Virtue, Catholic, and Feminist Ethics

The theories highlighted in this chapter—virtue ethics, feminist ethics, Roman Catholic social thought, and liberation theology—are driven by substantive, normative claims about the good and ways to achieve it. They also all share a social view of human nature and a conviction that ethics is integrated with other parts of life, not an isolated sphere of decision-making. The chapter begins with virtue ethics, including its Aristotelian roots and several contemporary interpreters. It then turns to feminist care ethics, which makes emotions, relationships, and practices crucial to defining the good. Finally, the chapter looks at Catholic ethics, including liberation theology, which insists that in their practices, people may share in the divine process of creation and perhaps even help build the reign of God. In different ways, these models all challenge the idealist, rationalist, and individualist emphases of mainstream ethics.

Practicing Care: Constructing Social Responsibility Through Feminist Care Ethics

Social responsibility is not self-generating. Instead, it is learned through purposefully targeted listening, combined with an intent to both act in response to needs one has heard as well as to continually evaluate one’s actions. Feminist care ethics offers us a scaffolding within which we can learn how to sense social responsibility, act on that ethical knowledge, and then measure the results of our actions. Social responsibility as an ethic of care offers us a way to teach social responsibility to others in the profession and a way to advocate for the value of our labor to those outside of the profession.

Groundwork for Transfeminist Care Ethics: Sara Ruddick, Trans Children, and Solidarity in Dependency

This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in relation to nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly.

Research and educational potential of feminist care ethics in sex education

In this article, we interpret sex education from the perspective of feminist care ethics, emphasizing the concept of caring democracy, advanced by Joan Tronto one of the most influential feminist political theorists. According to Tronto, these theories show that a deficit of care and a lack of democracy are mutually conducive. We argue that, as in other areas of life, a lack of care in sexuality and sex education leads to social inequalities that eventually translate into an unequal approach to freedom, equality, and justice, and to a deficit of democracy in the lives of some people. At the same time, we believe that, as a moral theory, care ethics, with its emphasis on the needs of men and women, can be adequately applied to the design of research projects, as well as to sexuality policies and practices. This may contribute to overcoming the stalemate in the debate on sex education and other topics in Slovakia.