Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice, which appeared in 1982, argued that men tend to conceive morality in terms of rights, justice, and autonomy, whereas women more frequently think in terms of caring, responsibility, and interrelation with others. At about the same time, Nel Noddings in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education sought to articulate and defend in its own right a “feminine” morality centered specifically around the ideal of caring. Since then, there has been a heated (...) debate about the reality of the distinction Gilligan drew and about its potential implications for ethical theory. Discussions of the morality of caring have questioned, in particular, whether any such morality can really provide a total framework for moral thought and action. For in order to deal with our obligations to people we are not acquainted with and address large-scale issues of social morality, any morality of caring seems to require supplementation by typically “masculine” thinking in terms of rights and justice, with the result that caring turns out to be but one part of morality, rather than anything women, or more enlightened men, could find attractive as a total and self-sufficient way of approaching ethical issues. (shrink)

The promotion of knowledge economies and societies, equated with the mobile subject as bearer of technological, managerial and cosmopolitan competences, on the one hand, and insecurities about social order and national identities, on the other, have in the past few years led to increasing polarisation between skilled migrants and those deemed to lack useful skills. The former are considered to be bearers of human capital and have the capacity to assimilate seamlessly and are therefore worthy of citizenship; the latter are (...) likely to pose problems of assimilation and dependency due to their economic and cultural ‘otherness’ and offered a transient status and partial citizenship by receiving states. In the European context this trend has been reinforced by the redrawing of European geopolitical space creating new boundaries of exclusion and social justice. The emphasis on the knowledge economy also generates gender inequalities and stratifications based on skills and types of knowledge with implications for citizenship and social justice. (shrink)

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic women's (...) "motherwork.". (shrink)

The gendered division of labour in combination with the feminisation of international migration contribute to shortages of care, a phenomenon often called ‘care drain’. I argue that this phenomenon is an issue of global gender justice. I look at two methodological challenges and favourably analyse the suggestions that care drain studies should include the effects of fathers’ and other male caregivers’ migration and, in some cases, the effects of migration within national borders. I also explain why care drain is a (...) problem of distributive justice, by looking at the background conditions that result in much of the care-givers’ migration. (shrink)

This article is devoted to analysing the ethical commitments underlying research methodology on “brain drain” and leading participants in the public debate to deny the human right of emigration for skilled persons. Here, we identify five such commitments : to consequentialism, prioritarianism and nationalism, we add sedentarism and elitism. Based on this analysis, we argue that even though the emigration of the most talented would be a loss for the country of origin, this loss is not sufficient to require that (...) migrants themselves compensate it – either by tax payments (e.g. Bhagwati’s tax proposal) or by not exercising their right to emigrate. Moreover, to interpret public investment in education as the source of migrants’ further obligations to their country is to view education rather as a source of dividends than an access to opportunity that present generations owe to futures ones. (shrink)