Philosophy Colloquium Lecture Series

Stories are as important as they are ubiquitous, depicting everything from the origin of the universe to the driving force behind an isolated act by a single individual. But stories do not just depict what has actually occurred—they can also exert tremendous power over what does or even can occur. How the unfolding of events is presented in a narrative, for instance, or the layers of a person’s character are sketched, can have monumental consequences for the people involved in them. In this talk, I will focus on one dimension of this, exploring how stories can epistemically wrong a person in life-altering ways and yet also be the source of the corresponding epistemic reparations that are called for in response.

In her 2006 review of Virginia Held’s The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global, Carla Bagnoli asks: “Is the ethics of care an autonomous ‘moral theory’?” Nearly twenty years later, the answer to Bagnoli’s pivotal question remains unclear. While Bagnoli originally concluded that care ethics was “not yet justified” as “an independent theoretical approach,” in this paper, I argue that not only does care ethics serve as a meaningful alternative to moral theories, as many feminist philosophers have observed, but it also holds significant promise as an autonomous moral theory. To this end, I advance one aspect of what it would take to justify it as a unified, independent moral theoretical approach: a normative grounding for the ethics of care. 

The past decade has seen significant strides in the development of care ethics as an autonomous moral theory. For example, after noting a lack of a “precise analysis of care ethics’ central normative commitment,” Stephanie Collins engages the care ethics literature to generate the normative core of care ethics, captured by what she calls the “slogan” or central principle of care ethics: “dependency relationships generate responsibilities” (2015, 2). In another important intervention, Steven Steyl articulates a theory of right action in which “[a]n action is right if and only if it is caring” (2021, 512) in the sense of promoting the flourishing of those being cared for (2021, 516; cf. Steyl 2020). Both contributions represent crucial steps towards clarifying the normative content of the ethics of care. Neither, however, addresses the fundamental matter of why one is morally required to adhere to the dependency principle or what makes a caring action a morally required action. That is, neither answers a key question regarding not the content of care ethics, but rather its foundation:  What grounds the moral demand to care? 

I address this challenge by delineating three possible normative groundings for the responsibility to care: a constructivist grounding in dependency, a relational grounding in individual agents’ distinctive moral ability to care, and an alternative relational grounding in caring relationships themselves. Each approach offers different reasons why we are required to care for one another, in which others’ needs and interests (and perhaps sometimes even desires) warrant consideration in moral deliberation. Ultimately, however, evaluation of how each grounding portrays the normative significance of relationality will reveal which one best supports the ethics of care as a moral theory of its own.

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