ABSTRACT
I have said that care ethics treats acts as right or wrong, depending on whether they exhibit a caring or uncaring attitude/motivation on the part of the agent. But surely this formula needs clarification and expansion. A single act may show an empathically caring attitude toward some people, and a lack of empathic caring, even malice, toward others. So an ethics of caring needs to be able to say how a caring individual relates to all the different people she knows or (merely) knows about. We shall take up this challenge in the present chapter and do so, again, by reference to empathy and distinctions of empathy.
I believe the best way to show that the ethics of empathic caring (as we can call the present approach) can give us a plausible general account of our obligations to help others, is to begin with a discussion of Peter Singer’s classic article ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’.1 In that article Singer argues that our obligations to distant and personally unknown others are just as strong as those we have to those who are near and/or known to us. Thus if a child is drowning right in front of one, and one can easily save her, it would normally be morally wrong not to do so, and almost everyone is willing to agree that we are morally obligated here. But most people think we are not similarly (or as strongly) obligated to save the life of a distant child by making, say, a small contribution to Oxfam; yet, as Singer points out in his article, the most obvious difference between the drowning child and children we can save via contributions to Oxfam is one of spatial distance.
