Care Ethics

As a central part of feminist ethics, a universal ethics of care has been developed since the 1980s, which assumes the vulnerability of people and their existential dependence on other people as an anthropological constant: “The heart of care ethics […] is that people do care for others – that this is a part of our daily lives in the mundane sense, and constitutive of our subjectivities and identities in a more profound ontological and moral sense. This activity of caring is not peripheral to our lives; it constitutes what makes us who we are” (Robinson 2013: 136). The various approaches to a universal ethic of care emerged in discussion with and in distinction from the ethic of justice, initially for the individual level of action (cf. Gilligan 1982/1988), but then also for the political and global level (cf. Tronto 1993; Robinson 1999). Early on, the literature also includes reflections on how we learn caring norms (cf: caring norms) (cf. Oliner/Oliner 1995, ch. 4).