Episode #168 -Transcript
So the story of what’s come to be known today in the world of philosophy as an “ethics of care” begins almost 50 years ago in the 1970’s. The setting is Harvard University. The main character of the story is Carol Gilligan...a talented student doing work in the field of developmental psychology. And the first CONFLICT that Gilligan faces IN this chapter of the story is with her teacher...a man by the name of Lawrence Kohlberg.
Now, Kohlberg...pretty much considered to be the gold standard of the time when it comes to gauging the levels of “moral development” in children. The idea is simple: it’s a mystery of the universe…how do people go… from being INFANTS rolling around in a pile of human excrement all day...to being upstanding members of society making ethical decisions about complicated situations. How would you even study something like that if you WANTED to?
Well, to Kohlberg, you gather up a bunch of kids, you put them into a room, you PRESENT the kids with moral dilemmas of various types, you ask them for what THEY think the correct way is to navigate the moral decision and then you follow up and ask them to EXPLAIN their moral reasoning and give them a score on a scale of 1-6. A score of 1-2 is what Kohlberg called “preconventional” levels of morality...basically the kids act in a way where their chief motivation in moral action is to avoid punishment. Scoring a 3-4 would place kids in a “conventional” level of morality...following rules and gaining the approval of others starts to become the main consideration in choosing what the right thing to do is. Finally scoring a 5-6 would make someone “post-conventional” in their moral reasoning...where it’s not so much about hard and fast rules or laws anymore...they make decisions more in terms of philosophical values like justice and equality. Kohlberg recognized that not even all ADULTS get to this post-conventional stage, but we can learn a lot about human psychology if we study the way that children progress THROUGH these various stages of development.
Now, back in the 1970’s...with the WAY that these studies were being conducted at the time...the results were SEEMING to indicate that girls...just progressed through this scale of moral development...at a slower rate...than boys did. They had reason to suspect that girls, and by implication, women...just had a lower ceiling of moral development than boys and men did.
And now our main character Carol Gilligan hits the stage. She was EXTREMELY skeptical of the idea that young girls for whatever reason progressed slower, morally than young boys, and she had a LOT of REASONS to BE that skeptical. She writes in her book “In a Different Voice”...to just... look at the long history of NOT JUST the EXCLUSION of female opinions, that’d be ONE thing...but also the actual DEGRADATION of the female perspective, this stuff goes back to the Garden of Eden. The very MYTHOLOGY that we use to give structure to our societal narratives...literally says that women were made out of the RIB bone of a man. Another example: Sigmund Freud...one of the most RESPECTED psychologists EVER...someone who the people doing work in developmental psychology were REFERENCING at the time...Freud more or less DISMISSES major parts of female psychology as a mystery...at one point in his work he refers to the way women think as a “dark continent”...some DANGEROUS place... that you know we need to send explorers in some day to figure some of this crazy stuff out. I mean it would be FUNNY if it wasn’t so harmful and dismissive.
Gilligan quotes Freud talking about the moral development of women:
“For women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men.”
And then
“Women show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgments by feelings of affection or hostility.”
So Gilligan says let me get this straight, Freud...what could EASILY BE a problem in your THEORY...you just ASSUME HAS to be a problem in the moral development of women? Let’s SAY that the studies we’re conducting are correct...that girls progress along KOHLBERG’S 1-6 scale at a slower rate than boys do...and let’s SAY that girls seem to make decisions LESS in terms of an ethics centered around justice. Does that necessarily mean...that girls are just, less morally developed than boys are?
Well the sad thing is at the time nobody would know for sure. Nobody had ever REALLY done a comprehensive, multivariate analysis on moral development breaking things down by gender. In fact, Carol Gilligan notices that almost ALL of the test subjects being tested in Kohlberg's analysis...were boys. Almost all of the people administering the tests...were men. Practically every THEORY of moral development had been created from a male perspective… that had inherited a legacy in the field of psychology and ethics almost exclusively created by...men. What would happen if someone DARED to pay more detailed attention to the way GIRLS answered these moral dilemmas in CONTRAST to boys?
Carol Gilligan starts to look CLOSER at the data gathered from the studies. She comes across two different interviews of children being ASKED about a moral dilemma. One from a boy named Jake...another from a girl named Amy. Both kids are presented with the SAME moral dilemma that has come to be known as the Heinz experiment.
So here it is: there’s this guy named Heinz. Heinz is married to his wife who is really, really sick. The medicine, to make his wife feel better is at the local pharmacy. But Heinz...can’t afford the medication. The question is this: should Heinz steal the medication? What is the right thing to do in this situation? What moral criteria are we using to determine that?
First interview Gilligan looks at is the boy named Jake…now Jake’s answer is that Heinz SHOULD STEAL the medication. When asked WHY…it’s clear to the interviewer that Jake is considering the value of property…he’s considering the value of life…and then he’s using a deductive moral logic to come to the conclusion that life is more valuable than property. When pressed further about how it is wrong to steal, he doubles down on his opinion talking about how the medication can be replaced, but Heinz’s wife is one of a kind and CAN’T be replaced…he talks about how even though stealing is illegal, this is why the legal system leaves room for the judge to give Heinz the lowest sentence imaginable…he feels so confident in his SOLUTION to this moral dilemma that he even goes so far as to say that weighing the relative values of life and property almost makes this FEEL to him like a “math problem with human beings”. That ANY rational, THINKING person would HAVE to arrive at the same conclusion. Right is right.
At which point Kohlberg… you know, looking through the two way mirror into the interview room starts to weep uncontrollably wishing this kid Jake is his long lost son. I mean I’m joking there but the point is that to Kohlberg… this kid has the right idea! He is rationally, deductively using a moral calculus to arrive at an almost mathematical level of certainty about what is CLEARLY the conclusion most in line with justice.
But then Carol Gilligan looks at the answers that Amy gives to the exact same question. Amy’s answer is that no…Heinz SHOULDN’T steal the medication. She says maybe he should try to BORROW the money or find some sort of extra work he can do to MAKE the money. After all, his wife shouldn’t have to die…but stealing from the pharmacist is wrong too. When pressed FURTHER by the interviewer…what if he CAN’T borrow or make the money…should he steal the medicine then? She says no. When asked why not…Amy doesn’t cite some moral principle weighing the value of property and life…she doesn’t talk about trolley cars or axe murderers at your doorstep…this is how amy responds verbatim:
“If he stole the drug, he might save his wife then, but if he did, he might have to go to jail, and then his wife might get sicker again, and he couldn’t get more of the drug, and it might not be good. So they should really just talk it out and find some other way to make the money.”
In other words, to Carol Gilligan…instead of amy seeing this whole situation as a “math problem with human beings” she saw it more in terms of a “narrative of relationships that extends over time.”
There is a DIFFERENT TYPE of moral calculus that is going on here. One side, the male perspective, primarily concerned with justice, was WILLING to accept that someone in this situation is going to be hurt…the question becomes what is the most rational, fair way that this hurt can be distributed. But amy as Gilligan says accepted that there may be no mathematically quantifiable PERFECT moral answer, but she was trying to navigate the situation and arrive at an end where maybe…nobody NEEDS to get hurt. Maybe bridges DON’T have to be burned with the pharmacist. Maybe Heinz DOESN’T have to place himself above society and its laws. In other words: she considered the context of the situation, she considered the relationships BETWEEN the people involved, she tried to FIND a moral answer that considered everyone and PRESERVED the world they live in.
When pressed further AFTER this by the interviewer… who ASKS amy to logically justify her opinion on what the right thing to do is…with each question she closes up a little bit more, feels a little more intimidated, feels like she can’t really explain logically, mathematically WHY she feels this way, until near the end of the interview when asked over and over why he shouldn’t steal she says “I just think it’s wrong”.
Now HERE’S the BIG POINT… ON A SCALE of moral development…that is TESTING children based on HOW WELL they can logically DEDUCE what brings the most justice…Amy, and other young girls LIKE her are going to score LOWER with answers like these, LOWER than the boys around her same age. Implicit within this is the fact that when testing moral development almost EXCLUSIVELY from a MALE PERSPECTIVE…women are STATISTICALLY going to have scores that LOOK… like they are just morally weak men. But this one dimensional view of moral development is WRONG to Carol Gilligan. Women’s answers to these questions are NOT, as Freud might think, a LACK of moral development. Women are viewing the moral dilemma from a totally different perspective with a different end goal in mind.
To Carol Gilligan…while there very well MAY BE biological factors involved that account for this difference between men and women…MOSTLY…BECAUSE of how women and girls are typically socialized within our societies…they are expected by nearly everyone they ever come into contact with…to be caregivers. Men are told to be problem solvers by society…women are told to be caregivers. More specifically…their job in this world is to put their OWN NEEDS and individual identity on the backburner…and to provide CARE to their children, their spouses, the sick, the elderly…they are socialized to believe that their role is to keep the peace…to be socially adept enough to understand the relationships between people around them, to MAINTAIN those relationships, to put themselves in other people’s shoes.
Within the social categories that women and girls often have to navigate…historically…it has just not been USEFUL to think of morality in terms of fixed moral principles mediated by a deductive logic…that’s a MUCH more useful way of VIEWING things if you are a man navigating the social categories ethe MEN have to navigate…where society tells you you’re a complete LOSER in this world if you DON’T go out there and EXERT your vision upon the world of politics or economics or business.
However, moral development as a female…has required a TOTALLY DIFFERENT set of skills to survive. So a different set of skills are developed…ones that aren’t necessarily being TESTED for by Kohlberg and other developmental psychologists of the time.
So Carol Gilligan asks a question: what would happen…if instead of centering our morality around considerations of justice, as MEN typically do…what if we built an ethics around this ALTERNATIVE way of thinking? She goes on to EXPLORE this idea throughout her career, but NOT BEFORE she coins a term to try to QUANTIFY this whole alternative approach to ethics…she calls it: an ethics of care.
Now…that’s the short version of this…before we go into the LONGER analysis of an ethics of care…few things here that have to be said before we move any further. Because we’ve gotten to a point in the story of Carol Gilligan where she starts to intersect with the ongoing work that has been done IN THE FIELD of the ethics of care over the course of the last few decades.
Uh, cause I’m gonna spoil it for you here…Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice…goes on to disrupt NOT ONLY the way that people conduct developmental psychology…but she also disrupts the field of ethics in philosophy and creates an ENTIRELY new lane centered around CARE as a moral imperative.
And I say the word disrupt in the BEST possible way. Virginia Held, a philosopher whose work I’ll be referencing here throughout says it best, she says that the value of Gilligan’s work has less to do with her expounding everything there possibly was to say about an ethics of care…and more to do with the consideration of a female, largely IGNORED perspective… and the potentially revolutionary ideas that came out of these voices formerly lost in the margins. Gilligan saw the moral significance of CARE in terms of its importance to the entire project of humanity in a way people had never really developed before.
But that said, something important that NEEDS to be addressed before we go any further here is to explore the question: how exclusively FEMALE, IS this ethics of care, really?
Because here’s the thing: SOME feminist philosophers EMBRACE the ethics of care as a uniquely feminine approach to morality. But MOST feminist philosophers see viewing an ethics of care as a purely female approach…they see it as problematic. For one, they say it reinforces outdated gender stereotypes…I mean who’s to say that women are the only ones that stand to benefit from seeing the world through the lens of care? Also they’re EXTREMELY skeptical of feminizing an ethics of care, because of just how often female perspectives have been relegated throughout history.
The greater context here is that SINCE the ethics of care started to be developed as an approach to morality…there’s been SEVERAL attempts to minimize it into something that’s just not that important. People have called it “women’s ethics”...or “ethics for the home”...you know the idea being that…this is an ethical approach that applies in the PRIVATE areas of society…the ethics centered around justice and exerting your moral vision upon the world around you…these are the ethics that are more suited for the PUBLIC realm.
Other examples: people have tried to say… that an ethics of care is REALLY just an extension of virtue ethics…that Care is a virtue that needs to be considered…just as PATIENCE is a virtue that needs to be considered. ALL of these, to many feminist philosophers, DRASTICALLY underestimate the importance of what is being developed here. That this is an entirely NEW moral approach, with revolutionary implications that apply to the public realm JUST as much as the private.
We’ll talk more about the impacts the ethics of care can have on society after we discuss it a little bit more but just to conclude this section of things that would it be irresponsible NOT to bring up before we continue…understand…that the significance of this new lane being created in ethics centered around care is MUCH BIGGER than just a “female ethics for the home”...this is an ethics on the level of humanity. This is a critique of the way MOST ethical approaches have been done for thousands of years. This really can revolutionize HUMAN ethics, REGARDLESS of gender.
However… to leave out the fact…that this new approach was ARRIVED at by someone who DARED to consider a FEMALE perspective, and that this perspective had been largely ignored because of imbalances in the voices allowed to contribute TO the field of ethics…to leave that out would be leaving out an important part of the story, and just goes to show how… when you willfully IGNORE voices in ANY group setting…you willfully CREATE blindspots for yourself. And those blindspots can turn even the most dynamic genius with the BEST intentions… into a mere technician that spends their career justifying a limited perspective.
Also… before moving forward, please understand MY agenda here as a fan of philosophy…I’m not trying to make claims about gender essentialism or social constructs surrounding gender, this podcast is not about me…ultimately, I just have a LOT of respect for every one of these philosophers that I talk about on the podcast …and what I’m trying to do here is pay respect to the work of Gilligan and Held and Noddings and Tronto and to introduce an idea that TRULY offered a major critique of the way former philosophers that we’ve TALKED about on this podcast had been THINKING about ethics. So with the ONLY relevant skill set I HAVE in this world…let’s TALK about the philosophical context of this and go MORE into understanding this ethics, centered around care, how would an ethics of care even look?
Maybe a good place to start is to offer a definition of what an ethics of CARE is even shooting for. What is CARE? And, the definitions obviously vary among the people doing WORK in this area, but one of the more POPULAR definitions that can help us here today, is from the philosophers Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher…they define care as:
“A species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves and our environment.”
So right away you can start to see how Jake, whose approach was centered around justice…and Amy, whose approach was centered around care…might have arrived at TOTALLY different conclusions because they were aiming for two TOTALLY different things.
To help EXPLAIN the difference BETWEEN these two approaches…philosopher Virginia Held CONTRASTS the two here…she says:
“An ethic of justice focuses on questions of fairness, equality, individual rights, abstract principles and the consistent application of them. An ethic of care focuses on attentiveness, trust, responsiveness to need, narrative nuance and cultivating caring relations.”
Now it may be the case…that we need BOTH of these approaches TOGETHER, to have a balanced way of viewing morality. But living in a world where an ethics of care has been ignored, degraded and cordoned off into the private sphere throughout history…the ethics of care…when it’s actually paid ATTENTION to…is going to SEEM like it’s BURSTING onto the scene with a pretty radical critique of what starts to look like a outdated, naive view of moral subjectivity.
The FIRST thing that an ethics of care is going to critique is the IDEA…that the BEST way to assess the morality of a given situation… is from the perspective of liberal individualism. Now what do they mean by that…well… think of classic examples of ethics from the western canon.
Kantian Deontology. Bentham’s utilitarianism, ethics of justice, take your pick basically of ANY ONE OF them…and what you’ll find is that the SUBJECT, that is CHOOSING which moral decision to carry out…is described as a rational, independent, autonomous individual. And for the record BECAUSE of this historical legacy… this has ALSO become one of the most COMMON WAYS that people VIEW themselves when making moral decisions in their life. Do you SEE yourself as an independent, rational individual? It’s OKAY if the answer’s YES…this is how people are often socialized to think.
Virginia Held says that there’s this expectation WRITTEN IN to these traditional forms of morality…that the people MAKING moral decisions in our societies are a bunch of “unrelated, independent and mutually indifferent individuals assumed to be equal.” and that “the more abstract the reasoning about a moral problem, the better, because the more likely to avoid bias and arbitrariness.”
WE ALL CAN RELATE to this way of THINKING! But under an ethics of care this TYPE of liberal individualism…to put it kindly…. is a delusional fantasy. An ethics of care is going to give a little tough love to this common way of viewing the moral subject, only because it cares though. I mean if an ethics of care didn’t LOVE traditional morality…it wouldn’t say anything at all.
And to illustrate all the differences between this traditional moral subject and the moral subject embedded into an ethics of care…maybe the BEST place to start would be to TALK ABOUT the TRADITIONAL moral subject, IN its natural environment…it’s an environment that these TRADITIONAL philosophers loved to talk about…that is IN one of these convenient, hypothetical scenarios…like the trolley car problem of Immanuel Kant.
Because I think if we do that… we’d be ABLE TO SEE, clearly, exactly WHERE these older attempts at morality start to run into problems, and where an ethics of CARE can offer us a new, fresh perspective on moral decisions.
So to get STARTED on that, hopefully everyone listening to this is at least REMOTELY familiar with the trolley car problem. Imagine a person standing on the side of some trolley car tracks, with their hand on one of those levers that SWITCHES the trolley onto a DIFFERENT set of tracks. Imagine this person sees a trolley… speeding towards five people unaware that the trolley is approaching, no doubt if this person does nothing, the trolley is going to kill five people. But if this person pulls the lever, they can SWITCH the trolley onto a set of tracks that only has ONE person on it. The question is: should the person pull the lever?
Now, obviously this is one of the most well known moral dilemmas in the history of philosophy for a reason. Looking at this from the perspective of traditional morality…where the person standing next to the lever is an independent, rational, autonomous person… unrelated and mutually indifferent to everyone else in the world…looking at it from THAT perspective…you can start to have some really interesting conversations about ethics. You can weigh different values against each other. You can even come up with what seems like a CORRECT ANSWER to this dilemma… based on the moral principles that you’ve reasoned to.
But it’s funny. The trolley car problem ALWAYS starts to get a little more CONFUSING when you add little variations into the mix. Like what if the ONE person you’d have to kill to save the five is the person that you love the MOST in the world? What if the five people on the tracks are all death row inmates who are guilty of horrible crimes? What if you PERSONALLY had to drive the trolley INTO the five people yourself and see the looks on their faces as you did it?
The point is: when CONTEXT, when REAL LIFE SITUATIONS start to work their way IN to this otherwise sterilized, hypothetical thought experiment…all of a sudden moral principles start to feel much harder to arrive at. All of a sudden you can start to doubt yourself. Like am I a BAD person? Am I a morally weak person because I would choose to kill five strangers over one person that I know…even though I FULLY REALIZE the mathematical way of seeing the moral decision is that five lives are greater than one?
Well maybe you’re NOT… a bad person for feeling that way.
An ethics of care would START by saying that there is a HUGE DISPARITY…between moral reasoning as it exists in one of these thought experiments…and ACTUAL moral reasoning as we experience it on the ground…as REAL people, immersed in REAL WORLD scenarios, without the LUXURY of being so disconnected from the ACTUAL decision.
The moral subject of the trolley car problem is a total fantasy, they don’t EXIST. This person that’s independent, rational, theorizing in an indifferent way, EQUAL to everyone else in the world. Let’s just go down the list of what’s WRONG there for an ethics of care:
Ask yourself: is this person on the side of the tracks independently, making decisions? Are they ENTIRELY self-sufficient? Well maybe in the fake world of the thought experiment…Carol Gilligan would say maybe if you were viewing subjectivity ONLY from the perspective of men and how they’ve been socialized to interface with the world throughout history. I mean you can see it just by TALKING to people… you ask a dude to tell you who he is. He’ll come back at you with all sorts of “I” statements about himself. I am a software developer. I’m really into cooking videos. I’m a yellow belt two stripes in children’s tae kwon do where I beat up on little kids. This is how a man will typically describe himself.
But you ask a WOMAN to tell you who she is, Gilligan says, and MORE OFTEN THAN NOT…she’ll tell you about the meaningful RELATIONSHIPS, that she has. I’m a mother. I’m a wife. I’m a sister.
This whole IDEA…that you are an independent subject navigating the world, SEPARATE from everyone else around you… is a complete, delusion. You are one person… that’s part of an intricate web of relationships ALL AROUND you, that MAKE your existence even possible. Your family, your friends, your coworkers, your community, everyone that maintains society…Virginia Held says the only reason anyone could POSSIBLY THINK that they’re actually independent is BECAUSE of this network of people that take care of the things you take for granted that ALLOW you to CONTINUE in this delusion.
Traditional morality pushes this idea that we are BORN individuals first…and then LATER ON, we decide to FORM these relationships that benefit us in the MORAL PROJECTS we want to carry out. But from the perspective of an ethics of care… when you REALLY think about it…what is the default STATE of human life? You are born into relationships…you are born, COMPLETELY DEPENDENT upon the people that provide CARE to you.
And this CARE…that is almost entirely IGNORED in traditional takes on morality…is fundamental to this whole project we have going on. Consider the fact that it doesn’t really matter WHAT you want to do… that you consider to be moral…you can cure cancer…you can send a rocketship to mars…pick ANYTHING you think is a MORAL GOOD in this world…and without the CARE that got you to that place of feeling DELUSIONALLY independent…the species would CEASE to exist. Without the CARE that’s REQUIRED…to protect the environment we live in, to contain the social institutions that organize our societies…without the care that’s required to maintain the health of the people and world that are NECESSARY for ANYTHING ELSE to EVEN take place…once again nothing would ever get done at all!
So to an ethics of care…the subject NAVIGATING these moral dilemmas is NOT independent…but instead someone who needs to RECOGNIZE their INTERDEPENDENCE on the world around them… and someone who should consider themselves and their decisions as a PART of that narrative of relationships that extends over time. Every moral decision that we MAKE is going to be in CONSIDERATION of these relationships that make our lives possible. As Carol Gilligan says an ethics of care is: “An ethic grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully and heard with respect.”
But let’s get back to the person pulling the lever in the trolley problem…let’s keep going down this list of the ways an ethics of care would see this person as NOT, in fact… a good example of a REAL person that’s making moral decisions. We’ve already seen that real people are not totally independent. Okay.
How about this other idea… that the moral subject is a RATIONAL creature…that through a system of moral logic this person is ARRIVING at moral principles…and that the more RATIONAL and ABSTRACT the theory the better because it’s further away from bias and emotion?
Well make no mistake…an ethics of care is obviously going to rely HEAVILY on rationality…the DIFFERENCE between IT and the person in the trolley car problem… is that an ethics of care leaves room for certain, specific emotions that are undeniably VALUABLE when assessing a moral choice. The thinking is…look, once again…MAYBE in a fabricated thought experiment human beings can be TOTALLY rational creatures…but the reality is that we are NOT totally rational. And emotions are NOT NECESSARILY always a HINDRANCE to making moral decisions. There are different degrees and different TYPES of emotions…certain emotions are actually things to be cultivated and practiced. Things like empathy, sensitivity, responsiveness, Virginia Held even says ANGER can sometimes be a useful emotion when assessing a situation that REQUIRES a moral decision. Purely rational deduction is not ENOUGH, for an ethics of care.
The point is: this antiquated notion… that morality requires people to be these ROBOTS that are as RATIONAL as possible…and that emotion and bias towards a situation are ALWAYS a distraction… the sort of thing Freud said about women’s capacity for moral development…this idea is just wrong.
Morality is a human process. Human beings have bias. Human beings have emotions. The fact the person pulling the lever in the trolley problem, feels DIFFERENT about their moral principles, when the one person on the track is their first born child…that WOULDN’T be SURPRISING to someone seeing this from the perspective of an ethics of care. OF COURSE you’re going to feel different. You’re not some fantasy robot in a thought experiment…you’re a human being embedded into relationships and context IN the real world.
And THIS is where we can see the problem with the expectation…that this fake person pulling the lever…is going to be ARRIVING at abstract, moral PRINCIPLES that apply to every single situation. CONTEXT EXISTS in the real world. Different situations require a different moral reasoning based on the specific relationships involved.
In many ways…the WHOLE POINT of one of these thought experiments was to REMOVE real life FROM the moral decision. To dehumanize it. And it’s not like they had bad intentions…once again, they were just trying to remove human bias from what they SAW as essentially a math equation.
But someone arguing for an ethics of CARE would say that the more you try to arrive at these moral generalities…the FURTHER you’re going to get away from where ACTUAL morality is taking place…in PARTICULAR situations, and sometimes…sensitivity towards others and responsiveness to their needs in the moment is going to be a better solution than purely rational calculations.
Just to illustrate HOW, MANY, AREAS an ethics of care is going to CONTRAST with traditional morality…let’s just put them back to back…you could say that an ethics of care is inductive…rather than deductive. Based on relationships rather than independent. Contextual rather than eternal. Rationally emotive instead of purely rational and maybe the most IMPORTANT difference between the two…is that when it comes to BECOMING a more moral person…traditional forms of morality say that it is possible to sit around, think about moral situations and then theorize about what the best thing to do is. That is a path to DEVELOPING a greater level of moral maturity. Not the case with an ethics of care. Moral growth in an ethics of care is going to be centered around Action…rather than theory.
Now, let’s talk about that action. How does an ethics of care look different than traditional morality when it’s actually applied to the real world? And how do we not just CARE for others…but CARE, WELL for others?
Because something to consider is that someone can WANT to CARE for someone else more than anything in the ENTIRE WORLD…but just not be the one that’s QUALIFIED to care for them at the time and end up doing more harm than good. We have a responsibility to know the difference…and again, that ALSO applies to care when it comes to our environment and social institutions as well.
Quick reminder of our definition from before…remember CARE as a moral imperative…is NOT just something that goes on interpersonally between two people. But again anything to maintain, contain and repair our world so that we can LIVE in it as best as possible. So while I’m going to be giving examples here of providing care to other PEOPLE who are in need…try to think about how the same ideas apply to things like society and the environment as well.
Now, how do you get better at care? Well, picture a moral exemplar when it comes to an ethics of care. Picture somebody you know…who is just REALLY GOOD at caring for other people. Could be your parents, could be your partner, someone at a hospital, DOESN’T really matter WHO it is.
But if you want to become a more moral person under the parameters of an ethics of care ask yourself: what skills does that person have…that YOU currently don’t have? Because one thing that’s important to note here: it’s NOT LIKE this person was just BORN with all of the skills necessary to be AMAZING at caring for people…if they were then Tronto says it wouldn’t fall under the category of MORALITY at that point… it would fall under the category of INSTINCT. And the same way you WOULDN’T get mad at a lion for eating a gazelle…if it were instinct… you wouldn’t have such a deep respect for someone that’s so good at providing care. The reality is… this person’s put in a LOT of hard work over the years to GET as good as they are.
The philosophers Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher lay out five key elements of care…virtues to be developed if you wanted to APPLY an ethics of care to things in your life. Think of this as a sort of HOW TO manual for moral maturity UNDER an ethics of care. These virtues IN ORDER are Attentiveness, Responsibility, Competence, Responsiveness and Plurality… and let’s go and explain the IMPORTANCE of EACH of these skills one by one.
The first one is called Attentiveness. Now, simply put…to be able to CARE for someone’s needs…you gotta actually KNOW that they’re in need of care. Obviously…but the deeper thing that’s being IMPLIED here is that…IF you’re the kind of person… that’s just coasting through life… not paying attention to the people or the world around you…IF you’re the kind of person that sees yourself as one of those self-sufficient independent subjects just making decisions only considering yourself…IF you’re that kind of person…then it’s going to be impossible for you to KNOW that there are things that are in NEED of care and attention…ALL AROUND YOU.
Now what FOLLOWS from that, from the PERSPECTIVE of an ethics of care…is that willfully IGNORING the world around you…not paying attention, MAKES you a bad person. This is an important difference to emphasize…because under some OTHER moral approaches out there…being ambitious, being LASER FOCUSED on personal achievements and goals, having a STRONG personal identity that you work on constantly…under some moral approaches these are things that MAKE you a GOOD person, someone to look UP to.
But under an ethics of care…it’s not that you CAN’T have personal goals…it’s that if those goals… come at the expense of you IGNORING everything else that needs to be done around you in the world…that’s not GOOD enough. I mean just imagine someone that works 16 hours a day, but practically IGNORES their kids…IGNORES people suffering in the world all around them. Would you consider them to be a good person? Or does BEING a good person, as Joan Tronto writes, REQUIRE, that you respond to the needs of others that PRESENT themselves to you in your life?
Point is: think of HOW MUCH of human life is taken up, by either doing something to maintain the world around you or other people doing things that help maintain YOUR existence. In other words think of how much of life is taken up, by CARE or by being CARED FOR. You can’t just IGNORE that GIANT piece of what it is to be human… and think that your own personal projects and identity are all that really matters morally. That’s just willful ignorance. And cultivating the skill of paying attention…is the ANTIDOTE to that willful ignorance. No doubt the person you pictured before who is AMAZING at caring for others is ALSO someone who’s pretty dang good at paying attention.
The second virtue to focus on is Responsibility. So, once you’ve started to pay attention to the world around you…and you nitice problems that need to be fixed…you’re not going to get very far in DOING that if you don’t have a feeling of responsibility that SOMETHING needs to be done ABOUT it. And this may seem like a really obvious statement at first, but Joan Tronto thinks it’s CRUCIAL to mark a distinction between moral actions motivated by a feeling of responsibility…and actions motivated by a feeling of obligation. What’s the key difference there?
Well you sign a contract, or you make a deal with someone that you’re going to DO something, you shake hands…people follow through with those sorts of arrangements mostly out of a sense of obligation. Nothing WRONG with this. I mean it’s IN these sorts of arrangements that a lot of what makes society work is BUILT upon.
But if you’re walking down the street and there’s a little kid bleeding out of their head needing help…or if you hear about some indigenous population being wiped out by a totally preventable disease…you don’t try to CARE for those people out of a sense of obligation…nobody’s going to come and arrest you if you don’t DO anything about it.
So the only way these things in our world ever get CARED for is if there is someone out there that has a sense of responsibility for maintaining the world we live in…and takes it upon themselves to DO something about it. Cultivating that sense of responsibility for the world around you becomes NECESSARY if you’re EVER going to take care of anyone.
The THIRD virtue you’re gonna want to have…is Competence. And, while ALL of these virtues are going to be REQUIRED to provide good care to someone…COMPETENCE is going to be one of the most important ones. Because even if you’re paying attention, and you’ve identified problems, and you’ve TAKEN responsibility to CARE for those needs…if you don’t know how to provide the care that is needed…then you’re not ACTUALLY helping ANYONE…no matter HOW hard you try.
Like imagine I’m taking care of someone who’s sick…and I’m like what do they need? Chicken Noodle Soup. Sick people LOVE chicken noodle soup. So I go to the stove, bring it up to a simmering boil, take the pot, bring it to their bedside and say I thought you could use some chicken noodle soup…and then dump the soup all over their head. Get well soon! You know, TECHNICALLY…I’m providing CARE to this person. I’m just completely incompetent.
And this persons all mad at me now. And I’d be like look stop boiling in your own soup over there. Boil in MY soup. YAH! That’s me throwing the soup. Look all jokes aside…this is a cartoonish example, but you can imagine a TON of real world scenarios when it comes to people trying to help the environment, help underrepresented groups, Joan Tronto gives an example in the area of education. She says imagine a school district that is massively underfunded…and the students are in need of care…we need someone to teach them how to do math. So the school district ASSIGNS a teacher to the classroom, but here’s the thing: the teacher doesn’t KNOW how to do math EITHER! They just sort of go through the motions and the kids never actually learn anything.
Her point here is even bigger than it may initially seem…under a LOOSER definition of care…imagine how easy it is for the school district here to say… hey, the students needed to learn math, they were in need of care…WE took care of the problem! We sent someone in there to TEACH them about math. But despite their attentiveness to the problem and responsibility to do SOMETHING…have they really accomplished ANYTHING? The ethics of care, then, is at least in PART a consequentialist ethics. It’s not GOOD enough to just TAKE ACTION DOING WHATEVER, just because it adheres to good intentions and some external code of ethics in a fake TROLLEY car world. The END RESULT of care MATTERS. CONTEXT matters… and COMPETENCE is a virtue that’s important to cultivate if you want to minimize the level of movement without progress. The person you pictured who you respect for being really good at care…NO DOUBT…has put in quite a bit of work learning what actually works.
The fourth virtue Tronto and Fisher say that care requires is Responsiveness. Or the CONSTANT, AWARENESS…of the response you’re receiving BY the thing that’s being cared for…ABOUT your care. But even that definition doesn’t tell the full story.
Let me start here. Joan Tronto writes that implicit within ALL care dynamics is the reality of vulnerability and inequality. Whenever there’s a situation where there is one person being cared for…and another person that’s providing care…that INSTANTLY creates a power discrepancy. Even in situations where neither party RECOGNIZES the vulnerability!
She gives an example of an office worker…and how when they go into work every day…they don’t feel VULNERABLE to the janitor who hauls off the trash when everyone goes home. BUT if the janitor stopped coming into work one day and nobody REPLACED them…you’d quickly realize just how much you relied on that person’s care.
Now think of that POWER discrepancy when it becomes a little MORE pronounced…a little LESS innocent. Think of it when it’s a doctor and a patient. Think of it when it’s someone who’s NOT a doctor…taking care of someone who might not even be THINKING clearly, or be able to ARTICULATE themselves. HOW EASY WOULD IT BE for the caregiver to be attentive to a need, feel responsible to act, be competent enough to provide care, but not LISTEN to the person they’re caring for and have an attitude like meh, trust me…I KNOW what this person needs. I know what they need more than THEY know what they need. I know what I’D want if I were in their situation.
The virtue of responsiveness illustrates ANOTHER way that the ethics of care is going to CONTRAST with traditional forms of morality. We are NOT…all equal across the board as subjects ENGAGING in moral decisions. The truth about navigating REAL LIFE as a human being…is that inequalities and power dynamics exist in practically EVERY SITUATION that we FIND ourselves in. And WHENEVER there’s a discrepancy in power…it creates the potential for ABUSE. Joan Tronto writes that we have to remain vigilant ABOUT that possibility and to understand that people are not “interchangeable” as she says, in these caregiving situations. You can’t just ASSUME you know what’s best for someone without even LISTENING to them.
And REMEMBER what Carol Gilligan said before…that an ethics of care is grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully and heard with respect.
WITH THAT IN MIND…part of CARING for someone is going to require NOT JUST putting yourself in someone else’s SHOES…but to try to put yourself in someone else’s…SELF. To really try to see things AS THEY see things. In THEIR language. On their OWN terms. And it’s NOT always gonna be easy! They could be delirious…or in a state of panic…maybe they just COMPLETELY disagree with you on every point in this world…point is an important part of care is trying to understand WHERE this person is coming from without PROJECTING yourself onto their reality. You have to put your OWN motives to the side. There’s a sense in which CARE…can NEVER be done WELL with a shallow understanding of the thing you’re providing care to. You NEED intricate KNOWLEDGE of the situation to EVER know how to care effectively.
And you can see how this applies NOT JUST in private caregiving situations, but to the public realm and globalized politics. How EASY would it be to see a culture on the other side of the world that is hurting and in need…to feel responsible to fix their problems…to have the resources and be competent enough to administer them…and then to arrogantly assume that well what these people need are cell phones and democracy and red bulls on every street corner…THAT’LL fix all their problems! How the cared for FEELS about the care that’s being given…MATTERS. And again… when you think BACK to that person you pictured that’s REALLY GOOD at caring for people…no question…they have cultivated this virtue of responsiveness and gotten better at understanding HOW the care they’re GIVING is being received.
The last virtue that needs to be considered if we want to become BETTER as caregivers…is Plurality. GIVEN…the interconnected nature of our lives and this increasingly globalized world…maintaining our ability to communicate with other people we may disagree with on some stuff…having RESPECT for our fellow people, having trust in those relationships…these are all going to be things we NEED if we EVER hope to COLLECTIVELY, come together and take RESPONSIBILITY for the care that’s DESPERATELY needed if you just look around you in most major cities these days.
I’ll use MY country as an example…you know what do people say are some BIG problems that need to be addressed that we don’t ever seem to DO anything about? They’ll say we have a drug and addiction epidemic…we have half a million homeless people…we have an education system that people say is ineffective or corrupt, we have children growing up without parents, EITHER because they’re not geographically present, OR because they’re just not there mentally they prioritize other things like working and securing their individual identity…we have an adversarial relationship with other countries and we don’t take care of the problems we have at home, people are barely making ends meet, people are destroying the environment, many more…these are not, MY statements…these are things Americans say when you talk to them on the ground level. People wonder WHY these problems have existed for so long and NEVER seem to be getting any better.
Well part of it of COURSE is that these problems are incredibly complicated. Yes. But Virginia Held, AMONG OTHERS would ask: could part of it ALSO be that we’re not collectively prioritizing CARE enough, as a culture? Think of how much we’ve IGNORED care throughout history. Think of the caregivers in our societies today…stay at home moms and dads, teachers, nurses, social workers…these are some of the most underpaid, voiceless people in EXISTENCE. What if there’s a different way of doing things that needs to be considered? She says,
“Instead of seeing the corporate sector, and military strength, and government and law as the most important segments of society deserving the highest levels of wealth and power, a caring society might see the tasks of bringing up children, educating its members, meeting the needs of all, achieving peace and treasuring the environment and doing these in the best ways possible to be that to which the greatest social efforts of all should be devoted.”
People sometimes say that these HUGE social problems are evidence of the DEGRADATION of western society. That these are SYMPTOMS of a larger social disease that is EVENTUALLY going to lead to societal collapse. But it’s interesting to consider…HOW MUCH is…our lack of responsiveness to these glaring problems because we are finding SOLUTIONS to the problems through a moral lens with HUGE blindspots when it comes to the value of care? How might the solutions to the problems look different if they WERE more contextual, relational…if we ELECTED people who SAW the world more through responsiveness to need RATHER THAN purely rational calculation.
Are we looking for SOLUTIONS to the problems in our societies as narrowly as Kohlberg looked for moral development in children back in the 1970’s? Pretty amazing that it all started with Carol Gilligan…someone who dared to think philosophically ABOUT the status quo in her field…and offered us all a new perspective… IN a different voice.
Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
