We believe we owe one another respect. We believe we ought to pay what we owe by treating one another ‘with respect.’ If we could understand these beliefs we would be well on the way to understanding morality itself. If we could justify these beliefs we could vindicate a central part of our moral experience.Respect comes in many varieties. We respect some people for their upright character, others for their exceptional achievements. There are people we respect as forces of nature: (...) we go to great lengths to accommodate their moods, wiles, and demands. Finally, most of us seem to respect people simply because they are people. This is the sort of respect of special interest to moral theory.In order to be worthy of this last sort of respect, it is not only sufficient but necessary that one be a person. We can, of course, take a similar attitude towardnonpersons. (shrink)

Sara T. Fry maintains that care is a central concept for nursing ethics. This requires, among other things, that care is a virtue rather than a mode of being. But if care is a central virtue of ethics and medical ethics then the claim that care is a central concept for nursing ethics is trivial. Otherwise, it is implausible.

Educational research has explored the potentials and problems inherent in student anonymity and pseudonymity in virtual learning environments. But few studies have attended to onymity, that is, the use of ones own and others given names in online courses. In part, this lack of attention is due to the taken-for-granted nature of using our names in everyday, “face-to-face” classrooms as well as in online learning situations. This research explores the experiential significance of student names in online classrooms. Specifically, the paper (...) reports on one relational thematic that surfaced in a phenomenological study investigating experiences of teaching and learning online. (shrink)

This article contends that an ethics of care has a particular moral ontology that makes it suitable to argue for the normative significance of relational responsibilities within professional health care. This ontology is relational. It means that moral choices always have to account for the web of relationships, the relational networks and responsibilities that are an essential part of particular moral circumstances. Given this ontology, the article investigates the conditions for health care professionals to be partial and to act on (...) the basis of particular responsibilities to their patients. We will argue that priorities could be partial in three ways: first, because there may be exceptional circumstances that allow for giving priority to one patient over another; second, because the integrity of the patient and a health care worker may be connected in special ways; and, finally, even if impartiality is essential, the institutional basis of health care must always give ample space for an ethically qualified individual and personal care for patients. Even if difficult priorities may be necessary, the conditions of institutional health care should always seek to create the prerequisites for nurses and doctors to administer proper care. (shrink)

Women often seek midwifery care as an alternative to the maternity services that are readily available within the insured health care system in Alberta. Some aspects of community-based, primary care midwifery in Alberta that characterize this alternative are the use of story-telling as a form of knowledge, the development of social con nections among women seeking midwifery care, and nonauthoritarian relationships between midwives and women. In this paper, the concept of confidentiality, as it relates to these aspects of midwifery practice, (...) is explored, using traditional, caring and feminist models of ethics. (shrink)

Educational theorists working within the tradition of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, posit teaching to be a site of implied ethics, that is, a realm in which non-violent or less violent relations to the other are possible. Derrida links ethics to the realm of friendship, enabling one to understand teaching as a site of the ethics of friendship. I clarify how friendship, as a re-metaphorization of differance, opens us up to a conception of teaching that provides a counterpoint to (...) the current discourse of ‘effective’ teaching. I draw out the implications of the Derridean conception of friendship for the educator in his or her philosophical orientation towards teaching and attempt to show that friendship points the educator towards an orientation that enables a ‘fine tuning’ and opening up of one’s sense of obligation and responsibility to one’s students in ways that cannot be circumscribed to current or institutionally sanctioned ways of understanding the activity of teaching, especially as it is often envisioned in American public education. (shrink)

Traditionally, the problem of defeating scepticism about the rationality of morality is that of showing that every morally required act is rationally required. Little or no direct attention has been paid to whether we must also show that it is rational for the agent to have and act from the morally appropriate motive, whatever that may be. This is not to say that philosophers have entirely ignored the issue of motives; a fair number—Kant and Aristotle come to mind—are concerned in (...) part with the kind of motive agents ought to have and from which they ought to act. But the link to scepticism has not been clearly made. At issue is whether scepticism is fully defeated if we show that every morally required act is rationally required, even if we leave it possible that a fully rational person who performs the act just “goes through the motions” in doing so. (shrink)

We reflect upon the meaning of freedom and autonomy in nursing behaviour, attempting to outline the contemporary situation of nursing in Italy, where the profession is achieving important results after a long period of submission and subordination. The way to real emancipation is not easy, but a statement of law on the one hand - abolishing constraints such as the Mansionario - and professional self-regulation on the other - the recent new Deontological Code - represent a real conquest in that (...) direction. However, no statement of law or deontology can be sufficient without deeper reflection by the profession on itself and its tasks, potentiality, social importance and self-esteem. (shrink)

In this paper I elaborate a notion of nurses’ professional self as one who is attracted towards intrinsic value. My previous work in 2003 has shown how nurses, who see intrinsic value in their work, experience self‐affirmation when they believe that they have made a difference to that which they see to have value. The aim of this work is to reveal a further aspect of nurses’ professional self. I argue that nurses’ desire towards that which they see to have (...) intrinsic value, is a necessary and self‐transcending aspect of a nurses’ professional self. I argue further that nurses’ desire towards intrinsic value inevitably involves their vulnerability. Nurses who see intrinsic value are shown to be vulnerable to self‐sacrifice in their inclination to work for the good of their patients, at the expense of themselves. Yet an ability to transcend their self in this way remains a necessary aspect of a nurse's professional self, which requires nurture and support through nurse education. (shrink)

Care exploitation is a pervasive yet undertheorized injustice that emerges in both our interpersonal and structural relationships. Among those that are particularly vulnerable to this injustice are activists, those invested in bringing about positive change precisely because of how deeply they care about a given cause. Care exploitation occurs when an individual with caring attitudes is called to aid in the flourishing of a subject (e.g., LGBTQ + rights, anti-racism, conservation) by another that presumes they will answer said call simply (...) because they care. In this work I offer an account of what it takes to prevent care exploitation in the narrow context of activism. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, I argue that we have a political responsibility to (at the very least) adopt a stance of solidarity with activists by virtue of our structural relationships with them. This demands two things of us: (i) being sensitive to activists’ well-being and (ii) supporting their capacity for self-authorship. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOrganization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted in everyday organizational life. We draw on the concept of boundary work to explain how employees negotiate the boundary of their caring responsibilities in ways that grants or denies (...) care to coworkers. We argue that the possibility of an ethics of care for coworkers requires boundary work that suspends the separation of personal and professional selves and constitutes the worker as a whole person. We contribute to research on care in organizations by showing how care for coworkers may be enabled or undermined by maintaining or suppressing the care allocation dilemma. (shrink)

The current interest in and discussion of virtue ethics suggests that this approach to moral decisionmaking has several distinct advantages as applied to ethical issues in healthcare delivery. For the most part, calls to incorporate the virtues of the healthcare provider in discussions of these issues have sought to supplement rather than totally replace traditional ethical theories, such as the utilitarian focus on maximizing the best overall consequences and the Kantian concern to act on the duty of respect for persons. (...) Including virtue-based ethics in such discussions allows for a more eclectic view of what should be considered in resolving difficult moral problems. As many critics of the purely principle-based approach have noted, real moral dilemmas are usually quite messy and are not easily susceptible to satisfactory resolution solely on the basis of abstract moral theories or principles. (shrink)

Care theorists often think of care as involving “caring-about”—concern or attentiveness—and “caring-for”—acting to nurture, look after, or meet needs. One problem for any theory of care is the scope of our obligations to care in both of those senses; in particular, our capacities for “caring-about” often outrun our capacities for “caring-for.” Accounts of care as potentially global in scope may ascribe overwhelming obligations to moral agents; however, we are often tempted to avoid or ignore situations that may call for a (...) caring response. I suggest that some Kantian ideas may help to strike a reasonable balance. (shrink)

This paper provides an empirically informed perspective on the notion of responsibility using an ethical framework that has received little attention in the engineering-related literature to date: ethics of care. In this work, we ground conceptual explorations of engineering responsibility in empirical findings from engineering student’s writing on the human health and environmental impacts of “backyard” electronic waste recycling/disposal. Our findings, from a purposefully diverse sample of engineering students in an introductory electrical engineering course, indicate that most of these engineers (...) of tomorrow associated engineers with responsibility for the electronic waste problem in some way. However, a number of responses suggested attempts to deflect responsibility away from engineers towards, for example, the government or the companies for whom engineers work. Still other students associated both engineers and non-engineers with responsibility, demonstrating the distributed/collective nature of responsibility that will be required to achieve a solution to the global problem of excessive e-waste. Building upon one element of a framework for care ethics adopted from the wider literature, these empirical findings are used to facilitate a preliminary, conceptual exploration of care-ethical responsibility within the context of engineering and e-waste recycling/disposal. The objective of this exploration is to provide a first step toward understanding how care-ethical responsibility applies to engineering. We also hope to seed dialogue within the engineering community about its ethical responsibilities on the issue. We conclude the paper with a discussion of its implications for engineering education and engineering ethics that suggests changes for educational policy and the practice of engineering. (shrink)

This comparative study of the ethics of care and the Confucian concept of jen argue against two assumptions made by Chenyang Li in his own study of these two traditions. Against him, I argue that a “feminine” morality is not adequate to address human equality, and that care-orientated theories like jen and care seem incompatible with the feminist commitment to oppose the subjection of women.

Motivated by a deep sense that injustice and inequality are wrong, liberals and reformers in the Western political tradition have focused their energies on policies and programs which seek inclusion: extending the suffrage to those without property; seeking to treat women the same as men, and blacks the same as whites; trying to ensure that as few as possible are excluded from economic opportunity due to lack of resources. Under current conditions, such demands for inclusion take two primary forms, especially (...) in the United States. One is a commitment to using the state to equalize the life chances of individuals. The other is a call for treating groups which have experienced discrimination with full respect. The former leads to the welfare state, while the latter is produced by, and in turn produces, what is commonly called identity politics, the politics of recognition, or the politics of presence. (shrink)

There is all over the world a sort of fever affecting all the research fields related, closely or somewhat loosely,with human health issues. Some of them – cloning, therapeutic cloning, stem cell therapy, human enhancement, etc. – arise fierce and controversial public debates. At the same time, a concern can be felt worldwide that tomorrow’s medicine might well become more and more « dual », the advanced health devices threatening to become the privilege of a small whealthy minority, or at (...) least excluding the vast majority of the poor and the low middle class. Furthermore, there are even greater disparities between wealthy and poor nations in access to health care and in the level of protection available to members of the latter’s population in a medical context. The theme of rationing health care has been ongoingly gaining in prevalence over the two to three last decades in the public debates, causing many to express worries about the ability of our health system to provide both efficiency and justice in health care. But, among all the new health care devices, are there not some which could be efficient both in terms of improvement of the management of patients’ health and of a just allocation of care ? Besides, not only emerge concerns linked with the development of new technologies in health care, but also in connection with the impact of social-political transformations onto the medical relationship : what are in this context the doctor-patient relationship in regard to autonomy and gender ? Should we be free to use or not to use these new technologies ? Might not the « quest for perfection » develop into a duty of perfection ? And, with the improvement of the therapeutic power to prolong human life, are we to think of assisted suicide as the future of death ? These are some of the issues that this conference wants to adress from an ethical perspective and with rigour. To enrich our discussions also medical and life science praticioners willing to reflect ethically on moral questions of health issues in their professional life and politicians faced with ethical decisions in the domain of health are welcome to participate. (shrink)

Care ethics emphasizes responsibility as a key element for caring practices. Responsibilities to care are taken by certain groups of people, making caring practices into moral and political practices in which responsibilities are assigned, assumed, or implicitly expected, as well as deflected. Despite this attention for social practices of distribution and its unequal result, making certain groups of people the recipient of more caring responsibilities than others, the passive aspect of a caring responsibility has been underexposed by care ethics. By (...) drawing upon the work of the French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, a care ethical conceptualization of responsibility can by enriched, by scrutinizing how responsibility is literally a response to something else. This paper starts with a vignette of an everyday situation of professional care. After that the current body of care ethical literature on responsibility is presented, followed by Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, using his analysis of Caravaggio’s painting The Calling of St. Matthew and resulting in his redefinition of responsibility. In the next section we present a table in which we juxtapose four distinct paradigms of responsibility, which we will describe briefly. The final section consists of an exploration of the paradigms by an analysis of the vignette and results in a conclusion concerning what Marion’s view has to offer to care ethics with regard to responsibility. (shrink)

Introduction:In previous issues of this journal, Carol Gilligan’s original concept of mature care has been conceptualized by several (especially Norwegian) contributors. This has resulted in a dichotomous view of self and other, and of self-care and altruism, in which any form of self-sacrifice is rejected. Although this interpretation of Gilligan seems to be quite persistent in care-ethical theory, it does not seem to do justice to either Gilligan’s original work or the tensions experienced in contemporary nursing practice.Discussion:A close reading of (...) Gilligan’s concept of mature care leads to a view that differs radically from any dichotomy of self-care and altruism. Instead of a dichotomous view, a dialectical view on self and other is proposed that builds upon connectedness and might support a care-ethical view of nursing that is more consistent with Gilligan’s own critical insights such as relationality and a practice-based ethics. A concrete case taken from nursing practice shows the interconnectedness of professional and personal responsibility. This underpins a multilayered, complex view of self-realization that encompasses sacrifices as well.Conclusion:When mature care is characterized as a practice of a multilayered connectedness, caregivers can be acknowledged for their relational identity and nursing practices can be recognized as multilayered and interconnected. This view is better able to capture the tensions that are related to today’s nursing as a practice, which inevitably includes sacrifices of self. In conclusion, a further discussion on normative conceptualizations of care is proposed that starts with a non-normative scrutiny of caring practices. (shrink)

The compelling ethical legacy of Clifford Christians's and his profound commitment to moral action is enriched by his engagement with universal proto-norms, values that order all human relationships and institutions and so bypass the divisiveness of appeals to individual rights, cultural practices, or national prerogatives. According to Christians, the primal sacredness of life establishes mutual respect as a basis for ethics and thus constitutes the premier proto-norm; our obligation to sustain one another defines human existence. Entailed by the sacredness of (...) life are other basic ethical values, such as truth, human dignity, and non-violence. This essay considers whether generating all ethics from such universals has downsides and whether the ethics derived from this “primordial generality” produces the maximal ethics required by a complex, modern world. (shrink)

Spiritual pedagogy (SP) as a new educational theory aims to apply cultural and spiritual values in classroom practices. It has been the focus of research in different fields such as counselling, management, and science in the past decades. However, its application in second/foreign language research and practice has been widely overlooked by L2 researchers, to date. To fill this gap, the present study made an effort to provide a theoretical analysis of the conceptualizations, scientific background, benefits, and practical techniques to (...) implement SP in the context of L2 education. In so doing, this paper suggests a number of practices through which SP can be integrated into L2 education among which positive psychology (PP) was more highlighted. Additionally, some practical implications were provided for EFL teachers, teacher trainers, students, curriculum designers, and researchers to enhance their knowledge of spirituality and education. In the end, different suggestions for future research were presented to move this research domain forward. (shrink)

Institutional ethics committees in health care facilities now create moral policy, provide moral education, and consult with physicians and other health care workers. After sketching reasons for the development of IECs, this paper first examines the predominant moral standards it is often assumed lECs are now using, these standards being neo-Kantian principles of justice and utilitarian principles of the greatest good. Then, it is argued that a feminine ethics of care, as posited by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings, is an (...) unacknowledged basis for /EC discussions and decisions. Further, it is suggested that feminine ethics of care can and should provide underlying theoretical tools and standards for lECs. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 205 Seiten: 95-114.

There are two focal points to this article. One is to address Julia Kristeva’s theoretical corpus in the context of philosophy of education. Kristeva’s notion of subject in process problematises education with its habitual emphasis on ‘product’. Another is to consider her impact from the perspective of edusemiotics. Edusemiotics is a new direction in educational philosophy and theory, and Kristeva represents one contemporary French intellectual who implicitly inspired the creation, research and development of edusemiotics. The article will briefly address the (...) distinguished features of edusemiotics, the central of which is process ontology in contrast to the old Cartesian paradigm of substance dualism that continues to haunt education. The article will also address the role of presymbolic dimension in the process of self-formation and, as a follow up, reformulate the concept of lifelong education and teacher training. (shrink)

Since the mid‐1990s we have witnessed the rise of numerous constructive and positive activities aimed at developing or enhancing corporate responsibility and corporate citizenship as well as anti‐globalization and anticorporate activism. And, of course, in 2008, we witnessed the meltdown of financial markets and numerous financial institutions as well as some major companies teetering on the brink of collapse. What is actually needed to create the world that many people want to live in may in fact be a new relationship (...) between business and society, that is, new ways of looking at the corporation and its role in society, both in practice and in management education? We will argue that some initiatives, such as Corporation 2020, have already begun to explore these issues by taking a more holistic perspective on different purposes and roles of the corporation in the future. Management education, which has been severely criticized in the aftermath of the economic crisis, has an important role to play, but in a changed form. Implications for leadership and management education include the need to shift cognitive, moral, and emotional levels of development, renewed emphasis on balance both individually and socially, a less is more sensibility, a holistic systems perspective, and shifting the purpose of the firm to encompass not just shareholder needs, but also societal, stakeholder, and ecological needs and interests. In this article we explore some of the ways in which these attributes might be engendered in future leaders, at least in those management development and education programs interested in fostering a new wave of progressive leadership in management for the future. (shrink)

This paper explores how Schutz’s ideas enrich and extend the ethic of care promulgated by feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, and Eva Feder Kittay. Using Schutz’s ideas about the I-Thou relationship, systems of relevances, and growing old together, the author lays a foundation for continuing dialogue between feminist theorists of care and Schutzian phenomenologists.

Theories about relationships impact the ways in which we imagine that teachers and students can or should interact. These theories often involve either individualistic or relational assumptions. A contrast has been made between theories that assume that the individual is primary, and the relationship secondary, and those that assume that the relationship is primary and the individual secondary. Roughly mapping on to these assumptions are the implications that educational relationships either ought to facilitate autonomy or community, emancipation or socialization. I (...) argue that educational contexts occupy a liminal space at the boundaries of multiple contexts, and so have limited ability to either emancipate or socialize students relative to these contexts. However, the very liminality of the educational space allows for a unique view and exploration of these contexts using autonomy and community as means rather than ends of education. Learning, described here as re-co-gnition, is facilitated as students move away from and then return to the liminal, and teachers and students view again together the boundaries of these various contexts as they intersect at the school. Implications for teaching in this liminal space are explored for recognizing relationships between student and teacher, childhood and adulthood, home and the “outside world,” and boundaries within and between disciplines. (shrink)

Ethics in caring is what we actually make explicit through our approach and how we invite the suffering patient into a caring relationship. This phenomenological study investigates suffering and health and how this presupposes a deeper reflection on ethics in caring. The aim was to try to discover, describe and understand how patients experience their life situation three years after undergoing surgery. The theoretical approach is based on central aspects of Eriksson’s caritative theory (i.e. the view of the person as (...) body, soul and spirit). The informants were four women and four men aged between 55 and 77 years. The empirical material revealed suffering that was connected with both illness and life. Suffering involves experiences of grief, loneliness and struggling. Health implies a yearning for something beyond the current life situation, a yearning to experience some meaning in life. This leads to an awareness of unplumbed possibilities. Understanding the experiences of individual patients demands of us, as both researchers and nurses, to act, seeking after the scientific truth (i.e. a deeper reflection of the ontological, epistemological and methodological questions). The idea of responsibility helps us to interpret and meet the innermost desires of suffering patients in their true presence. Caritative caring ethics means ‘being there’, confirming patients’ absolute dignity; it is a manifestation of the love that ‘just exists’. Compassion requires an inner disposition to go with others to the places where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely and broken. An ontology of caring provides both a starting point and a context for reflection about ethics and the ethical life. (shrink)

Abstract:Scholars have developed many theories of international strategy and many theories of international ethics. Separating strategy and ethics in this way, though, perpetuates a perception that profit and ethics are mutually exclusive. Accordingly, I offer a framework that links international strategy and international ethics. I suggest that at an abstract level the strategic concepts of integration and responsiveness and the ethical concepts of justice and caring are concerned with the same theoretical quandaries. Therefore, in any situation there are behaviors that (...) are both integrative and just and/or both responsive and caring, and these behaviors are both strategic and ethical. To demonstrate the potential descriptive and prescriptive value of the framework, I descend the ladders of abstraction associated with these concepts and apply the framework to two business situations. (shrink)

The societal dynamism of modernity results in the theoretical upgrading and the actual development of personal reflective capacities, for example abstract reasoning, Kantian morality, and the development of the idiocentered perspective. These capacities are created in the disembedding of prereflective capacities, for example context-sensitive intelligence, care-morality, and mundocenteredness. The reflective capacities become the prerequisite of further modernization. The development-potential offered by the demands of modernity is accompanied by a risk of assimilative stress, for example pseudological reasoning, varieties of postmodernism, making (...) a fetish of the medium, and the forfeit of the morality of care. (shrink)

The article addresses Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which offers very productive tools for analysing disability. The Habermasian division of social reality helps examine positive and negative effects of tensions between the lifeworld of a person with disability and the system. By exploring such an individual's communicative action, one can obtain an insight into his/her validity claims and disruptions in the communication process and self‐understandings inscribed in group narratives. The study reported in the article used in‐depth interviews, which narratively (...) reveal the experiences of a person with disability in family, education, sports and labour. The key findings are, first, that the rationalization of lifeworlds of people with disability increases while processes in which they are colonized by the system intensify; second, that education and family are significant factors in the raising of validity claims; and third, that validity claims as tools of verbal communication should be augmented with arguments from non‐verbal language (e.g. gesture, empathy). (shrink)

In this article, we investigate the role an ethic of care might play in constructing a normative model of ethical practice for journalism. How would practice be changed if the goal of journalism shifted from the traditional epistemological understanding to an ontological-ethical orientation? What would it mean for journalism to think of itself as an institution committed to aiding in the construction of a community defined by the solidarity of its citizens with one another?

Dewey provides an ethics that is committed to those aspects of experience that have been associated with the "feminine." In addition to an argument against the devaluation of the affective and of concrete relationships, we also find in Dewey's ethics a thoughtful appreciation of how and why these things are essential to our moral life. In this article I consider the importance of the affective and of relationships in Dewey's ethics and set out aspects of Dewey's ethics that might be (...) useful resources for feminist writers in ethics. (shrink)

The existential, experiential, ethical, pathic and pre-pathic dimensions of education are essential for the creative composition of subjectivities in institutional spaces, yet educational research and policy tend increasingly to privilege technical discourses and prescriptive approaches both when evaluating ‘what is effective in education’ and when determining educational policy. This essay explores those aspects of the educational experience and educational institutions that are often felt and sensed pre-cognitively by students, parents and teachers, but are seldom given further elaboration or articulation in (...) educational research. We will reflect on what is meant by the experience of education and experience in education, including the struggles to make sense of or understand something, the surprises that strike pre-reflectively, and the ways in which such moments are noticed, pursued, and explored rather than reflexively ‘evaluated’. We then explore the idea of experimentation in institutions, in particular in relation to the range of concepts that Jean Oury introduces in order to move our attention and awareness to questions of experience, existence, atmosphere, and the pathic—the way in which we undergo, sense and participate in the world prior to cognition and the desire for mastery and control of our encounters. Finally, we address the question of the ethics of institutions. (shrink)

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the possibility of designing a satisfactory method, using written responses to hypotheical scenarios, for evaluating the quality of moral reasoning in student nurses. Scenarios were developed from interviews with practising nurses. Nurses and student nurses provided written responses to the scenarios, and nursing faculty members from six institutions sorted the responses according to their perceptions of quality (i.e. 'best', 'next best', 'worst' etc.). There was very little agreement among faculty members on (...) the quality of the responses. Consequently, it was impossible to develop a 'best' response on which the faculty members could agree. Analysis revealed a framework used by the participants for ethical decision-making. The results of this study have important implications for the way in which we think about the teaching and the evaluation of nursing ethics. (shrink)

Care is a feature of all of our lives, all of the time. An analysis of Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence reveals that care and caring permeate complex dimensions of life in and after school and we ask here, if, on some accounts, care can do the work required of it. Acknowledging the significance of her contribution to care, we focus on the work of Nel Noddings suggesting that she pays insufficient attention to other emotions implicated in the work of morally (...) appropriate care. We argue here that Noddings' version of care would benefit from the support of an ethical theory of the emotions, including a moralized form of compassion, if care in schools is to be both better understood and more likely realised. (shrink)

All humans experience needs. At times needs cut deep, inhibiting persons’ abilities to act as agents in the world, to live in distinctly human ways, or to achieve life goals of significance to them. In considering such potentialities, several questions arise: Are any needs morally important, meaning that they operate as morally relevant details of a situation? What is the correct moral stance to take with regard to situations of need? Are moral agents ever required to tend to others’ well-being (...) by meeting their needs? What justification or foundation, if any, can be given for requiring moral agents to respond to others’ needs? (shrink)