ABSTRACT
Advocates of care ethics such as Nel Noddings see caring as grounded in feeling. They look to Hume as a forerunner of their approach, and it is natural to regard them/us as moral sentimentalists.1 But the original sentimentalists, unlike most Kantians and liberals, thought that their view left morality, moral behavior, unjustified in rational terms. Both Hutcheson and Hume hold that it is not irrational, not against reason, to do immoral things, and they also hold, more generally, that there is no such thing as practical rationality. Even given its roots in and affinity for sentimentalism, does or should a care ethicist accept either or both of these further assumptions? (I say ‘further’ because to claim that moral actions depend on feeling, and that moral judgments are justified by reference to facts about feeling, is not quite yet to have committed oneself to the strong views that Hume and Hutcheson hold about rationality.)
In what follows, I want to argue that an ethics of empathic caring has no reason to try to avoid Hume and Hutcheson’s assumption that immorality needn’t be (considered) irrational. That assumption, or conclusion, is not as dangerous or implausible as many ethical rationalists have believed, and I want to explain why I think this. On the other hand, I do think we have reason to resist the extreme sentimentalist claim that there is no such thing as practical – as opposed to theoretical – rationality; and I want, later in this chapter, to sketch a positive account of practical rationality that sits well with our caring approach to morality. Finally, I shall want to say something here about the place of reason or rationality within care ethics as a whole, and about how the care-ethical ideal of fostering caring relationships fits in with what has, or will have, been said earlier in this chapter.
