Peta Bowden

Using a Wittgensteinian approach to understanding, this thesis extends and challenges recent feminist discussions of the ethic of care as a gender-sensitive corrective to traditional moral theory. It elaborates a more complex understanding of the diversity and ambiguity of the ethical possibilities of caring than has been presented in earlier analyses. A brief introduction to the contemporary debate is followed by accounts of six different examples of caring practices, viz: caring attention, taking care of oneself, mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. The aim of this survey is to show that caring constitutes an intricate labyrinth of ethical possibilities, the understanding of which involves approaching it from numerous directions. Through concern for the similarities and differences between these examples, their insights and their oversights, the thesis displays the limitations of theories which presume a unified, non-contexted ethic of care. At the same time the detailed descriptions of caring practices affirm the ethical significance of a range of activities that are frequently overlooked in conventional accounts of ethics

Recent discussions concerning the ethics of nursing care have gained added impetus from articulations of die so‐called ‘ethic of carersquo; in moral philosophy. This paper addresses the question of recognizing and elaborating the ethics of nursing care by exploring the problems and the possibilities of diese intersecting discourses. In the first part of the paper it is argued that appropriation of ‘the ethic of care’ by nursing theorists as the central value of nursing, in contradistinction to other moral values such as beneficence or justice, runs the risk of reinforcing the conventional approaches to ethics that ‘the ethic of care’ seeks to overturn. Central to ‘the ethic of care’ is the recognition that caring entails a focus on the particularities and context of the relationships in which it is expressed. Accordingly die application of a unitary concept of care to the context of nursing relations may seriously distort dieir diverse and complex‐specific ediical possibilities. The dynamic complexity of nursing ethics may be more adequately understood by working through an array of specific examples of nursing practice highlighting the differences and similarities between them and other ethical practices of care. Experience of a set of examples in this way will draw attention to the multiplicity, ambiguity, and particularity of the ethics of nursing while facilitating the ability to recognize how other practices may or may not be understood as examples of ediical nursing care. In the second part of the paper a beginning is made on this project by addressing the work of several different theorists of care who have examined different practices of nursing from the overlapping perspectives of nurses, patients and the socio‐historical construction of their relationships.

In _Caring_, Peta Bowden extends and challenges recent debates on feminist ethics. She takes issue with accounts of the ethics of care that focus on alleged principles of caring rather than analysing caring in practice. Caring, Bowden argues, must be understood by 'working through examples'. Following this approach, Bowden explores four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. Her analysis of the differences and similarities in these practices - their varying degrees of intimacy and reciprocity, formality and informality, vulnerability and choice - reveals the practical complexity of the ethics of care. _Caring_ recognizes that ethical practices constantly outrun the theories that attempt to explain them, and Bowden's unique approach provides major new insights into the nature of care without resorting to indiscriminate unitary models. It will be essential reading for all those interested in ethics, gender studies, nursing and the caring professions

"Understanding Feminism" provides an accessible guide to one of the most important and contested movements in progressive modern thought. Presenting feminism as a dynamic, multi-faceted and adaptive movement that has evolved in response to the changing practical and theoretical problems faced by women, the authors take a problem-oriented approach that maps the complex strands of feminist thinking in relation to women's struggles for equal recognition and rights, and freedom from oppressive constraints of sex, self-expression and autonomy. Each chapter focuses on a different cluster of concerns, demonstrating key moves in second-wave feminist thought, as well as some of the diversity in response-strategies that encompass both socio-economic and cultural-symbolic concerns. This approach not only shows how central feminist insights, theories and strategies emerge and re-emerge across different contexts, but makes clear that far from being 'over', feminism remains a vital response to the diverse issues that women find pressing and socially important.

This paper argues that Pedro Tabenksy's Aristotelean understanding of true happiness overlooks the constitutive significance of the virtues and values of relationships of radical dependency. Tabensky's focus on the rational and contextual aspects of personhood as the locus for our social interdependence results in friendship relationships being taken as paradigmatic for social engagements. Through a sketch of some of the unique dimensions of the asymmetrical relations upon which our bodily functioning and personal identities inevitably depend, I show that this focus risks perpetuating the lack of recognition of the value and significance of caring relations familiar to us in contemporary societies today. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(4) 2004: 394-401

Recent work in clinical nursing ethics has been influenced by two main areas of insight associated with the challenge levelled by the women's movement to traditional thinking about morality and ethics. Broadly speaking these two realms have been distinguished as articulating ‘feminist’ socio‐political and ‘feminine’ ethic of care concerns. Often these two impulses are seen as pulling against each other, or worse, the ‘feminine’ emphasis on the ethics of care is seen as reinforcing the dynamics that elicit the ‘feminist’ concern. In this paper I suggest how an expanded understanding of an ethic of care in clinical settings can provide resources for dealing with both concerns. A discussion of the way institutional relations can ride rough‐shod over the ‘feminist’ insights of ethical care, in the second part of the paper, provides evidence for my conclusion that ethical nursing care depends on recognizing that both areas of insight are imperative for its success.