Care and Global Justice

Abstract

The last two chapters discussed ways that virtue ethics and care ethics could best interact to produce an ethical outlook that took the experiences of women as central and levelled the field as far as women’s participation in public life is concerned. But Chapter 5 turned up a significant source of conflict between those theories: whereas virtue ethics has the potential to produce a theory of justice because virtues can be exercised universally, care is always geared towards a particular individual, and therefore it is harder to see how one might derive justice from care ethics. In this chapter I investigate further this difference by asking whether we can or should care for distant others as we care for our dependents. Clearly, we do need to care for distant others; letting them suffer because they are not in our home and we cannot give the same kind of close-up attention to all who need help is no reason to ignore their plight. But does care ethics, with its emphasis on one-to-one relationships, leave room for this sort of caring, and can older virtue ethics help at all?