PREFACE TO THE 2013 EDITION
The first edition of Caring was published in 1984. In the intervening years, interest in the ethics of care has grown substantially. On my own library shelf, there are now books and articles on care theory in philosophy, psychology, religion, bioethics, library science, peace studies, art, anthropology, education, and business. Some of the initial fears about caring have been allayed; for example, few critics now worry that attention to caring as a way of life will send women back to the kitchen and the nursery. But some genuine concerns remain, and a few important misunderstandings and differences of opinion have grown over time. In this preface, I will address some of these misunderstandings and attempt to respond to critics. In an afterword, I suggest a program for future work on care ethics.
One important complaint—with which I heartily sympathize—focuses on the former subtitle of Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Hardly anyone has reacted positively to the word feminine here. In using it, I wanted to acknowledge the roots of caring in women’s experience, but using “a woman’s approach” rather than “feminine” risked the complete loss of male readers. With “feminine,” at least a few male Jungians wrote to say that they felt included. I think critics are right, however, to point out that the connotations of “feminine” are off-putting and do not capture what I intended to convey. Relational is a better word. Virtually all care theorists make the relation more fundamental than the individual. Virginia Held comments: “The ethics of care . . . conceptualizes persons as deeply affected by, and involved in, relations with others; to many care theorists persons are at least partly constituted by their social ties. The ethics of care . . . does not assume that relations relevant for morality have been entered into voluntarily by free and equal individuals as do dominant moral theories.”1
Persons as individuals are formed in relation. I do not, however, want to lose the centrality of women’s experience in care ethics, and I’ve tried to make the connection more explicit in both Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy and The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality.2
I have called the language used in Caring the language of the mother, as contrasted with that of the father. Carol Gilligan gave us a powerful introduction to this contrast in her groundbreaking book, In a Different Voice. The language of the mother concentrates on relationships, needs, care, response, and connection rather than principles, justice, rights, and hierarchy. As Gilligan put it: “The ideal of care is thus an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone.”3
But the emphasis on “taking care” has led to some misunderstanding and confusion. Briefly, the problem is that some proponents of care ethics have equated caring and caregiving. The ethics of care is a rapidly developing normative moral theory. It is concerned with how, in general, we should meet and treat one another—with how to establish, maintain, and enhance caring relations. Caregiving is an important element in care ethics, but, as a set of activities or occupation, it can be done with or without caring. We all know of cases in which persons assigned to provide care have performed the tasks of caregiving without conveying care. Still, I have argued that well-supervised practice in caregiving may act as an incubator for the development of caring. Thus, it is important for the young, in addition to being cared for, to see and assist in the genuine caring done by adults.
Another important source of confusion is the distinction I have made between caring-for and caring-about. Caring-for describes an encounter or set of encounters characterized by direct attention and response. It requires the establishment of a caring relation, person-to-person contact of some sort. Caring-about expresses some concern but does not guarantee a response to one who needs care. We are all familiar with an array of scenarios that might be called “caring-about.” I might, for example, care about civilians living in fear during civil strife in, say, Syria, but I may not follow up on my expressed concern. Or I may follow up with a small gift to a charitable organization. Edging closer to caring-for, I may check on the credentials of the organization to find out how my contribution is spent. The point is that we cannot care-for everyone; we are limited by time, resources, and space. My comment that we have no obligation to care-for the starving children of Africa generated outrage in many readers. But we cannot be obligated to do the impossible, and it is clearly impossible to establish a caring relation with everyone in the world.
One critic, Barbara Houston, said that when she read my comment about our having no obligation to care for the starving children of Africa, her “urge was to throw the book across the room.” She explained her outrage in a publication addressed to me: “I was incensed that someone should deny an obvious obligation. Upon cooler reflection I realized you were drawing a useful distinction between caring for and caring about, and more to the point, I discovered something about myself, namely, that I wanted to fiercely insist I had an obligation that, in all honesty, I had to admit I never made any effort to meet.”4
The distinction recognized by Houston, a generous critic, is important when we discuss the function of institutions and large organizations in supporting caring. A school, for example, cannot care-for directly, but it can work toward establishing an environment in which caring-for can flourish. The same is true of international organizations and nations. One nation cannot itself care-for another, but it can encourage an environment in which groups meet face-to-face and thereby create opportunities for genuine caring-for. I’ll say more about this in the afterword, where we’ll consider further work that needs to be done in care ethics. I think critics are right when they advise that much more must be said on caring-about.
Readers should also be alert for what we might call pathologies of care. Charles Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby comes to mind; she was so immersed in caring-about an Indian tribe overseas that she virtually ignored her own children.5 At the opposite extreme, we find parents so wrapped up in their own children that they cannot respond to—or even give attention to—others they may encounter.6
Care theorists, like virtue ethicists, put limited faith in principles. We not disdain principles. We recognize that principles—for example, an injunction against lying—help to keep daily life running smoothly. We learn the rule and commit ourselves to it, and for the most part we would not consider breaking it. However, when a real conflict arises, the principle is of little help. We have to dig behind the principle to see what deeper value has engendered it. Most of us would not consider adopting the rule as an absolute; we would not join Kant in refusing to lie to a would-be murderer even to save the life of the victim. Instead we ask who might be hurt, who might be helped by our lie.7 We acknowledge that everyday life would be harder if we did not regularly tell some considerate “white lies.”
The first three chapters of Caring are devoted to an analysis of caring relations and the part played by carer (one-caring) and cared-for in those relations. Primary attention in these chapters focuses on natural caring, the caring motivated by love or inclination. It is not an exaggeration to say that relations of natural caring are treasured in every facet of human life. Such caring may require monumental physical or emotional effort, but it does not require a moral effort; that is, we act out of inclination, not out of duty or concern for the status of our character. Such caring, I argue, is the social condition we treasure and want to establish or preserve. Only when natural caring fails or cannot be invoked do we turn to ethical caring. In taking this position, we pose another challenge to the Kantian emphasis on adherence to principle and duty. For Kant, acts done out of love or inclination earn no moral credit. To behave morally, the Kantian moral agent must identify and act on the appropriate moral principle. Reason must displace emotion. In care ethics, however, we are not much interested in moral credit. We are, rather, interested in maintaining and enhancing caring relations—attending to those we encounter, listening to their expressed needs, and responding positively if possible. But even when we must deny the need expressed, we try to do so in a way that will preserve the caring relation.
Chapter 2 opens with a brief discussion of empathy. There I contrast empathy, originally defined as projective and cognitive, with the receptive feeling—sympathy—associated