Chapters 4–6 treat ethical caring and how it is motivated by our longing for and commitment to natural caring. As in natural caring, the focus of ethical caring is relation. Virginia Held writes: “I see the ethics of care from as fully a normative view as any other ethic. It addresses questions about whether and how and why we ought to engage in activities of care, questions about how such activities should be conducted and structured, and questions about the meanings of care and caring. It especially evaluates relations of care.”8
From the perspective taken in this book, natural caring is the motivating force behind ethical caring. When something goes wrong (or might go wrong) in our relational encounters, we want to restore or maintain natural caring. To do this, we draw on what I have called our “ethical ideal,” our memories of caring and being cared for. We ask how we might act if this other were not so difficult, if the situation were less complicated, if the burdens were not so great, if we were at our caring best. And through this often challenging process of reflection, we decide what to do, how to respond.
Ethical caring, then, derives its strength from natural caring. This is clearly a reversal of Kantian priorities. Ethical caring does not seek moral credit; it seeks a response from the cared-for that completes the encounter—a recognition that is usually spontaneously offered in natural caring. Natural caring is the cherished condition; ethical caring seeks to restore or replace natural caring.
There is reason to be cautious here. Striving to maintain natural caring does not imply that we respond positively to every expressed need. Indeed, there are many situations in which it would be clearly wrong to do so. There are times when we must deny an expressed need, sometimes for the sake of the cared-for, sometimes out of concern for others in the web of care. The attempt to maintain a caring relation is an attempt to keep the doors of communication open, and this can be especially important when the status of basic relations is ambiguous or even questionable. It is especially important in the context of global caring.
The process is open to corruption. Ethical caring is hard work that requires continuous reflection on the part of carers. How can I best care for the one before me without damaging other relations in the web of care and without engaging in deceptions that might eventually undermine future encounters? I’ll return to this topic in the afterword, which explores the possibilities of global caring.
Chapter 5 concentrates on the construction of the ideal upon which we draw in ethical caring. As John Dewey advised us repeatedly, our ideals are properly created and developed from the “real stuff” of life. They are neither handed down from the gods nor fashioned from imaginary or fanciful elements. This is why the real stuff of childhood experience must be so closely guided in caring relations. Memories of being cared for and reflections on such care constitute the early material of the ideal. Then, as the child learns to care for others, new memories are added to the developing ideal. Emphasis throughout the chapter is on the continuous development of that ideal, including the incorporation of errors and lapses in caring together with the honest reflection on them that increases the real usefulness of the ideal.
Sometimes when we become aware of our relatedness—when reciprocal receptivity is at its height—we experience joy. Existential philosophers have rightly described the anguish and anxiety that accompany human life, and I certainly do not deny these feelings. They accompany us, unbidden, through a lifetime. However, joy—discussed in chapter 6—offers itself as an unsummoned reward or by-product of relation. It seems to be triggered by receptivity, an openness to the other that is somehow reciprocated in an almost mystical fashion. We are momentarily overwhelmed by a feeling of joyful oneness with this other—our child, our lover, an idea, a scene, a piece of music. Joy helps to maintain us in caring and, thus, adds to our ethical ideal.
In chapter 7, I explore forms of receptivity and response that shade off from the ethical into the intellectual. It is not surprising that, with respect to nonhuman animals, we relate most closely to those that respond to us with seeming interest and affection. Such response is exactly what care ethics refers to as reciprocity. We are not talking about contractual reciprocity. We do not expect cared-fors, whether human or animal, to do for us what we do for them, nor do we expect payment of some sort. Instead, we look for signs that our caring has been received. What we do by way of caring satisfies a need in the cared-for, completes the caring relation, and enriches our lives as carers.
I have a long-standing interest in intellectual receptivity, which has grown over my years as a teacher. I have included some discussion of it in chapter 7. When we hear Archimedes’s exclamation, “Eureka!,” we note a joyous recognition of intellectual receptivity. An idea has responded to his investigation. I mention in an early chapter Mozart’s “hearing” music played to him from somewhere in the unseen world of musical ideas, Miró’s hand mysteriously guided as he painted, the mathematician Gauss seized by mathematics, a mathematics student astonished by what she saw when she stopped thinking and received what was there in the written problem. Receptivity can be experienced in both moral and intellectual domains.
There are clearly parallels between intellectual and moral receptivity, but there are also distinct differences. Simone Weil, whose work on attention is important in care ethics, made the mistake of assuming that the practice of attention could be cultivated in one field and transferred to another. She suggested, for example, that the study of geometry could encourage the capacity for attention in general and, in particular, for attention to God. That attention might then be redirected to human beings.9 I think she was wrong on this. Some highly receptive composers, artists, and mathematicians have been demonstrably insensitive to the needs and feelings of human beings. We are not likely to increase the receptivity characteristic of caring by insisting that all children study geometry. To develop as caring persons, young people must have supervised practice in caring.
The last chapter treats moral education. In it, I identify four major components of moral education: modeling, dialogue, practice, and confirmation. Most approaches to moral education mention the first three, and the responses of readers over the years have been largely favorable to my interpretation through care ethics. Differences in emphasis have been debated—especially those between character education and care ethics—but no serious objections have been raised against the treatment of modeling, dialogue, or practice.10
Little has been said, however, about confirmation, a concept adapted from Martin Buber.11 In discussing this deeply compassionate idea, I have emphasized attributing to the wayward acts of students and children “the best possible motive consonant with reality” (193). Instead of blaming, shaming, and punishing, we try to find a respectable motive for a less-than-respectable act. In doing so, we point a student toward his or her best self, toward a developing ethical ideal. This act, we advise, is beneath the better person we have come to know. The main difficulty with this approach is that teachers must come to know their students quite well. We cannot very well attribute the best possible motive consonant with reality if we are ignorant of that reality. I suspect that, understandably, teachers may feel that confirmation suggests they should gloss over infractions and simply pretend that they could have been committed for morally acceptable reasons. Such a response, however, might be worse for the developing ideal than traditional blame and punishment. To confirm another, we must know and understand that other’s reality. Given the structure of today’s schooling, this may be asking the impossible.
Despite the difficulties involved in employing confirmation, I would not give up on it. Rather, I would ask whether there are ways in which we might structure our schools so that teachers and students could spend more time together. Why not allow elementary school students and teachers to stay together (by mutual consent) for three years rather than one? Why not encourage one teacher to guide a group of students through all of their high school mathematics? The formation of caring relations is central in both teaching and life itself.
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