Can the Ethics of Care Handle Violence?

Abstract

It may be thought that the ethics of care has developed important insights into the moral values involved in the caring practices of family, friendship, and personal caregiving, but that the ethics of care has little to offer in dealing with violence. The violence of crime, terrorism, war, and violence against women in any context may seem beyond the ethics of care. Skepticism is certainly in order if it is suggested that we can deal with violence simply by caring. Violence seems to call for the harsh arm of law and enforcement, not the soft touch of care. Elsewhere I have discussed how the ethics of care would recommend respect for international law and how it would thus approach issues of military intervention. I will concentrate here on how the ethics of care can contribute guidance in dealing with family violence and in confronting terrorism.

Keywords:

• Care
• Ethics of Care
• Kantian Ethics
• Law
• Violence
• Violence against Women
• Terrorism
• War

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on Philosophy and Everyday Life at the University of Oslo, Norway, 9–10 June 2008. I am grateful to Tove Pettersen and others for comments on that version, and to Christine Koggel and Joan Orme for subsequent comments. The paper is based in part on my books The Ethics of Care and How Terrorism is Wrong.

Notes

¹Massing writes that “10,000 civilians at a minimum were killed during the invasion, the large majority victims of the coalition” (p. 87).

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Notes on contributors

Virginia Held

Virginia Held is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate School, and Professor Emerita at Hunter College. Her book The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and global was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. Among her other books are The Public Interest and Individual Interests, (Basic Books, 1970); Rights and Goods: Justifying Social Action (Free Press, 1984, University of Chicago Press, 1989); Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1993); and How Terrorism is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (Oxford University Press, 2008); as well as the edited collections Property, Profits, and Economic Justice (Wadsworth, 1980), and Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics (Westview, 1995). She co-edited the collections Philosophy and Political Action with Kai Nielsen and Charles Parsons, (Oxford University Press, 1972) and Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs with Sidney Morgenbesser and Thomas Nagel (Oxford University Press, 1974). In 2001–2002 she was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has had Fulbright and Rockefeller fellowships. She has been on the editorial boards of many journals in the areas of philosophy and political theory, and has also taught at Yale, Dartmouth, UCLA, and Hamilton. She has two children and five grandchildren