The ethics of care are one of the most creative and hopeful developments in ethics in contemporary thinking. The subject is just 25 years old, having its birth in Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice. Gilligan suggested that most ethics, most of the time, has been done by men and have demonstrated those aspects of ethical thinking that have been in the province of men: justice, contract, rationality and principle at the expense of relationships with those closest to us. Women have traditionally thought and practiced in different ways: relationally, with responsibility for others and rooted in care. Others picked up Gilligan's challenge including Noddings, Ruddick and Manning. More recently, Virginia Held has presented an overview and critique of the ethics of care after a quarter century of development and discussion. In this chapter I will demonstrate that the ethics of care (as addressed in the literature) are helpful in explicating a nonviolent critical theory if modified in certain ways.

The Elements of an Ethics of Care

The ethics of care begins with the assertion that ethics is rooted in human affective response—that is, in the emotional response to people, other sentient beings and situations.

Though a new and needed emphasis, this perspective is not unique to feminist ethics. In the ancient traditions, both the Buddha and Jesus present an ethics of compassion or loving kindness. It favors relationships between people over abstract principles. It is an ethics of the heart, rather than the mind. Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith argued that ethics are a function of sentiment. For Smith, it was “fellow-feeling.” We are hardwired with sentiment, compassion for others. It is part of the human condition. This is the opening of Smith's work on moral sentiments: