Ethics of care

An ethical approach that treats care, relationships, dependency, and responsiveness to particular people and circumstances as central to moral judgment.

Care: The activity of attending to needs and supporting another person's well-being. Ethics of care makes caring practices a central source of moral understanding.
Carol Gilligan: An American psychologist whose research challenged male-centered accounts of moral development. Her work helped prompt the modern debate about care as a distinct moral voice.
Deontology: An ethical family that assesses actions by duties, rules, or constraints. Care ethics questions whether universal duties can capture the demands of particular relationships.
Care ethics in bioethics: The use of care-ethical ideas to examine health care, patient relationships, and medical decisions. Clinical dependency and ongoing relationships make health care a direct test of care ethics.
Joan Tronto: An American political theorist who developed a political account of care and its distribution. Her work asks how institutions and citizens should share responsibility for care.
Dependency: Reliance on others for support, resources, or essential activities. Human dependency challenges ethical theories that picture people as fully independent.
In a Different Voice: Carol Gilligan's 1982 book arguing that moral reasoning can emphasize relationships and responsibility. The book brought care-based moral reasoning into prominent discussion.
Consequentialism: An ethical family that evaluates actions by the outcomes they produce. Care ethics resists reducing moral judgment to aggregate outcomes alone.
Care work: Paid or unpaid labor that supports people's health, daily needs, and well-being. Care ethics draws attention to the moral and social value of often-undervalued care labor.
Care ethics and justice: Debates about how relational care and impartial standards of fairness can inform one another. The approach must address fairness beyond the close relationships where care is easiest to recognize.

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