On the extension of care as moral virtue

Abstract

This paper discusses care ethics from the perspective of the practical extent of its scope. Carol Gilligan and especially Nel Noddings are presented as proponents of the thesis that care requires a kind of personal connection or encounter between the persons involved, thus being inherently "personal" and "partial". Claudia Card's position is presented as a critique of these theses, especially for the gap of such a model in relation to the people who will never be directly linked to us, but who nevertheless don’t cease to request our moral engagement - therefore, demanding from ethics a salient space for justice and impersonal principles. Some ideas from Abraham Maslow and Betty Friedan are presented as a means of reinterpret this problem, especially from the conception of the so-called “meta-motivations” or “metaneeds”, characterized as the opening of the possibility, in the moral personality, of feeling “connected” (in a similar sense to that demanded by Noddings) with certain “abstract” and distant goods, such as those encompassed by the ethics of principles (in the terms outlined by Card).