Care Ethics as Applied Ethics: Topics for Freedom

This article proposes to find a substantial ground for articulating a common view of care ethics as liberal (applied) ethics. The author proceeds by presenting and discussing different approaches to the problem of care ethics, starting from the pioneering work of Carol Gilligan in this field (In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, published in 1982). Then she goes on commenting the philosophical notion of care, with reference to relevant theories as preliminaries of an ethics of care: Foucault’s ethics of self-care, Kant’s idea of ethics as a universal principle, and Heidegger’s idea of ethics as an ontological principle. In the following, the author confronts care ethics with feminist theories, trying to settle its place in its relationship with liberal ethics or the ethics of justice, opting at the end for an integrative pattern of care ethics as an applied liberal ethics.

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