Care Ethics
Matilde Rey Aramendía
Care ethics is an approach developed within feminist philosophy that proposes placing care at the centre of moral reflection, starting from the recognition that human beings are vulnerable and interdependent, both with respect to one another and to the environment that surrounds them. This approach emerged as a critique of the dominant moral theories of Western tradition, particularly those that prioritise individual autonomy, impartiality, and the application of universalisable principles of justice to moral reasoning.
The starting point of this approach is usually located in the work of American philosopher and psychologist Carol Gilligan. In her book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), she challenged the model of moral development proposed by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, whose studies interpreted women’s moral responses as immature or deficient relative to a stage-based model constructed from male experience. Drawing on her own research, Gilligan argued that many women articulated their moral judgements by attending to other considerations, such as relationships with others, the responsibilities arising from those relationships, and concrete situations of vulnerability. This form of moral reasoning, which she identified as a “different voice” characteristic of women, placed care and responsibility toward others at the centre of moral judgement.
Building on Gilligan’s work, care ethics was developed as a moral theory by other scholars, as Nel Noddings, who conceived it as an “essentially relational” ethics (Noddings, 2009, p. 41). For Noddings (2002), since human beings always exist in relation to others, care and attentiveness to the needs of others constitute fundamental dimensions of life. From this perspective, care ethics must be organised around concrete responsibility toward the people with whom we maintain bonds and whose needs call for our attention and action.
The emphasis on interpersonal relationships and the relational dimension of care gave rise from the outset to a debate about the relationship between care and justice. In this context, Seyla Benhabib (1992) defended the need to incorporate caring relationships into moral theory without abandoning the universalist aspirations of ethics. Along similar lines, Virginia Held (2018) has argued that the concerns associated with care and justice point to distinct but equally relevant dimensions of moral life, and that an adequate moral theory must be capable of integrating both perspectives.
One of the basic premises of care ethics is that dependency is a structural feature of human existence. Human beings are vulnerable and interdependent throughout life, in different forms and degrees depending on the moment and context. These considerations have direct implications for a moral theory of care, since they affect the way autonomy is conceived: if it is gradual and relational, then caring relationships must occupy a central place in reflection on morality and justice.
The recognition of interdependence as an intrinsic feature of human existence led, consequently, to a challenge to the liberal ideal of the independent and self-sufficient individual. Eva Feder Kittay developed a theory of dependency arguing that every society rests on caring relationships and on the labour, frequently rendered invisible and feminized, of those who attend to dependent persons. Kittay (2020) thus focused not only on those who require care, but also on those who provide it, introducing the notion of “nested dependencies” to refer to the situation of vulnerability in which carers find themselves because of the material, temporal, and emotional burdens associated with care.
Care ethics has also challenged the traditional opposition between reason and emotion. While rationalist moral theories tended to identify impartiality and abstraction as conditions of the most advanced forms of moral reasoning, care ethics has argued that emotions possess moral and epistemic value. Virginia Held (2018) contends that emotions such as trust, empathy, and concern for the needs of others are not mere irrational impulses, but rather constitute forms of attentiveness that enable us to understand situations which, from purely abstract models of reasoning, remain inaccessible. From this perspective, emotions form part of the processes through which we identify needs, interpret contexts, and respond to others.
These discussions progressively widened the scope of care ethics beyond the domain of interpersonal relationships and into the political sphere. Joan Tronto played a fundamental role in this reorientation, arguing that care should not be understood solely as an interpersonal moral disposition, but also as a political practice structured by social relations of power. For Tronto (1987), a feminist theory of care must abandon the idea that care constitutes a specifically female disposition and situate the critique within a broader framework that also encompasses relations of class, race, and ethnicity. Care must thus cease to be a private matter and become a central element in the organisation of collective life. This proposal was developed in depth in Caring Democracy (2013), where Tronto argues that contemporary democracies simultaneously suffer from a care deficit and a democratic deficit. According to the author, these two issues are closely connected, since the social organisation of care determines who can participate in collective life and under what conditions. A full democracy therefore requires the redistribution of caring responsibilities as a matter of first-order political importance (Tronto, 2013). Nancy Fraser, for her part, has argued that the care crisis is not just any democratic deficit, but reflects a structural contradiction inherent to capitalism: social reproduction is a possibility for economic accumulation, yet the logic of capital tends to destabilise the very reproductive processes on which it depends. Resolving the care crisis therefore requires not only redistributing responsibilities and granting recognition, but transforming the foundations of the economic system that produces it (Fraser, 2016).
In recent decades, political reflection on care has expanded beyond exclusively human relationships, incorporating an ecosocial point of view. From an ecofeminist perspective, scholars such as Yayo Herrero have pointed out that human dependency has a dual dimension: human beings are simultaneously interdependent, in that they need other people to sustain their lives, and ecodependent, in that they depend on ecosystems and the biophysical limits of the planet (Herrero, 2017). From this perspective, the ecological crisis and the care crisis are inseparable, insofar as both stem from forms of social and economic organization that ignore human dependence on care work and on the ecological limits of the planet. In The Care Manifesto, the Care Collective (2020) argues that responding to this double crisis requires reconfiguring the boundaries of who or what counts as an object of care, proposing the cultivation of an “everyday cosmopolitanism” that encompasses ecosystems, non-human forms of life, and distant communities, thereby questioning the boundaries (national, cultural, and those separating the human from the non-human) and particularisms that restrict our caring responsibilities.
Wendy Harcourt (2026) has pursued this line further, emphasising the importance of placing care at the centre of social, economic, and ecological relationships, and stressing that the reproduction of human life also depends on complex relationships of interdependence with non-human environments and beings. Drawing on feminist political ecology, Harcourt argues that capitalist economies are structurally dependent on caring labour that is frequently rendered invisible and performed unequally by women, racialised persons, and socially precarious groups. The climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have made this structural dependency manifest, revealing how economic accumulation rests on forms of reproductive and affective labour that remain insufficiently recognised. On the basis of these premises, Harcourt proposes placing care at the centre of economic, political, and ecological organisation, understanding it as a form of collective responsibility oriented toward the sustaining of communities, territories, and ecosystems, and linked to forms of solidarity and reciprocity among human and “more-than-human” beings (Harcourt, 2026).
This expansion of care ethics fostered new reflections on the role of materiality in caring relations. In this regard, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has proposed a posthumanist conception of care that incorporates non-human beings, technologies, environments, and material entities as constitutive elements of caring relations. In Matters of Care (2017), she argues that care constitutes a practice of material, affective, and political engagement with the world. From this perspective, “thinking with care” entails recognizing ourselves as part of complex networks of social relations and assuming responsibilities toward the beings, processes, and forms of matter that are often excluded from traditional frameworks of moral concern.
These reflections on the materiality of care converged with certain proposals from new materialism, which seek to question the traditional separation between (active) subjects and the material world (conceived as passive). Along these lines, Jane Bennett (2010) has argued that matter possesses capacities for affecting and participating in social and ecological processes, challenging the idea that agency belongs exclusively to rational human subjects. Without equating these forms of agency with human intentionality, this approach makes it possible to understand care as a practice that attends not only to human relationships, but must also be directed toward non-human elements.
Despite its growing influence, care ethics has been subject to various criticisms. From the outset, the thesis of the “different voice” gave rise to an intense debate that questioned whether there were differences between men and women in moral reasoning given the available empirical evidence. Some scholars suggested that such differences were better explained by attending to the differentiated socialisation processes of men and women (Greeno and Maccoby, 1986). Following this line, scholars from various feminist perspectives have noted that this association risks reinforcing gender stereotypes and presenting as universal experiences that are in fact shaped by differences of race, class, culture, and so on. It has also been noted that caring relationships are not necessarily emancipatory, since they may unfold in contexts marked by relations of power, dependency, or subordination. Finally, some scholars have questioned the capacity of an ethics centred on concrete relationships to address structural forms of injustice and to establish obligations toward persons outside our own contexts.
These criticisms have prompted various reformulations of care ethics, which, as noted, have progressively incorporated greater attention to power relations, structural inequalities, and the diversity of experiences and contexts. Care has thus come to be conceived as a political and global matter, closely linked to justice, vulnerability, and interdependence. This evolution has consolidated care as one of the central categories of contemporary political philosophy and as an indispensable conceptual tool for analysing the social, political, and environmental challenges of the present.
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