Maurice Hamington

Interview with prof.dr. Maurice Hamington.

1. Where are you working at this moment?

I work at Metropolitan State University of Denver in Denver, Colorado, USA. My title is Associate Vice President of Academic Centers and Programs and I am a Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

My work with care has taken on three directions:

Exploring the embodied nature of caring.
Framing care as a performative endeavor.
Applied aspects of care.

In Embodied Care (University of Illinois Press, 2004), I argued that human bodies facilitate caring and that our bodies contain prenoetic caring knowledge. My most recent work, which builds on the notion of embodied care, frames care as performative and thus views care as more than an ethical theory but an ontological and epistemological theory as well. Finally, an ongoing stream of my work has been to apply care theory to social and political policies and practices as in the anthologies, Socializing Care (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Feminism and Hospitality (Lexington Books, 2010), and Applying Care to Business Ethics (Springer, 2011)

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

I was first exposed to the theories during the course of study leading to my first Ph.D. in Religion and Social Ethics (University of Southern California, 1994) and then the focus of my second Ph.D. in Philosophy was developing the notion of embodied care. If find care theory a compelling way to understand identity, knowledge creation, as well as morality.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

I prefer to think of “care theory” rather than the ethics of care. The reason is that I find care does a different kind of work than other forms of ethics. Rather than simply answering the question, “what is the right thing to do?”, care addresses what I know and who I am as well as how to act toward one another. I view care as possessing elements of postmodernism in that it defies neat categories of understanding.

Care is fundamentally, an embodied, performative, and imaginative endeavor that has significant implications for what we know, who we are, and the nature of the good.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

Ethics is more than rules, rights, or consequences. We cannot address issues of morality without integrating issues of identity and epistemology as well.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

Nel Noddings

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

Dalmiya, Vrinda, “Why Should Knowers Care?” Hypatia vol. 17, no. 1 (Winter 2002)
Noddings, Nel, The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality (University of California Press, 2010).
Verducci, Susan, “A Moral Method? Thoughts on Cultivating Empathy Through Method Acting” Journal of Moral Education 29:1 2000.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

Books

Hamington, Maurice and Maureen Sander-Staudt, Eds., Applying Care Ethics to Business, Issues in Business Ethics Series, Springer, September 2011.
Hamington, Maurice, Ed., Feminism and Hospitality: Gender in the Host/Guest Relationship, Lexington Books (a Division of Rowman & Littlefield), August 2010.
Hamington, Maurice, and Dorothy C. Miller, Eds., Socializing Care: Feminist Ethics and Public Issues, Rowman and Littlefield, January 2006.
Hamington, Maurice, Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Ethics, University of Illinois Press, September 2004.

Articles

Hamington, Maurice, “Caring, Journalism, and the Power of Particularism,” Expositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, Fall 2011.
Hamington, Maurice, “Care Ethics and Corporeal Inquiry in Patient Relations,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 5:1 (Spring 2012): 52-69.
Hamington, Maurice, “Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: How Care Ethics Informs Social Justice,” Social Philosophy Today, 26:1, 2011.
Hamington, Maurice, “Care Ethics, John Dewey’s ‘Dramatic Rehearsal’ and Moral Education,” Philosophy of Education Yearbook 2010. Spring 2011.
Hamington, Maurice, “The Will to Care: Performance, Expectation, and Imagination,” Hypatia, 25:3, Summer 2010.
Hamington, Maurice, “Toward a Theory of Feminist Hospitality,” Feminist Formations (formerly National Women’s Studies Association Journal), 22:1, April 2010.
Hamington, Maurice, “Business is Not a Game: The Metaphoric Fallacy,” Journal of Business Ethics, 86:4, 2009.
Hamington, Maurice, “Learning Ethics from Our Relationships with Animals: Moral Imagination,” International Journal of Applied Ethics, 22:2, Fall 2008.
Hamington, Maurice, “Care Ethics and International Justice: The Cosmopolitanism of Jane Addams and Kwame Anthony Appiah,” Social Philosophy Today, 23, 2008.
Hamington, Maurice, “Touching the Other in Myself: Merleau-Ponty, Tactility, and Care Ethics,” Review Journal of Political Philosophy, 4:1, 2006.
Hamington, Maurice, “Jane Addams and the Politics of Embodied Care,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 15:2, Fall 2001.

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

Care theory needs to be more than an academic pursuit. It is gaining popularity but only among some academics. Care needs to be a social and political value that helps repair our world. Traditional Western approaches to ethics are inadequate to address the challenges of our diverse social existence.

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

I wish to be supportive. Your mission is much needed and I would like to see it be successful.

Interviews

Carol Gilligan

1. Where are you working at this moment?

I am a University Professor at New York University, teaching in the School of Law, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. (Carol Gilligan on Wikipedia)

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

My research on identity and moral development led me to identify the ethics of care as a “different voice”—a voice that joined self with relationship and reason with emotion. By transcending these binaries it shifted the paradigm of psychological and moral theory. The ethics of care starts from the premise that as humans we are inherently relational, responsive beings and the human condition is one of connectedness or interdependence.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

I came to write about an ethics of care after listening to the ways in which people speak about experiences of moral conflict and choice that they face. My research focused on actual rather than hypothetical situations of moral conflict and choice and explored how people construct moral conflicts and choices, what they see as the moral problem or question, and how moral language comes into play in shaping the choices they consider and the actions they take. I was impelled to write about an ethics of care by the disparities I heard between the voice of moral theories and the voices of people on the ground.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

As an ethic grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully (in their own right and on their own terms) and heard with respect. An ethics of care directs our attention to the need for responsiveness in relationships (paying attention, listening, responding) and to the costs of losing connection with oneself or with others. Its logic is inductive, contextual, psychological, rather than deductive or mathematical.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

That morality is grounded in a psychological logic, reflecting the ways in which we experience ourselves in relation to others and that the origins of morality lie in human relationships as they give rise to concerns about injustice and carelessness. Studying development, I realized that concerns about oppression and concerns about abandonment are built into the human life cycle, given the differential power between children and adults and the fact that care is essential for human survival. An ethics of care speaks to these concerns.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

The people who participated in my research along with great artists—playwrights, novelists and poets—who have enhanced our understanding of the human condition across cultures and time. In developing my thinking about the ethics of care, I also learned from the writings of moral philosophers, including Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Suzanne Langer, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell and David Hume.

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

Currently, the writings of Michael Slote, and the work being done in Paris by the moral philosopher Sandra Laugier and the sociologist, Patricia Paperman.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

Joining the Resistance (2011), especially the first and last chapters, and also In a Different Voice (1982) and The Birth of Pleasure (2002).

For the alignment of care ethics with democracy and with resistance to patriarchy, I would also recommend my 2009 book with David A. J. Richards (my NYU colleagues and a constitutional law scholar and moral philosopher): The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (Cambridge University Press).

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

To address the question of why the ethics of care is still embattled (especially in the U.S.) but also now in Europe), to consider the ethics of care in light of new evidence in the human sciences that as humans we are by nature empathic and responsive beings, hard-wired for cooperation. Rather than asking how do we gain the capacity to care, the questions become how do we come not to care; how do we lose the capacity for empathy and mutual understanding? It is also crucial to clarify that within a patriarchal framework, the ethics of care is a “feminine” ethic, whereas within a democratic framework it is a human ethic, grounded in core democratic values: the importance of everyone having a voice and being listened to carefully and heard with respect. The premise of equal voice then allows conflicts to be addressed in relationships. Different voices then become integral to the vitality of a democratic society.

A feminist ethic of care is an ethic of resistance to the injustices inherent in patriarchy (the association of care and caring with women rather than with humans, the feminization of care work, the rendering of care as subsidiary to justice—a matter of special obligations or interpersonal relationships). A feminist ethic of care guides the historic struggle to free democracy from patriarchy; it is the ethic of a democratic society, it transcends the gender binaries and hierarchies that structure patriarchal institutions and cultures. An ethics of care is key to human survival and also to the realization of a global society.

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

Only that your efforts may flourish.

Interviews

Per Nortvedt

1. Where are you working at this moment?

I am working at The Center for Medical Ethics, Institute of Health and Society, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

I am conducting research into the foundation of care ethics, in particular questions concerning the role of emotions and moral sensitivity in moral judgments. Also I am engaged in metaphsyical questions concerning the basic motivations for care, particularly inspired by the ethics of Emmanuell Levinas. I call this ethics, an ethics of proximity: The Principle and Problem of Proximity in Ethics. (Journal of Medical Ethics 2008 (34).)

My works also pertains to the role of care and partiality in clinical health care priorities. The idea is that from the perspective an ethics of care there seems to follow a certain normative requirement to be partial. This role of partiality versus impartiality in ethics even though being heavily debated in moral philosophy has been scarcely addressed by care theorists, with some exceptions (Virginia Held, Joan Tronto, e.g). My idea is that an ethics of care, as well as an ethics of proximity can influence this debate in a constructive way.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

As a nurse and in my PhDwork I was always interested in the role of moral sensitivity and empathy. During my PhD work I became increasingly interested in trying to establish a more solid normative basis for the role of emotions and empathy in moral judgments. Also my nursing background and research into how the historical tradition of nursing emphasised the phenomenology of illness and understanding the subjective experiences of the patient, greatly fueled my interest in an ethics of care and research into the foundations of care.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

The crucial focus of an ethics of care is on the importance of interpersonal relationships and the role of these relationships in moral judgments. An ethics of care takes place within interpersonal relationships to be of particular moral relevance to moral life and for moral judgments. In this respect two keywords of this ethics are: partiality – to give some particular attention to persons with whom one is interpersonally connected; and proximity – that personal closeness both relationally and in its spatio-temporality are morally significant.

5. What is the most important thing you have learned from the ethics of care?

That not only moral principles and moral judgment is what is central to morality and ethics. Also the role of moral sensitivity and moral motivation in which ones attitudes plays an important role is ethically and morally significant

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

The one I have been the most inspired by, even though he does not consider himself a care ethicist, is the american philosopher Lawrence Blum with his work on care and particularity in the 1980’s and the 90’s. Also the work of the norwegian philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen and his work on empathy and moral performance have been of great influence to my own position.

Additionally, neither of them being care ethicist, but the philosophy of Emmanuell Levinas, the Norwegian phenomenologist and nurse philosopher Kari Martinsen and the American philosopher Samuel Scheffler with his work on associative duties and personal relationships has been a great inspiration in my career. Among leading care ethicists, I think the work of Joan Tronto, Virginia Held and the norwegian Tove Pettersen, in my view represent very solid work on care theory today.

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

Of course the seminal work of Carol Gilligan, but also the works mentioned by Tronto, Held and Tove Pettersen. Of special relevance for care ethics is Lawrence Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity, Cambridge UP 1994, and his Altruism, emotions and morality, Routledge, 1980. And Arne Johan Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy and Judgment, Penn State Press 1994.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

My works that are most relevant and that I am most satisfied with is my PhD dissertation,: Sensitive Judgment Tano press Oslo 1996.

Care, Sensitivity and “the Moral Point of View”.. I: New Pathways for European Bioethics. Intersentia 2007 ISBN 978-90-5095-670-3. p. 81-99
Levinas, Justice and Health Care. Medicine, Health care and Philosophy 2003; Volume 6. s. 25-34.
Sensibility and Clinical Understanding. Medicine, Health care and Philosophy 2008; Volume11. s. 209-219
Subjectivity and Vulnerability; Reflections on the Foundation of Ethical Sensibility. Nursing Philosophy 2003; Volume 4.(5) s. 222-231
The Principle and Problem of Proximity in Ethics. Journal of Medical Ethics 2008 (34) s. 156-161
Most recent work: The ethics of care. Role Obligations and Moderate Partiality in Health Care. Nursing Ethics2011; Volume 18.(2) s. 192-200. Hem and Skirbekk co-authors
The Normativity of Clinical Health Care – Perspectives on Moral Realism. Forthcoming in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

I think to clarify its normative potential and its distinctivess with relation to other theories like virtue ethics and consequentialist ethics. To accomplish this, it is increasingly important to set care ethics in play with the dominant perspectives and discussions within moral theory and philosophy. To mention some perspectives: Moral phenomenology, and metaphysics; Levinas, Husserl, Loegstrup. Analytical philosophy: Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Samuel Scheffler, Christine Korsgaard. Moral realists and quasi-realists like Arne Johan Vetlesen, David Wiggins, consequentialists like Peter Singer, Peter Unger.

It is not satifying that an ethics of care can argue for the importance of relationships to moral life and judgments without in more detail discussing the normative implications of a relational view in ethics and morality.

10. Our ambition is to promote care ethics nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

I would very much like to be in more contact with you and would love to visit you, and perhaps have some joint seminars and projects.

Interviews

Chris Gastmans

1. Where are you working at this moment?

I am working as full professor of medical ethics at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law (CBMER) of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. The Centre was created in 1986 (we celebrate the Centre’s 25th anniversary this year) at the medical faculty of our university. The Centre’s staff consists of moral theologians and philosophers, lawyers, nurses and psychologists. At the CBMER philosophical-ethical, empirical-ethical and legal research lines have been developed for reproductive medicine, genetics, biobanks, tissue transplantation, patient rights, end-of-life care and elderly care. We provide courses in medical ethics, healthcare ethics, nursing ethics, and medical law at all faculties of our university. These educational efforts have been translated in an Erasmus Mundus Master in Bioethics.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

I am in charge of the research lines ‘elderly care ethics’ and ‘end-of-life care ethics’. These two major research lines contain research projects on nurses’ involvement in end-of-life care processes (e.g. euthanasia, withholding/withdrawing artificial food and fluid administration), ethical decision-making regarding physical restraints, intimacy and sexuality in institutionalized elderly, institutional ethics policies on euthanasia, etc. As you can see, all these topics are more or less closely linked to daily care practices. From the beginning of my research activities, I considered care ethics as a promising and innovative ethical perspective from which these care practices can be analyzed. However, as I am convinced that care ethics should go into dialogue with more fundamental theological and philosophical ethical theories, I also consider the personalist approach on ethics as an important source of my ethical thinking. Besides this philosophical-ethical approach to care ethics research, I also conduct empirical ethical studies that help me to understand the essential characteristics of ethically sensitive daily care processes.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

I started my academic work in 1990 at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law in Leuven. I got a doctoral degree in theology in 1995 with a critical study of the historical, anthropological, and moral theological foundations of nursing ethics, conceptualized as an ethics of care. Since 1998, I teach nursing ethics at the nursing department of the medical faculty, medical ethics at the faculty of theology and ethics of care at the faculty of philosophy. Recently, we initiated the international intensive course nursing ethics that will take place on December 7-9 2011 in Leuven. So it is clear that I was involved in the ethics of care from the very beginning of my academic career, both from a research and an educational perspective.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

Ethics of care stands for a unique normative perspective from which human behavior can be interpreted and evaluated. In order to have normative power, that is, to be able to distinguish between good and bad behavior, care ethics needs an explicit anthropological basis – a view of mankind that underlies care. This explicit anthropological basis helps us to clarify concepts closely related to care ethics such as vulnerability, interdependence, care, responsibility, relational autonomy, dignity, personhood. Only when the normative anthropological basis of care is sufficiently clarified care practices can be evaluated and optimized from an ethical point of view. I consider this as the main task of care ethicists.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

The ethics of care provides many ideas that have deepen my insight into the essential characteristics of ethical problems, for instance the central role of vulnerability in human life. But the most important thing I learned from the ethics of care is the emphasis on the contextual embeddedness of ethically sensitive care practices. The role of context in care practices and its impact on the ethical quality of care practices can easily be made visible by empirical research using a qualitative design. For instance, the ethical reasoning of nurses when they are involved in care practices concerning the use of physical restraint in elderly care, is strongly influenced by contextual factors such as workload, time (day-night), architectural characteristics of the ward, communication culture among nurses and physicians. This also shows that the ethical quality of care practices can be improved by considering their contextual embeddedness.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

When I was writing my PhD dissertation, I was strongly influenced by the writings of Lawrence Blum. His books ‘Friendship, Altruism and Morality’ (1980) and ‘Moral Perception and Particularity’ (1994) were very useful to clarify for instance the distinction between the virtue of care and emotional involvement. Regarding the personalist approach in ethics, I consider the Leuven moral theologian Louis Janssens as my most important teacher.

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

I would recommend the above mentioned books written by Lawrence Blum. But of course, my students are strongly motivated to read the well-known ‘Moral Boundaries’ of Joan Tronto. This book introduced really innovative perspectives in the ethics of care debate.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

I would recommend ‘Nursing Considered as Moral Practice: A Philosophical-Ethical Interpretation of Nursing’, published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, given that in this article, the main sources of my ethical thinking are brought into dialogue: nursing practice, care ethics, and personalism.

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

Most criticism towards the ethics of care concerns normativity (see for instance the thematic issue on care ethics in Nursing Ethics 2011 (2)). Hence, I think much more research should be done in order to strengthen the normative foundation of the care ethics approach. Therefore, it might be helpful to enrich care ethics by going into dialogue with the work of important philosophers as Emmanual Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Buber and Paul Ricoeur. These philosophers could help us to deepen the normative value of care by referring to its anthropological foundations (e.g. embodiment, intersubjectivity).

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

I appreciate the valuable work done by the colleagues. Different from our Centre in Leuven that is located at the medical faculty, the Tilburg care ethicists have very close links with theology and philosophy. I would support the efforts of the care ethicists to provide a sound philosophical and theological foundation for the ethics of care.

Interviews

Michael Slote

Michael Slote is UST Professor of Ethics at the University of Miami and is author of “The Ethics of Care and Empathy” and “Moral Sentimentalism”. He was previously professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, and at Trinity College Dublin.

He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the recently renewed field of virtue ethics. He argues that virtue ethics, in a particular form which draws on the concept of an ethics of care, offers significant intuitive and structural advantages over deontology, utilitarianism, and common-sense morality. He has also recently endorsed the meta-ethical view of moral sentimentalism in opposition to moral rationalism. ((Wikipedia))

1. What are you working on at this moment?

I am working on the importance of receptivity both as a corrective to the Western philosophical tendency to overemphasize rational control in human life and as an entry point to understanding how Chinese ethical thought can be useful to present-day Western philosophizing.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

Care is arguably based in empathy, but both require a certain degree of receptivity, and I think care ethics needs to be more explicitly aware of this. Proper attention to the importance of receptivity will not only favor care ethics over moral rationalism, but (as suggested above) indicate other areas of human life and thought that have largely been misunderstood or distorted by traditional Western philosophy.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

I was pushing virtue ethics in a sentimentalist vein, and care ethics is the contemporary ethical philosophy that comes closest to such a virtue ethics. I later saw, or thought I saw, that there is no reason for the sentimentalist virtue ethicist not to be or become a care ethicist.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

Well, there are lots of different views that nowadays go under the name of care ethics, and that is the mark of a mature or maturing school or approach. What they seem to have in common is the idea that caring should be philosophically foregrounded relative to other ethical virtues and desirable relationships. But how best to do this is, of course, a matter of some dispute.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

Well, it has pointed me toward a larger critique of traditional (and patriarchal) Western values.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

Nel Noddings and Carol Gilligan

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

The early work of those two authors stands out. But there is much recent work on care ethics that carries things forward. Perhaps I shouldn’t get into specifics.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

Well, the two books The Ethics of Care and Empathy and Moral Sentimentalism would be good.

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

I think care ethics has to pay more attention to traditional philosophical issues, though of course it will want to treat them in its own distinctive way. And we need to consider how the skills and intellectual virtues that inform or are supposed to inform care ethics can be made available and shown to be important to ethical practitioners who resist or reject care ethics.

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

If you wish to involve me in your ongoing activities, I’d be interested. I’m not sure a journal solely devoted to care ethics is a good idea, but your website can play a significant role, surely.

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Interviews

Ruth Groenhout

1. Where are you working at this moment?

Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. I will be spending the Spring of 2011 at the University of St Andrews at the Center for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Policy.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

I’ve been working on three issues over the past several years. First, I am interested in human nature—in what it means to be human and how that is related to our accounts of what good human lives look like. These questions are widely discussed in the virtue ethics literature, and I began to be interested in care ethics in part because of significant areas of overlap between the questions being asked in care ethics and those being asked in virtue ethics.
Both theories are focused on human flourishing, and both want to offer a more holistic account of human life than either utilitarianism or deontological ethics. But many (though certainly not all) virtue ethicists tend to trace their theories back to Aristotle without much focus on how excluding women from an account of human nature distorts the resulting theory. As a feminist, I also wanted to work in a theoretical context that incorporated women’s experiences and perspectives into ethics.

My second area of interest has been health care and medical ethics. The field of health care has changed so dramatically in the just the past twenty years that ethical analysis of new technologies and approaches to health is desperately needed. An ethics of care offers a very natural fit with health care, and has been adopted fairly widely in the nursing literature. I’ve worked on analyses of several issues (assisted reproduction, health care policy) from an ethics of care perspective, and plan to do more of this in the future.

Finally I have been interested in the development of an ethics of care—it is still a very new ethical theory (compared to others) and is still in the formative stage. I do think that making care the central focus of an ethical theory is vitally important for getting ethics right, and for developing a theory that is suited to human life (rather than, say, the lives rational disembodied egos might live), and I’ve been impressed with the fruitfulness of care theorists’ examination of the work that society often allocates to women and its potential for providing philosophical insight into basic ethical questions.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

I read Nel Noddings Caring while I was in graduate school. At the time none of my classes had ever included any feminist theorists, and I found Noddings’ willingness to take women’s experiences seriously both refreshing and theoretically interesting. Most of my work at the time focused on virtue ethics, and (as I mentioned above) virtue ethics seemed problematic because of its blindness to women’s lives. It also tended to ignore power imbalances in social roles.

After reading Noddings’ work, I also started reading Sara Ruddick, Rosemarie Tong, Virginia Held, Eva Kittay, and Joan Tronto, and it seemed as though care ethics was both an exciting new area for ethics as well as a very natural fit for my interest in human nature and health care ethics.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

The ethics of care begins with the recognition that care is fundamental for ethics. By care I mean both the attitude of empathetic attentiveness and the actual practices of caring that people depend on throughout the course of their lives. Care is a crucial part of ethics for several reasons. First, without care, human life is impossible. Care is this a presupposition for all other ethical concerns. Second, without care, ethics is unmotivated. Unless we do care about others’ well-being, ethical principles are meaningless.

Care ethics, as I interpret it, requires an analysis of what sorts of people we need to become in order to be capable of caring relationships, it requires an analysis of interpersonal relationships of care, and it requires an analysis of what social structures support caring relationships, or fail to support them, or make them difficult to maintain. All three levels are important, and without any of them our analysis will be incomplete.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

The importance of distinguishing power that is used to abuse and control others from power used to maintain relationships of care and help the self and others to flourish. Many ethical theories begin with the assumption that humans are all relatively equal because the theory has no good way to address imbalances of power. Care theory begins with the recognition that many of our most important relationships are vastly unequal in power, and that that imbalance is not necessarily bad when the power is used properly, as when parents use their authority and knowledge to make sure children grow up healthy and strong, or when health care professionals use their expertise for the sake of the patient’s health.

Obviously these power imbalances can tempt the powerful to abuse their power, but pretending we’re all equal doesn’t address that issue. Care ethics encourages us to analyze what structures and patterns of relationships maintain care and a proper balance of power between agents in a way that offers a better account of uses and abuses than rival theories can offer.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

For the general structure of an ethics of care, I’ve been heavily influenced by Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, and Joan Tronto. They don’t all agree on every detail, but their development of the central ideas in care ethics has helped me think through so many important issues.

Rosemarie Tong, Eva Feder Kittay, and Selma Sevenhuisjen have generated important analyses of specific issues in health care and related fields, and their work on how care ethics can offer concrete moral guidance represents some of the really vital work that care theorists are currently doing.

In terms of epistemological issues, Sara Ruddick and Lorraine Code have both done important work in thinking about how issues of knowledge are affected by our relationships and particular situations—an aspect of care theory I’d like to see developed further.

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

Nel Noddings, Caring, as well as Women and Evil, and Starting at Home
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global
Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency as well as The Subject of Care, edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder
Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self
Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location
Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries
Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing

This is just a partial list—there are so many good books in this area. But these are all books I find myself pulling off my shelf again and again.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

Connected Lives: Human Nature and an Ethics of Care. This book develops my argument for the need for an account of human nature, human lives, and human social structures in an ethics of care. I’ve also written an occasional paper for the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame that examines connections between an ethics of care and the Christian theological tradition. That piece is titled “Theological echoes in an ethics of care.” I don’t think there are too many other theorists working across the secular/religious boundary on this topic, so that’s probably worth looking at.

I’m currently at work on a book that uses an ethics of care as a perspective from which to evaluate underlying social structures in health care—the move from a clinical judgment model of reasoning to an evidence-based model of reasoning, for example—and when I get that written, I hope someone will read it!

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

Global cooperation—we need ways to think about our lives together as humans that permit international responses to problems like the AIDS crisis, global migration (and exploitation) of workers and the like, and these are issues that can’t just be addressed within the boundaries of particular countries. Virginia Held has done some good work starting to develop this aspect of care theory, and I hope other theorists begin to work in this area as well.

A second issue I’d like to see care ethics working on is the economics of health care. Here in the US we are facing serious economic problems in our health care systems, but almost every health care system around the globe finds itself faced with the problem of how to provide adequate care without generating unsustainable costs. I think care theory has a lot to offer here, in part because of the spiraling costs of health care are due to the fact that we are trying to meet people’s need for care (at the end of life, and at other times) with technology and better medications. But beyond a certain level, care isn’t always enhanced by technology, sometimes quite the opposite. We need to start articulating what care really means in this context so we can make decisions that are both caring and sustainable.

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

One recommendation is to think about how some of these theories might fit with, or illuminate major belief systems such as religion in the West, or perhaps Confucian thought in some Eastern contexts. An ethical theory has more impact when it is clear to people how it connects with some of what they might already believe. There are a few people beginning to explore the areas of continuity and discontinuity between care ethics and Confucian thought, for example, like Chenyang Li, Ann Pang-White, and Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee. Some of my own work, exploring the ways that care ethics might connect with Christian ethics, likewise fits in this category. This sort of work show how an ethics of care can take up and develop central aspects of a tradition in ways that are both theoretically fruitful and helpful for those who belong to that tradition.

Interviews

Elisabeth Conradi

Elisabeth Conradi started to study philosophy, German literature and educational theory at Heidelberg University and then continued and completed her studies at Frankfurt University where she earned the Master’s degree in philosophy, presenting a thesis on Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy of Right. As a visiting scholar she conducted research at the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Prior to that she was engaged in postgraduate studies with Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, as well as with guest professors Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Iris Young, and Joan Tronto. She also took courses at the Graduate School for Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

1. Where are you working at this moment?

Since March 2009 I am Professor of Philosophy and Social Theory and member of the social work faculty at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University Stuttgart. I am also affiliated to the University of Göttingen, where I qualified to supervise doctoral candidates by the process of habilitation in the academic field of Political Science.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

The two questions at the centre of my work are: How can the reflection of practice and the reflection of theory become systematically connected? And: How can the tension as well as the relation between politics and ethics be understood? Engaging these questions, my current book (Frankfurt 2011) introduces a conception of “social transformation through successful practices” in the context of a “cosmopolitan civil society”.

Both questions – the connection between practice and theory as well as the relation between politics and ethics – have been also discussed in my book “Take Care” (2001). Here I interrogate the deontological foundation of respect through equality, autonomy, and reciprocity as well as the idea of a contractual society. As an alternative I propose a foundation of an ethics of attentiveness and explicate how people take responsibility, and act in a careful and cooperative way.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

During my graduate studies of philosophy at Frankfurt University I got to know the “discourse ethics” as a predominant moral theory. In this approach Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel adopt the justice perspective explicated by Lawrence Kohlberg. This perspective refers to conflicting individual rights, general rules and obligations. In contrast to it, the care perspective developed by Carol Gilligan emphasises communication and personal responsibilities, the situational context, and the preservation of relationships.

During my graduate studies of philosophy at Frankfurt University it was one of my main interests to transfer Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg to the theories of Kant, Rawls and Habermas. Furthermore it was my concern (and still is) to expand the care perspective from the moral realm to political theory.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

Carol Gilligan as well as Joan Tronto lay stress on the moral requirement ‘not to turn away from someone in need.’ While Gilligan locates the moral problem in the fact that someone is hurt through detachment, Tronto points to the need that should be met.

If care is understood as a perspective, one does have to assume that it is located within the individual subject. If care is understood as an activity, it can be seen as located between subjects. Both aspects of care – relatedness and activity – integrate into the concept of a social practice.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

In the course of care interactions the persons involved enter into (or continue) a relationship with one another. The relationship is intensified through care.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

At Frankfurt University I became acquainted with the work of Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held through Andrea Maihofer who criticised “discourse ethics” from a gendered perspective. I also participated in a group of graduate students that planned and organized an international guest professorship inviting Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young, and Joan Tronto.

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

I already referred to Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice 1982, Mapping the Moral Domain (ed) 1988) and Joan Tronto (Moral Boundaries 1993).

Especially for opening the care debate in the direction of global responsibility I further suggest Virginia Held (The Ethics of Care 2005, Justice and Care (ed) 1995) and Margaret Walker (The Curious Case of Care and Restorative Justice in the U.S. Context, in: Hamington 2006 pp. 145-162) as well as Iris Young (Responsibility, Social Connection, and Global Labor Justice, in: Young: Global challenges 2007) and Christine Koggel (Poverty and Global Justice, in: Cragg, Koggel 2004).

For the Debate in German these authors have been especially important: Andrea Maihofer (Geschlecht als Existenzweise 1995), Herlinde Pauer-Studer (Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit 1996), Annemarie Pieper (Gibt es eine feministische Ethik? 1998) and Ina Praetorius (Skizzen zur feministischen Ethik 1995). While I disagree with Silvia Käppeli (Vom Glaubenswerk zur Pflegewissenschaft 2004) I consider her work to be important.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

Elisabeth Conradi: Ethik und Politik. Wie eine Ethik der Achtsamkeit mit politischer Verantwortung verbunden werden kann. In: Hartmut Remmers, Helen Kohlen (Hg): Bioethics, Care and Gender. Herausforderungen für Medizin, Pflege und Politik. Universitätsverlag Osnabrück: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2010, S. 91-117.
Elisabeth Conradi: Was ist Achtsamkeit? In: Orientierung. Fachzeitschrift der Behindertenhilfe. Heft 3, August 2008, S. 1-4.
Elisabeth Conradi: Take Care. Grundlagen einer Ethik der Achtsamkeit, Frankfurt am Main 2001.
Elisabeth Conradi: Kosmopolitische Zivilgesellschaft. Wandel zur Weltgesellschaft durch gelingendes Handeln. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag 2011.

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

The relationship between the care ethics of attentiveness as a professional ethics (of nurses, social workers, politicians, therapists, assistants etc) and the more comprehensive (philosophical) concept should be reflected in an interdisciplinary dialog between philosophy and pedagogy, social work education and nursing science, disability studies and medical ethics, theology and political science.
The secularity of care ethics could be discussed: How can forgiveness be thought in a secular conception (see Walker: Moral repair 2006)? How does the care ethics of attentiveness differ from buddhist meditation?
The political importance of care ethics (and its relevance for political theory) should be discussed more intense in an interdisciplinary dialog. Keywords are: citizenship, global communities, global responsibility, state sovereignty, migration, security, forgiveness and restorative justice, responsibility and care for a postcolonial work, peace, poverty (See above point 7: Held, Walker, Koggel).
Care ethics should investigate in thinking about (possible ways of and theoretical approaches to) social transformation: How can the practice of care (and care-takers as well as care-givers) increase more respect in society? How to organize (public) need interpretation?
Can care ethics offer a concept of (the structure and institutionalisation and politics of) help, support, empowerment, need interpretation (etc.) beyond and beside economic (as well as state-controlled) interests?
To what kind of (participative) politics leads the care ethics of attentiveness?

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

It would be important to also take into account positions from African colleagues, for example the work of H. Odera Oruka or more contemporary for example the thoughts of Fainos Mangena.

Interviews

Margaret Urban Walker

Since 2002, Margaret Urban Walker PhD is Professor of Philosophy and Lincoln Professor of Ethics at Arizona State University, where she received ASU’s Defining Edge Research in the Humanities Award in 2007. She was a member of the Philosophy Department at Fordham University from 1974-2002. She also taught at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium; Washington University at St. Louis; and University of South Florida, where she held visiting appointments. In 2002, she returned to the Catholic University of Leuven as the first woman to hold the Cardinal Mercier Chair in Philosophy. She enjoyed a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellowship at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values in 2003-2004, and was honored to be Marquette’s Aquinas Lecturer in 2010.

1. Where are you working at this moment?

I am a member of the Philosophy Faculty of the School of Historical, Philosophical, & Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

My earlier research in moral philosophy developed a critical approach to ethical theory that identified impacts of social differences on moral thinking, including philosophical theories of morality. The ethics of care was a leader in demonstrating how concerns about care work and those who need it and do are rendered invisible or marginal in ethics. My current work focuses on the repair of moral relations in the aftermath of wrongdoing, with special attention to political violence and post-conflict justice and repair. The dignity of victims of violence requires multiple forms of caring attention to address material, psychological, social, and moral needs.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

The ethics of care played a tremendous role for me in showing how feminist ethics could contribute both a unique critique of gender bias and an independent and powerful vision of moral life, agency, and responsibility.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

I believe an ethic of care examines closely the implications of human dependency, vulnerability, and interdependence, and insists on four goods: responsiveness to human needs; responsibility and competence in meeting needs; valuing connection and relationship itself; and valuing of caring labor and activities.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

That contributions to human well-being and aspects of human well-being will be absent in moral theory if those who are socially identified with those aspects of life lack voice, social respect, and political agency.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

I had an opportunity to take a seminar with psychologist Carol Gilligan in the 1980s. I admired the work of Sara Ruddick, Joan Tronto, Selma Sevenhuijsen, Virginia Held, Annette Baier, Eva Kittay, and others, and learned from their work, and in some cases, from them personally. Through collaborations with Marian Verkerk at the Center for the Ethics of Care at the University Medical Center, Groningen, I have seen the dynamic role care ethics can play in bioethics.

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

My favorite is Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Routledge, 1993), because from the outset it treats care ethics as a social and political perspective that raises questions of citizenship, solidarity, and equality. I have taught the book many times.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

My book ‘Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics’, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2007), shows the consequences of the intertwining of moral and social positions, so that ethics represents only the positions of those with relative privilege. In ‘Moral contexts’ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), my essay ‘Seeing Power in Morality’ is deeply influenced by care ethics. My most recent work on moral repair and reparations, ‘Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing’ (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and ‘What is Reparative Justice?’ (Marquette University Press, 2010) explore the distinctive moral vulnerabilities of those subject to violence and oppression.

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

Recognition and support for care work and care providers at the heart of social, political, economic, and biomedical policy, nationally and internationally, presents a huge field of issues.

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

Continue your good work. Show that the ethics of care speaks to fundamental moral issues in every area of public and private life.

Interviews

Raymond de Vries

Raymond De Vries PhD co-directs the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan and is a Professor in the Department of Learning Health Sciences and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology there. He is also visiting professor at CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. He is particularly interested in the regulation of science and the production of scientific knowledge; clinical trials of genetic therapies; the export of western moral traditions to non-western societies; and the social, ethical, and policy issues associated with the medicalization of pregnancy and birth.

1. Where are you working at this moment?

I am a sociologist, working at the bioethics program at the University of Michigan Medical School. I have appointments in the departments of medical education, obstetrics and gynaecology, and the department of sociology in the College of Literature, Sciences and the Arts.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

My research is built on what I call a “sociology of bioethics” perspective. This means that rather than using my ability as a social scientist to answer questions generated by bioethicists (“sociology in bioethics”), I use bioethics as an arena for learning more about society, culture, and social organization. This approach naturally leads me to investigate different approaches to ethical reasoning – care ethics, principlism, feminist ethics, casuistry, etc. – with an eye toward understanding why and how these different strategies are used.

At the moment I am completing a book-length social history of bioethics and I am involved in a few research projects including, a study of the use of deliberative democracy to guide the creation of policy on surrogate consent for research and an interview study that is challenging existing ideas about the therapeutic misconception.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

As I explained above, I am interested in the different approaches to defining and resolving ethical dilemmas – how they have been developed, where they are used, who champions them. So my interest in care ethics (and its social location and social uses) begins there. My understanding of care ethics was greatly enhanced by a semester I spent at the Center for Law and ethics at the University of Leuven in the Fall of 2006. My great teachers there – Chris Gastmans, Kris Dierickx, Paul Schotsmans, Herman Nys, and Pascal Borry – introduced me to important nuances in the field.

4. How would you define ethics of care?

The ethics of care is an approach to seeing and resolving ethical problems that begins by understanding the individual and her social situation. Rather than an abstract approach that seeks to generalize about the nature and content of ethical problems, care ethics looks at moral problems in situ, seeking to understand and resolve these problems by recognizing how they are generated by (among other things) unequal relationships that derive from ideas about gender, ethnicity, and social class.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

I am not a well-versed student of Levinas, but his notion of the concept of l’autre – the other – and his insistence that the beginning of ethics is consideration of “the other” has given me a foundation on which to build an approach to (bio)ethics. Acting ethically in medicine, or in any sphere, requires attention and consideration of the other. Interestingly, this same idea is at the heart of principlism. The Belmont Report describes three principles: justice, beneficence, and respect for autonomy (not simply autonomy): this latter principle comes to close to the idea of Levinas in that it is asking that attention be paid to the (autonomy of) the other.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

Most important to me has been the work of Margaret Urban Walker. Her work on moral contexts, moral repair, and moral understanding (the titles three of her books) helped me (a social scientist!) to think more broadly and more clearly about the relational aspects of moral decision-making.

7. What works of in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

Aside from the books by Walker mentioned above, I was inspired by Carol Gilligan’s, In a Different Voice. Long before I became interested in bioethics, this book got me thinking about how one’s situation in life shaped one’s moral sensibilities.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

R. De Vries. How can we help? From ‘sociology in’ bioethics to ‘sociology of’ bioethics. Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2004: 279-292.
R. De Vries. Firing the neuroethical imagination. EMBO Reports. Vol. 8, 2007: S65-69.
R. De Vries. The Prepositions of Bioethics. Hastings Center Report, 38(3), 2008: 49.
R. De Vries, N. Berlinger, and W. Cadge. Lost in translation: the chaplain’s role in health care. Hastings Center Report, 38(6), 2008: 23-27.
R. De Vries. Why can’t we all just get along? A comment on Turner’s plea to social scientists and bioethicists. Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics. 18 (1), 2009: 43-46.
R. De Vries, Charles Bosk, Leigh Turner and Kristina Orfali (eds.). The view from here: Social Science and Bioethics. London: Blackwell, 2007.

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

Ethicists must begin to think more about “upstream” solutions to ethical problems. At the moment, ethics is largely a reactive exercise, where one waits until an ethical dilemma arises and then struggles with a solution. Care ethics points us in a different direction: toward a way of thinking about the social and cultural conditions that are likely to generate ethical problems and then seeking to alter those conditions.

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

Yes, how about organizing an international conference on “upstream bioethics?”

Interviews

Christa Schnabl

Christa Schnabl is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social at the University of Vienna, and currently the Vice Rector of the University of Vienna.

1. Where are you working at this moment?

I am Associate Professor at the Institute for Social Ethics of the Catholic Faculty of Theology in Vienna. From 2007 until 2011 I am also appointed as vice-president of the University of Vienna (Austria) and therefore I am on leave from my educational and research work.

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?

As a social ethicist I am mainly interested in anchoring socioethically the impulses that emerge in an ethics of care. I therefore focus on the activities and demands from a societal perspective, rather than on the immediate and personal relation of care. Put differently, I am interested less in the inner perspective of caring, and more in the outer perspective on care and the social responsibility to care.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?

It was gender ethics that led me to care ethics. I learned to recognize care as a key concept for the further development of modern societies, because in it many areas of life come together. The questions of care unite questions of family policy, social policy, health care policy, gender policy and economic policy. This recognition only arose later on, after first having held care as a peripheral theme….

4. How would you define ethics of care?

That is difficult, because I do not consider myself a care ethicist in the first place. I consider care a central topic area of ethics. However, I want to stress that the ethical principle of care should be connected to the principle of justice, and not be elaborated as a separate, special ethic. An ethic of care that puts questions of care and caring central, should in my view be more broadly orientated.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?

I have learned to see the implications of drawing into the ethical reflection those themes that are invisible within the public sphere. Ethics is not a construction of reflective thoughts in itself, but must always reflect upon everyday fields of reference. For human experience does lead to different plausibilities, which effect both the reflection and the special sensitivity for themes that emerge. Moreover, the naturalness of ethical systems is questioned.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?

To me certain theoritical lines have been more important than any specific teacher. For instance, there is a theoretical line of individual ethical questions as well as a line of political ethics, and theoretics can be divided accordingly. Thus, Eva Feder Kittay, Herta Nagl-Docekal, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, but also Axel Honneth and Emmanuel Levinas focus upon care and the individual, and on the other hand Joan Tronto, Selma Sevenhuijsen, Susan Moller Okin have their focal point upon the political and ethical aspects of care.

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?

It is widely acknowledged that Carol Gilligan’s „In A Different Voice“ , which appeared in the early eighties, is the initial igniter of the entire care ethics debate. Her theoretical impulses have started different philosophical and ethical debates and further developments.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?

My book „Gerecht sorgen. Grundlagen einer sozialethischen Fürsorge“ is my most exhaustive work on the connection of the debates of care and justice, considered from a social-ethical point of view. A publication list with German articles can be found on:

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?

The question of how care can be implemented within social theory and societal considerations is a real challenge. How can the care area be politically embedded? What models and possibilities are being given, that may help changing the recognition and distribution of care work?

10. Our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?

My wish would be, that a platform or network is established, which is not only accessible for researchers and the academic world, but also integrates people who are politically and practically involved. That would be a step towards „politicizing“ the subject.