Joan Tronto

A standard view in ethics is that ethical issues concern a different range of human concerns than does politics. This essay goes beyond the long-standing dispute about the extent to which applied ethics needs a commitment to ethical theory. It argues that regardless of the outcome of that dispute, applied ethics, because it presumes something about the nature of authority, rests upon and is implicated in political theory. After internalist and externalist accounts of applied ethics are described, “mixed” approaches are considered that contain inevitable political dimensions. A feminist alternative, Walker’s metaethic of responsibility, shows that authority is best understood as relational and that situations of unequal power are therefore often the places where applied ethics arises. Furthermore, in a democratic society, commitments to democracy should shape the account of authority, and, thus, the nature of applied ethics as well

How do we know which institutions provide good care? Some scholars argue that the best way to think about care institutions is to model them upon the family or the market. This paper argues, on the contrary, that when we make explicit some background conditions of good family care, we can apply what we know to better institutionalized caring. After considering elements of bad and good care, from an institutional perspective, the paper argues that good care in an institutional context has three central foci: the purpose of care, a recognition of power relations, and the need for pluralistic, particular tailoring of care to meet individuals? needs. These elements further require political space within institutions to address such concerns

A partire dalla definizione di cura elaborata insieme a Berenice Fischer, si argomenta come la cura sia un importante strumento concettuale per qualunque genere di teoria politica. Ciň che diviene essenziale č un'analisi delle dimensioni della cura, delle dinamiche di potere insite in ogni relazione di cura, nonché del piů ampio contesto che modella tali preoccupazioni. L'articolo tratteggia, nello specifico, i caratteri essenziali del rapporto fra cura e politica democratica, che postula la ricerca di una riduzione delle asimmetrie nelle relazioni di cura. Affinché i cittadini democratici svolgano bene i compiti di cura e in un modo compatibile con la vita democratica, essi devono immaginarsi allo stesso tempo sia come soggetti che forniscono cura sia come soggetti che la ricevono. Il grande passo da compiere č dunque avvedersi che l'espressione to care significa sempre sia dare sia ricevere cura e solo quando ciň sarÀ stato pienamente compreso si sarÀ in grado di elaborare una teoria democratica davvero inclusiva che riconosca alla cura il suo giusto posto.

Spatial metaphors abound in feminist theory. The modest goal of this paper is to reassert the importance of temporal dimensions in thought for feminist thinking. In order to establish this general claim, several kinds of current thinking about time that are problematic for feminists are explored. First, the postmodern compression of time and space is considered from the standpoint of the changes it brings in the nature of care. Second, the privileging of the future over the past is considered in light of the problems it creates for thinking about justice for historical wrongdoing. Forgiveness and remembrance require an attention to the past.

This introduction to the special issue on ‘Ricoeur and the ethics of care’ is not a standard editorial. It provides not only an explanation of the central questions and a first impression of the articles, but also a critical discussion of them by an expert in the field of care ethics, Joan Tronto. After explaining the reasons to bring Ricoeur into dialogue with the ethics of care, and analyzing how the four articles of this special issue shape this dialogue, the authors give the floor to Tronto. She focuses on the central issue at stake: what may be the value of a more abstract, conceptual approach for the ethics of care as a radically practice-oriented way of thinking? She argues that the four contributions too easily frame this value in terms of Ricoeur’s relational anthropology. Instead she points out that if the ethics of care is a kind of practice, it makes sense to think of such practices as necessarily building upon one another, expanding constantly the context and relationships upon which practices are built. In the final section the authors respond to Tronto’s framing of ‘practices all the way up’ by arguing that this approach need not be at odds with one inspired by Ricoeur’s conceptual thinking. Rather the two can be seen as different movements—upwards and downwards—that both contribute constructively to the shaping of the important intermediary zone between the practices and the abstract ideals.

In this paper I consider what may seem an "accidental" family relationship and stress its worrying attributes for contemporary family life. While we have made strides in being willing and able to "queer" kinship relationships, another frontier remains in thinking about the family. Not all forms of family relations are kinship or quasi-kinship relationships. I refer to a kind of family relationship that remains very largely invisible: that between the household's kin and their domestic servants. Throughout most of the twentieth century writers about the family came to think of such relationships as unimportant because they were an historical curiosity, their resurgence re-raises unresolved and serious questions about the ethics and politics of the contemporary family. The important questions that I want to raise are these: if the family should serve as a school for justice, then what does the presence of servants teach? Historically and in contemporary terms, what does the nature of servitude have to do with autonomy and dependency? The paper involves a consideration of these questions in the eighteenth century as a way to provoke our current thinking

Tronto explores the “care crisis” that now pervades advanced industrial societies, in which women are doing more paid work and, consequently, less of the care work of civil society. Tronto urges advanced industrial societies to rethink who is responsible for care and recognize the role that government should play in ensuring that care is provided for those who need it. Unfortunately, citizenship has traditionally been defined in ways that make no provision for responsibilities to care for others. Tronto observes that “privatizing” care by relegating it to the marketplace does not provide a solution to the care crisis, since paid care work is subject to exploitation, partly because it is often done by illegal immigrants from Third World countries. Despite expecting privatization to be the likely solution to the problem, Tronto nevertheless recommends that care work be regarded as a governmental responsibility in order to make it more valued publicly.

In this paper the authors argue that the exploration of the nature of needs and rights should begin with the actually existing organization of care and of justice in society. The authors raise two key concerns with this organization: 1) the invisibility of care to some, and 2) the inaccessibility of rights to others. Recent work by care scholars has called attention to the ways the current organization of care work perpetuates the myth of self-sufficiency for some, while reducing others to mere dependents. Law and Society scholars have demonstrated the problems of uneven access to legal remedies within the current organization of the legal system. Addressing these concerns simultaneously reveals both the problems of the current organization of needs and rights as well as illuminating alternative possibilities. The authors argue, first, that a justice perspective, based on rights is inadequate because its presumed universality is belied by the reality of the inaccessibility of rights to many. Second, the authors argue that a care perspective, currently formulated upon the assumption that only some people have needs, is also flawed because its presumed particularity distorts the human experience and subsequent policies. Instead, the authors need to conceive of care in a public way that permits both rights and needs to be understood as applicable to all. The authors propose some initial thoughts about how to create such a public concept of care.

Contributors to this volume demonstrate how the ethics of care factors into a variety of social policies and institutions, and can indeed be useful in thinking about a number of different social problems. Divided into two sections, the first looks at care as a model for an evaluative framework that rethinks social institutions, liberal society, and citizenship at a basic conceptual level. The second explores care values in the context of specific social practices or settings, as a framework that should guide thinking