Lecture 7 - Ethics of Care People with integrity = ability...

Ethics of Care
° People with integrity = ability to care for others and foster good
relationships
° Care = requires you take concrete action to look after the needs of others
° Caring for others + Fostering good relationships
 1. Humans are essentially social creatures – we live and work in
groups
 2. We cannot accomplish many of the tasks we need to undertake
unless we can foster good relationships
°
° What is care?
 A basic human capacity to recognize and respond to the needs of
others and to moderate our behavior by appealing to the good or harm
it might cause to others
 Martin Hoffman – moral psychologist
o Sees care as growing out of our natural capacity for empathy
 Impulse to help can be undermined…
o Blaming victim for his own distress
o Feeling overwhelmed by the distress of others
o By consciously avoiding the awareness of the distress of others
 We have a natural impulse to prioritize needs of those close to us, but
we can use this to be responsive to distant others as well
 Because there is a natural basis for care, care as a moral perspective
can be both a strong motivation for doing the right thing and can
provide a basis for recognizing right actions
 Care = a META-virtue
o It provides an organizing principle for all the other virtues