CAREY SENIOR FACULTY Fellow 2002-03
Ruth Groenhout
(Philosophy)
Calvin College
Created to Care: The Augustinian Roots of an Ethics of
Care
The ethics of care is a contemporary feminist account of ethics that
has been developed by theorists who focus on women's experiences and
ways of thinking. It is an account of ethics that is grounded in care
for the other in his or her particularity. But the development of an
ethics of care has not gone uncriticized. Critics from within and without
feminist circles have argued that an ethics of care draws on a falsely
essentialist picture of women's nature as emotional, nurturing and self-sacrificing,
and in so doing reinstates traditional accounts of women's nature, accounts
which have served in the past to restrict women's freedom and confine
them to subordinate roles in the home and in society at large.
An adequate response to these criticisms requires
an articulation of the account of human nature that is implicit
in care theory. The charge of false essentialism can best be
responded to by clarifying what assumptions the theory does
make about humans
in general, and about men and women in particular. And when we
examine the presuppositions and assumptions that care theorists
make, it becomes apparent that they do, in fact, assume an implicit
account of human nature, one that has close ties to the accounts
given by two very different theorists: St. Augustine and Emmanuel
Levinas. Since neither of these thinkers intends to offer an
account
of women's ethical experience, the similarity between their accounts
of human nature and that implicit in care theory suggests that
care theory does not rely on an untenable conception of women's
nature. This does not negate the fact that care theory does
offer
an account of ethics that provides a better context for addressing
ethical concerns that are central to women's experiences. Instead,
it underscores the extent to which care theory provides a more
adequate account of all human experience, male and female, than
some rival theories. An ethics of care, I argue, depends on a
conception of humans as oriented toward love, as irremediably
relational, and as finite and embodied. These features are common
to all of the thinkers discussed. However, both Augustine and
Levinas have a notion of transcendence that is not a central
focus of contemporary ethics of care, and this notion is one
that cannot
be left out of the theoretical grounding without a corresponding
loss in theoretical power. In particular, this emphasis on the
transcendent suggests that an account of care, to be fully developed,
should take account of the religious aspects of human life.
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