Is Care a Virtue? A New Account of Care's Relationship With Virtue Ethics

This paper aims to address a lingering misconception about an ethics of care: that it is simply a form of virtue ethics that includes the straightforward virtue of care. Care cannot be a standard virtue of character, I argue, because care is a necessary precondition of virtue. Virtue ethics sets itself apart from consequentialist or deontological ethical theories by explaining ‘the good’ in terms of virtues, as opposed to outcome or right action. Superficially, there would seem to be nothing very unusual about accommodating care within a virtue ethical framework. In ordinary discourse we talk of the virtuous person as being caring in the same way that we might talk of them as being charitable, kind, courageous or witty. Nevertheless, over the course of this paper I argue that care is not a virtue like courage or wit but something more ethically fundamental that makes courage, wit and other virtues intelligible.