Proceedings of the XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 10, 2008

Ethics

A Balance of Justice and Care
Reading Feminist Ethics

Since early the 1980s Feminist philosophers started to put up the value of care on agenda in study of ethics, investigating issues of valuing care as a balance of justice. A book came up as The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global in 2006, written by Virginia Held (VH). She called her balancing approach as “fairer caring” and caring justice”. These two terms show the essence of VH’s analysis of notions of care and justice: meshing them together as inseparable but emphasizing care as a wider framework into which justice should be fitted. Hence, care should be the priority in a more comprehensive moral theory, the ethics of care (EC). I will interpret VH’s thoughts and arguments of EC as priority and how justice and care integrated for each other and why EC will work out a better way regarding many ethical issues. Finally, I will compare VH’s EC with Confucian ethical idea of reciprocity as the golden rule of Confucianism, and evaluate the difference between the two and strengths of each.