Reading 40. Rita C. Manning, Just Caring
Outline with Study Questions
I.Introduction
1.What are the two elements of Manning’s ethic of caring?
2.What principle limits our obligation to care?
II.Section I. Caring
1.What situations call for a caring response on one’s part?
2.On what three factors does one’s caring response depend?
3.How do subsistence needs differ from psychological needs? Meeting which kinds of needs is usually more fulfilling for the caregiver?
III.Section II. Objects of Care
1.In addition to persons, what can be an object of care?
2.What should determine which objects we care for?
IV.Section IV. Knowing How and When to Care
1.In Hume’s moral philosophy, how does justice supplant natural feelings of empathy?
2.What is Noddings’s strategy for determining what caring requires when natural caring is absent?
3.How do Hume and Nussbaum differ from Noddings with regard to the role of general principles in ethics? With whom does Manning agree?
V.Section V. Defense of a General Obligation to Care
1.On what three grounds can the obligation to care be defended?
2.Why does Manning reject Noddings’s position that we have no obligation to help the starving people in Africa?
3.In Manning’s view, what is the basis of our obligations toward animals?
VI.Section VI. Limitations on Obligations to Care
1.What distinguishes our prima facie obligation to care from our actual obligation to care?
2.In the ethic of care, when are we required to sacrifice?
VII.Section VIII. Caring and Other Ethical Theories
1.How does an ethic of care differ from virtue ethics? How are these theories similar?
2.What feature does an ethic of care share with Nietzsche’s approach to determining how we should live our lives?
3.In what two ways is an ethic of care holistic?
4.How does an ethic of care differ from the land ethic with regard to human psychology?
VIII.Section IX. Conclusion
1.What are the advantages of an ethic of care?
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
1.Is care the fundamental ethical value?
2.Do we have an obligation to extend a disposition to care to all persons in need, or just to some?
3.Is it immoral not to actively care for those in need when we are able to do so without significant personal sacrifice?
4.Does the obligation to care extend to animals?
5.Does an ethic of care differ from an ethic of love?
For Further Reading
Baier, Annette C. “What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” Noûs 19 (March 1985): 53–63. Reprinted in Baier’s Moral Prejudices: Essays in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Baier argues that female moral philosophers emphasize love and that male moral philosophers emphasize obligation, and she suggests that these two notions can be integrated into an ethic of trust.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. 184 pp.
In Chapter 3, “Concepts of Self and Morality” (pp. 64–105), psychologist Gilligan contends that women have understandings of the self and of morality that differ from those of men and that do not fit traditional, male-based models of moral development.
Held, Virginia. “Feminism and Moral Theory.” In Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, pp. 111–28. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987.
Held argues that the foundation of society is the mother-child relation, not the buyer-seller relation of the marketplace, and explores the kind of ethics that would result from a focus on nurturing relationships.
Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 216 pp.
Chapter 4, “An Ethic of Caring” (pp. 79–103), builds an ethic of care on the foundation of natural caring, which springs from affection, such as that of a mother for her child.
Slote, Michael. Morals from Motives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 216 pp.
See Chapter 3, “The Structure of Caring” (pp. 63–91), and Chapter 4, “The Justice of Caring” (pp.92–113).
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1994. 226 pp.
See Chapter 4, “Care” (pp. 101–24), and Chapter 5, “An Ethic of Care” (pp. 125–55).