ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates some of the specific moral implications of the care/justice debate in general. It discusses the lessons revealed by examination of the ideal types of care and justice. The chapter examines the relationship between the resulting versions of the two ethics. The ethic of care's emphasis on social interdependency leads to a different perspective on moral knowledge. It emphasizes that people's moral knowledge, and the rational capacity to achieve it, is ultimately dependent on the education they have received from parents, teachers, and so on. The ethic of care's emphasis on the social determinants of moral knowledge addresses limitations in the ethic of justice's emphasis on the individual reflection required for moral knowledge. Most feminist commentators would agree that both ethics are morally important, that the ethics are not as dichotomously opposed as is often thought, and that the conventional public/private boundaries of the ethics are inadequate.
