Virtue and lifeworlds

• Aristotle’s warrior prince– courage, generosity,

magnificence, high mindedness, gentleness, friendliness, truthfulness, wittiness, wisdom

• Christian monk– faith, hope, charity, chastity,

piety, humility, obedience

• Confucian family subject– humanity, propriety, filial piety,

broadmindedness, dignity

The world of the market

• The competitive individualist– Disciplined, hard working,

entrepreneurial, organized, driven to succeed

The Caring Community

• Humans are essentially social creatures.

• Doing the right thing means creating and sustaining caring communities.

• Care is a basic human capacity to recognize and respond to the needs of others.

• Care begins at home and extends to distant others.

Empathy and Care

• Empathy is basic human capacity

• Must be developed through– past care– caring interactions with others

• Commitment to be a caring person

Care as Virtue

• Care as foundational virtue– Disposition to be good friend, family

member and citizen of caring community

• Care is a disposition to respond to others by– Not inflicting harm

– Alleviating suffering

– Cultivating caring communities

• Requires the cultivation of empathy and its extension to distant others

Central features of care

• Moral attention– attention to the facts

• Sympathetic understanding– awareness of what the other would

want you to do, and of what would be best for the other.

• Relationship awareness– awareness of existing relationships, of

need to create and sustain community

• Accommodation and harmony– Balancing interests and preserving

harmony in so far as you can.

Failures of Empathy

• Deliberate blunting of feeling of empathy: e.g. blaming the victim

• Here and now bias

• Empathic over-arousal

Failure to Develop Empathy

• “can be destroyed by power-assertive childrearing, diminished by cultural valuing of competition over helping others, and overwhelmed by egoistic motives… nonnurturant, excessively power-assertive life experiences may well produce individuals who cannot empathize.” (M. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development 281-2)

Responding to Failures of Empathy

• In oneself:– Call up feeling of empathy

• e.g. by imagination

• In Society and family– Share care work– Sensitive childrearing– Emphasize helping over

competition

• Limit “power-assertive life experiences”

“Care and Justice voices”: Moral

reasoning• Care: moral development as

emotional maturity.

• Justice: moral development as cognitive.

• Care: moral reasoning is contextual.

• Justice: moral reasoning is finding the right principles to apply to each case.

“Care voice”: persons

• The caring community

• Embedded persons• Particular social context

• Some relationships are given.

• Connected selves• Self-understanding in terms of

relations with others.

“Justice voice”: persons

• The world of the market

• Autonomous individuals– Capable of self-definition in all

social contexts.– Relationships are contractual.

• Separate/Objective Self– Self-understanding in terms of

individual characteristics and desires.

Care and other Moral Perspectives

• Different perspectives reveal different aspects.

• Care as practice and care as moral perspective

What to do?

• Direct your moral attention to others.

• Be open to sympathetic understanding.

• Be aware of the need to sustain and preserve networks of care.

• Try to preserve harmony.

• Short cut: What would my ideal caring self do?

Feminism and Care

• Taking the experiences of women and girls seriously.

• Autonomy and its limits

• Who is doing “care” work?– In the household

• Domestic work

• Emotional work

– In the larger society

• Who loses when care work is limited in these ways?