Ethic of Care as a Feminine Ethics

Care-oriented ethics is one that puts itself first and foremost in the face of justice-oriented ethics. Because throughout history, due to the dominance of men in all areas, justice has been introduced as the only moral value, and now the ethics of care wants to challenge it. Although many people have talked about the care, the origins of this theory today go back to Carol Gilligan, who was collaborating with Kohlberg at Harvard in the moral development measurement project. She discovered that there had been a widespread misunderstanding of women's personality and abilities throughout history largely, due to ignoring or not understanding the element of care as the mainstay of women's personality. The result is the exclusion of women from many parts of societies under the pretext of inability to grow mentally and morally. After her, other care-oriented feminists have introduced different types of care with different examples and meanings, but all of them, without exception, have relied on compassion, mercy, empathy, responsibility, and kindness, as the core of care ethics. They cited the prominent role of justice in men's mentality and traced the root of all human problems of the world for dominance of this view. And finally, claimed that if care becomes the focus of all global politics and uses as a universal standard, it can solve all human problems stemming from the masculine justice ethics.

Speaker: Solmaz Etemadzadeh University of the Basque Country 

Discussant: Giovanni Giorgini

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