Women and Caring: What Can Feminists Learn About Morality from Caring? [1989]

This chapter not only continues challenging the traditional script about men's and women's caring, it also suggests feminists must be careful about the direction their analysis of care takes. It argues that feminists cannot assume that any attribute of women is automatically a virtue worthy of feminists embracing it. The chapter explores some ways in which caring challenges contemporary moral theory. The moral relevance of attentiveness belies the adequacy of the abstract, exchange-oriented individual as the moral subject. Caring challenges the view that morality starts where rational and autonomous individuals confront each other to work out the rules of moral life. The chapter considers the way in which caring for another raises questions about authority and autonomy between carer and cared-for. It examines how caring for another raises problems that grow out of the particularity of caring. The chapter discusses some aspects of moral life posed by the necessary attentiveness to [the] other's needs when caring for another.