which the disruptions of the human life-world that attend the illness experience manifest the structure of the problem of evil and point toward an answer that transcends the individual and the medical community. Further, the disease-oriented approach to medicine, when understood in the context of the analogia entis, can be taken as an analogy for a deeper spiritual healing, and can thus become a vehicle through which one can minister to the disruptions of a patient's life-world. An appreciation of the analogical structure of healing provides the basis for a Christian ethic of care.     

Rethinking professional ethics in the cost-sharing era

Changes in healthcare financing increasingly rely upon patient cost-sharing to control escalating healthcare expenditures. These changes raise new challenges for physicians that are different from those that arose either under managed care or traditional indemnity insurance. Historically, there have been two distinct bases for arguing that physicians should not consider costs in their clinical decisions--an "aspirational ethic" that exhorts physicians to treat all patients the same regardless of their ability to pay, and an "agency ethic" that calls on physicians to be trustworthy advisors to their patients. In the setting of greater patient cost-sharing, physicians' aspiration and agency roles increasingly conflict. Satisfactorily navigating the new terrain of consumer-driven healthcare requires physicians to consider these two roles and how they can best be reconciled so as to maximize quality of care while respecting the heterogeneity of patients' financial resources and willingness to pay.