“The Ethics of Care.”
First, read Held’s “The Ethics of Care.”
Instructions: For this in assignment, read the prompt and write a response in one paragraph, single spaced.
Preface: Held maintains that “we need an ethics of care, not just care itself (page 350). The various aspects and expressions of care and caring relations need to be subjected to moral scrutiny and evaluated, not just observed and described.” She continues on page 352 to sketch out an approach for evaluation:
“Caring persons and caring attitudes should be valued, and we can organize many around a constellation of moral considerations associated with care and its absence. For instance, we can ask of a relation whether it is trusting and mutually considerate or hostile and vindictive. We can ask if persons are attentive and responsive to each other’s needs or indifferent and self-absorbed…”
Prompt: Let’s attempt to utilize Held’s Care ethical theory to try to evaluate a relationship in our own life (no pets please). We’ll plug in real numbers to make our own original metric to test her theory out. Remember that for Held’s theory we are looking at relationships that go two ways, so an evaluation should include both members in the relationship you choose to analyze. (It’s not a net average.)
First: Identify one caring relationship that is a part of your own life and briefly explain how these involve responsibility and dependence.
Second: Evaluate your caring relationship for each person in the relationship using Held’s criterion and by applying our [original] number metric for each side. (Some students have asked the other person in the relation to provide their own numbers to evaluate you, but this is optional.) To begin your evaluation of the relationship, you will first need to create your own list of relevant emotions or moral considerations that you believe are important to focus on. Then measure these on each side of the relationship by providing a score. (See the chart in the example below.)
The Metric: Provide a number from 1 to 5, to measure the listed emotions/moral considerations on each side of the relationship. (For example, if the characteristic is “trustworthiness” then a 1 might be “vindictive” or “extremely suspicious” or “non-existent” and a 5 corresponding to something like “absolute trust”). I will leave it up to you how you think it is best to formulate these. The main thing is to develop a scale to rate the different characteristics that are components of a caring relationship.
Third: Finally, respond to the following questions: Did this evaluation help bring any further clarity about the relationship into focus? Are there any areas that either you or the other person may need to improve?
