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//***************** Care Ethics - September 23rd, 2019 **********************//
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- Alright, let's kick off this week!
    - You have a 10 point homework assignment due Wednesday
        - "If you missed recitation because of a job interview or travel plans something, email me AHEAD OF TIME and we'll be good. If you don't have an excuse, just tell me and I'll still let you do something for partial credit"
- Next week will also be the start of our midterm review (IT'S COMINGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!)
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- Alright, today we'll talk about Virginia Held and care ethics, and wrap up our discussion on chapter 2 of the textbook (the whole "eat your normative ethics fruit-n-veggies" section)

- Now, Held is a feminist, and she uses that word a couple times in this essay - "we're not going to go too far down that rabbit hole, but we will give you a brief overview of it"
    - Why is feminism considered a distinct field of ethics? Because historically, philosophy has had a hot streak of being kind of discriminatory towards women
        - "Can't we just substitute 'man' for 'mankind' in old dead people writings?" Not if you're a political philosopher!
            - Similar issues come up with philosohers of science and other fields, where most philosophers had white, well-educated European men in mind as their model, and (knowingly or not) designed their philosophies around it
    - So, back in the late 1700s feminist philosophy started to become a thing with Mary Wollstonecraft and others ("John Adams apparently took so many notes on her French Revolution history that you couldn't read the actual book")
        - Fast-forward to the 1900s, and Lawrence Kohlberg was part of this second-generation wave of psychologist philosophers ("He specifically did some weird stuff with punishment-reward morality that's kind of a weird, utilitarian-ish blend...thing")
            - One of the things he did was develop a scale of how "moral" people were, and guess what? Women consistently did worse on his scale, and one of his Phd. students named Carol Gilligan challenged his system because of that
        - So, out of that, Gilligan developed care ethics partly as a reaction to Kohlberg's system - although she certainly wasn't the only formulator

- So should care ethics actually be one of the "big 4" ethical systems? Ehhh...
    - BUT, Professor Rosenberg thinks it should be part of this class because it's DIFFERENT
        - Deontology and utilitarianism seem to fit with our moral intuitions; virtue ethics and care ethics, though, are based on a different set of assumptions that challenge us to look critically at what our moral choices are based on, and to really look at the foundations of moral intuitions

- Alright; what IS care ethics?
    - Because it's really less than 50 years old, there's still some disagreement about this
        - Noddings, a care ethics philosopher, says that we have "natural care" for people in our family, and that there's a comparable "ethical care" between
            - Many utilitarinists and Kantians assume scenarios where 2 rational people are doing something in public, and don't consider weirder cases like parents taking care of their children, or how to interact with our elderly grandmas who forget stuff
                - These are marginal, weird cases in other ethical systems, but care ethics makes them the core: starting from the family and close relationships and working outwards to public behavior
                - "Do you see how asking 'can I lie to this person?' changes when we're considering if we can lie to a disabled person, or our 3-year-old child?"
        - Similarly, Held points out that all of us started out life as dependents who couldn't do anything, and most of us are still dependent on others in some way
            - Held believes that people are by nature relational beings, and therefore that morality fundamentally is about these relationships (especially between dependants and providers - "not everyone can feed themselves, whether it's because they're 2 years old or because they're poor")
    - You might notice that this is talking about what might be considered traditional "female work," which many feminists would argue has been devalued on a sexual basis ("we don't need an ethics of washing people's clothes")

- Now, even in this super-crash-course version of care ethics, there are some problems that emerge here (although please note that there are multiple variants on this, just like all of the systems we're talking about)
    - One is that separating ethics into "masculine" and "feminine" ethics has the potential to reinforce stereotypes, rather than combatting them
    - Another issue is that care ethics doesn't always tell us WHAT to do - we should care for people, but who? When? We don't have infinite time, so how do we allocate our time?
        - Obviously there are responses to this, but "what to do" isn't as obvious as in other ethical systems
    - Finally, the issue Held's essay tries to talk about: care vs justice, and their relationship
        - Held, at the end of her paper, says justice is SUBSERVIENT to care, which is controversial even among feminists!
            - It does seem like there are some things we consider "just" that aren't obviously about caring for people

- Okay; we actually don't have enough time to wrap up chapter 2, so we'll somehow jam that across the next few lectures
    - For now, we're about to start a mini-unit on the sociology of technology, so read Pinch and Bijiker's long article (ESPECIALLY focus on the bicycle part)
    - Additionally, wrap up your automated car assignment for Wednesday

- Alright, that's all! See you guys later!