ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of autonomy in the ideal types of care and justice. The recent and ongoing care/justice debate has focused on questions about the relationship between predominant approaches to ethics, especially Kantian ethics, labeled the ethic of justice, and the newly articulated ethic of care. The ethic of justice begins with an assumption of human separateness, so that in order to be obligated to others, people must in some sense consent to those obligations. The different starting points of the two ethics are reflected in two different ways of constructing the problem in the Heinz dilemma. Based on their differing assumptions about the role of social relations in constituting an individual's identity, the ethic of justice and the ethic of care reach differing conclusions about autonomy. The ethic of care's focus on relationships between individuals leads its advocates to be skeptical of the desirability and even the possibility of autonomy.
