When Carol Gilligan introduced what she thought was a poverty in modern ethics, she
labeled the sides Justice and care, where justice was the current paradigm and
understanding of ethics and Care represented a feminine perspective that might
be able to revalue ethics. I will use the terms Care and Justice ethics
broadly—encompassing many different ethical disciplines, much as she does—but I
will define them in a way that is informed by other Care thinkers. Justice will
be defined as that which starts from a universal, independent, atomist,
separate conception of a self and forms general rules from that self, and then
applies those general rules to specific cases, and that values rational control
over emotion, where emotions can only get in the way of ethical action. Care on
the other hand, I will define as an ethic that focuses on the specific, highly
contextual elements of a person in relationship. Care mbraces emotion as
providing a partial basis for morality and moral understanding, where there is
an appreciation and focus on attention, context and narrative, as well as, a
focus on communication in moral deliberation, where specific trumps the general.
At first, it feels
apparent that Nietzsche would be apposed to a Care ethics because it promotes,
well: care. However, you can read Nietzsche two ways. You can read him literally,
where the strong should have recourse to whatever makes them great. Or, you can
read him more metaphorically as some think he should be read, and he himself
implies (Montanari, 2011; Nietzsche et al.), and a different picture emerges.
In this construal, or interpretive lens, Nietzsche is only saying we should be
letting man be free to be great in activity, without the burden of feeling self
hate (Nietzsche et al.). Nietzsche wants continually forming exemplars,
something that affirms life, life that is only actualized in activity
(Montanari, 2011). Care ethics might be a development of this activity. There
is more to say about Neitzsche that affirms Care ethics, but we must deal with
the fact that Nietzsche would see anything as vile that redefines itself
against the strong and revalues activity as weakness and inactivity as strength
and some might see care ethics as affirming weakness. 
This seems like a problem for Care ethics, as
it seems to be attempting to revalue something that has been considered
inherently weak, and even less human, as something strong (Held 1990). However,
there are two ways, broadly construed that an ethic of Care can be conceived.
The first may fall impotent prey to this critique. This perspective on Care can
be conceived of as a response to masculine domination, and an effort to revalue
the world, making the weakness of promotional inactivity inherent in femininity
to be considered strong. In this view, proponents of care would be defining
themselves against masculinities activity. This aspect or version of Care would
say masculinity devalues a woman’s place and makes her creature who has less
ethical potential than man, as a gender, and so it must be changed so that it
does not have this bias (Jaggar, 1995). However, to argue that that Care is
simply saying that it’s an unjust practice, so we need to revalue it would be
would be in error. It is certain that some of the motivation that facilitated
the perspective of care was a concern that women’s concerns were devalued.
However, that being as it may, there is a second stronger concern that predominates
in care and this is the Care that I refer to in the rest of the paper.
This version or aspect of Care doesn’t define
itself in antithesis to male domination; but, instead, it seeks to develop a
positive theory that can possibly replace Justice ethics and account for its
many flaws. This theory perceives a serious poverty in ethics that results from
certain historical assumptions that define the rules of the game that justice ethicists
are playing. They attempt to replace, or at very least inform, a justice ethic
that has been male dominated (Held, 1990). The Care ethicist, here, attacks a
conception of ethics that predominantly men formed from overly narrow, a priori
assumptions (Held, 1990; Jaggar, 1995). There’s good reason to believe the
second perspective is true, or at least more frequently true, of care ethics.
Most of the literature—like writings of Walker, Jaggar and Held—focus on the
narrow historical assumptions and impoverished concepts that they believe are
empty of any real meaning. In the formerly mentioned care perspective, the
perspective results from concerns about how women are valued; in the later,
care is a positive theory that results from a privileged perspective.
Due to the male domination of ethics, they’ve
created this unrealistic decontextualized, neutral “person”. The Justice
ethicist attempt to make sense of man socially (ethically) by postulating an
unrealistic, misleading fiction of man born and raised outside of culture (Held,
1990). So they’ve conceived of a general “person” and out of that created
ethical principles to apply to very specific, complex and situations. The
theoretical man without context isn’t a person at all because an actual person
is formed behaviorally and ethically within a family, with father, a mother and
all the inculcations that culture offers through practices and relationships.
Nietzsche adds to
this, in full agreement that this general man of justice is a fiction, and an
foolish place to start an ethic. Whereas for Care, Justice ethics doesn’t
account for the feeling person in context and through time; Nietzsche shows
that Justice ethicist can never know the agent they postulate because a person
is only ever known historically, after the fact, even the individual only
recognizes himself historically by remembering his actions (Montanari, 2011;
Nietzsche et al.). Because we are only ever looking at our actions in
hindsight, and from that evaluating who we are in the moment, we can only catch
glimpses of who we are (Montanari, 2011; Nietzsche et al.). Additionally,
through genealogy, looking at humans through history, we can only ever see the
contingency in what we have perceived to be necessary (Murdchadha, 2005), so to
postulate a fixed ideal would be gross a mistake and terrible assumption.
Both Care and
Nietzsche give a provocative attack on justice ethics but they also do more:
they may offer a replacement. They reveal that the foundations of justice
ethics, namely rationality, doesn’t provide complete access while claiming to
do so, and indeed it starts drawing conclusions from an assumption riddled
foundation of what it means to be a human agent. They show the oddness of
making inferences from a stripped down, de-contextualized, de-relationshiped person
to persons who are each individually born and raised in the highly variable context
of deep emotional social connections. Nietzsche complete this because he revealed
that you can only know yourself in part because you only know yourself as an
agent by looking back on a past action. But, now Foucault provides a way to
unify both perspectives. He exposes that the agent can only be realized historically
within relationship.
Here we get the
active agent, but who can only do so with the preconditions of certain rules
and values present and embodied in his the social practices. Since this agent
is active and changing, but socially valued and forming from with that system
of values, the best ethic would be one that creates an environment that allows
diverse action to arise out of the social. Care provides such an ethic because
it focuses on the specifics of situation and the specific needs of each
individual. It at once allows for diversity and fosters the community out of
which it grows. Because the social, emotional context provides the
preconditions for a self in history, fostering those relationships of care provides a greater ability for diverse
action. It focuses on the specific instead of the general, where the general
forces the agent in preformed and unrealistic conceptual boxes. The ethic of Care
allows for the agent to act spontaneously, see his self historically, and to
promote the conditions for his own historical reflections.
Care ethics and
Nietzsche together reveal the insufficient moral theories of justice ethics and
the flimsy foundations out of which Justice ethics forms. They also, with the
help of Foucault possibly provide the first conceptual blocks for an ethical
ideology that takes advantage of realistic agents within a context of realistic
agents all creating a context of care out of which creative, spontaneous and diverse
actions can arise and be recognized as such by both the agent and those around
him.
References:
Foucault (Assigned Reading). The ethics of the concern of the self as a
practice of freedom. Ethics: Subjectivity
and Truth, 281-301.
Held, V.
(1990). Feminist transformations of moral theory, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 321-344.
Jaggar, A.M. (1995). Caring as a
Feminist Practice of Moral Reason, 179-202.
Montanari, D.J. (2011). Nietzsche and “getting it wrong”. Philosophy and Literature, 35, 190-198.
Murchadha, F.O. (2005). Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger: thinking freedom and
philosophy, British Journal of the
History of Philosophy, 13, 361-373. doi: 10.1080/09608780500093319.
Nietzsche,
F. W., Ansell-Pearson, K., & Diethe, C. (2007).On the genealogy of
morality. Cambridge Univ Pr.
