The Concept of Care: Unpacking the Philosophical Foundations of Feminist Care Ethics

Philosophers who study care – most often, care ethicists – are involved in an ongoing discussion about the concept of care. Despite the significant progress made in this discussion, certain conficting images of care seem to persist in the literature. On one hand, as feminist theorists across disciplines have highlighted, care is a complex social practice that is mired in inequality and injustice. The deeply gendered nature of caring and the unequal division of care-work creates and cements structural inequalities. On the other hand, care is also thought of as a moral value or an ideal. The ethics of care – a moral theory with decidedly feminist roots – is predicated on the idea that caring is somehow morally valuable. A discrepancy thus arises, particularly for care ethicists: care is a social practice that compounds injustices. But it is also a moral value. What is it about care that makes it malleable to such variations? To pick out this complexity and capture the conceptual nuances at play, my research suggests that we frame the concept of care as a thick ethical concept. I will discuss what this thick conceptual framing entails, and provide accounts of the descriptive and evaluative elements of the thick concept of care. I then discuss how this framework helps address central issues in care ethics on the relationship between the social and moral dimensions of care.

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Dr Ira Chadha-Sridhar works primarily in the fields of moral, political, and legal philosophy at the University of Cambridge. As the Hatton-WYNG Junior Research Fellow in Law, Medicine and Life Sciences at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, Ira’s research project focusses on the ‘ethics of care’ and its intersection with doctrinal questions in medical law. Ira holds a PhD and an LLM from the University of Cambridge, and a BA.LLB (Hons) from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata, India.