Virtue and lifeworlds

1
Virtue and lifeworlds

• Aristotles warrior prince
• courage, generosity, magnificence, high
  mindedness, gentleness, friendliness,
  truthfulness, wittiness, wisdom
• Christian monk
• faith, hope, charity, chastity, piety, humility,
  obedience
• Confucian family subject
• humanity, propriety, filial piety,
  broadmindedness, dignity

2
The world of the market

• The competitive individualist
• Disciplined, hard working, entrepreneurial,
  organized, driven to succeed

3
The Caring Community

• Humans are essentially social creatures.
• Doing the right thing means creating and
  sustaining caring communities.
• Care is a basic human capacity to recognize and
  respond to the needs of others.
• Care begins at home and extends to distant
  others.

4
Empathy and Care

• Empathy is basic human capacity
• Must be developed through
• past care
• caring interactions with others
• Commitment to be a caring person

5
Care as Virtue

• Care as foundational virtue
• Disposition to be good friend, family member and
  citizen of caring community
• Care is a disposition to respond to others by
• Not inflicting harm
• Alleviating suffering
• Cultivating caring communities
• Requires the cultivation of empathy and its
  extension to distant others

6
Central features of care

• Moral attention
• attention to the facts
• Sympathetic understanding
• awareness of what the other would want you to do,
  and of what would be best for the other.
• Relationship awareness
• awareness of existing relationships, of need to
  create and sustain community
• Accommodation and harmony
• Balancing interests and preserving harmony in so
  far as you can.

7
Failures of Empathy

• Deliberate blunting of feeling of empathy e.g.
  blaming the victim
• Here and now bias
• Empathic over-arousal

8
Failure to Develop Empathy

• can be destroyed by power-assertive
  childrearing, diminished by cultural valuing of
  competition over helping others, and overwhelmed
  by egoistic motives nonnurturant, excessively
  power-assertive life experiences may well produce
  individuals who cannot empathize. (M. Hoffman,
  Empathy and Moral Development 281-2)

9
Responding to Failures of Empathy

• In oneself
• Call up feeling of empathy
• e.g. by imagination
• In Society and family
• Share care work
• Sensitive childrearing
• Emphasize helping over competition
• Limit power-assertive life experiences

10
Care and Justice voices Moral reasoning

• Care moral development as emotional maturity.
• Justice moral development as cognitive.
• Care moral reasoning is contextual.
• Justice moral reasoning is finding the right
  principles to apply to each case.

11
Care voice persons

• The caring community
• Embedded persons
• Particular social context
• Some relationships are given.
• Connected selves
• Self-understanding in terms of relations with
  others.

12
Justice voice persons

• The world of the market
• Autonomous individuals
• Capable of self-definition in all social
  contexts.
• Relationships are contractual.
• Separate/Objective Self
• Self-understanding in terms of individual
  characteristics and desires.

13
Care and other Moral Perspectives

• Different perspectives reveal different aspects.
• Care as practice and care as moral perspective

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What to do?

• Direct your moral attention to others.
• Be open to sympathetic understanding.
• Be aware of the need to sustain and preserve
  networks of care.
• Try to preserve harmony.
• Short cut What would my ideal caring self do?

15
Feminism and Care

• Taking the experiences of women and girls
  seriously.
• Autonomy and its limits
• Who is doing care work?
• In the household
• Domestic work
• Emotional work
• In the larger society
• Who loses when care work is limited in these ways?