Where to start with Care ethics

Care ethics begins from a critique of impartiality: the dominant tradition in moral philosophy, from Kant through Rawls, treats justice as requiring equal treatment of all persons regardless of relationship. Carol Gilligan's work argued that this model misses the ethic of care and responsibility that develops from relationships of particular attachment. Nel Noddings and Virginia Held elaborated a positive ethics of care: a morality centred on relationships of dependency, attentiveness to particular others, and the responsibilities of caring work.

Gilligan's In a Different Voice opens the tradition at its origin: the empirical and philosophical argument that moral development includes an ethic of care that Kohlberg's justice-centred theory systematically undervalued. Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice extends care thinking to three cases — disabled people, non-human animals, and global citizens — all of whom fall outside the scope of standard contract theories. Tronto's Moral Boundaries argues that care ethics must become a political ethics, not merely a personal one: caregiving is political work, and the societies that devalue it are politically as well as morally deficient. Rawls's A Theory of Justice stands as the counter in its standard form — the impartial veil of ignorance as the device for deriving principles of justice. Kittay's Love's Labor closes with the care ethics of dependency: a challenge to the liberal fiction of independent, self-sufficient persons.