Exploring the Virtue of Care: Balancing Personal and Community Needs

1. 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

2. The world of the market • The competitive individualist • Disciplined, hard working, entrepreneurial, organized, driven to succeed

3. 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.

4. Empathy and Care • Empathy is basic human capacity • Must be developed through • past care • caring interactions with others • Commitment to be a caring person

5. 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

6. 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.

7. Failures of Empathy • Deliberate blunting of feeling of empathy: e.g. blaming the victim • Here and now bias • Empathic over-arousal

8. 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)

9. 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”

10. “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.

11. “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.

12. “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.

13. Care and other Moral Perspectives • Different perspectives reveal different aspects. • Care as practice and care as moral perspective

14. 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?

15. 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?