Alison Jaggar, “Caring as a Feminist Practice”

Posted: Wed, Oct 22, 2025

The contributions of care ethics, according to Jaggar:

Exposes “an inadequate portrayal of moral thinking that exaggerates the significance of principles and fails to recognize that affectively laden aspects of moral thinking have epistemic as well as motivational functions” (p. 198);
Uncovers the gendered interests and concerns reflected/neglected in traditional moral theory;
Affirms situated ethical theorizing that starts from the concrete, messy, real circumstances, experiences, relations, and social locations rather than from an impersonal “view from nowhere”;
Subjects the personal and interpersonal to moral critique;
Centers “the caring work assigned primarily to women, especially women of the lower classes” devalued by traditional moral theory.

.Jaggar’s critique: A feminist ethics worthy of that name must

“be properly critical of the moral validity of felt, perceived, or expressed needs, so that it can avoid permitting or even legitimating morally inadequate responses to them” (p. 189); and
not be overly reliant on “individual responses to immediate needs” but focus “on problematizing the structures that create those needs or keep them unfulfilled” (p. 197).

On our needs as shaped by injustice: While care ethicists are concerned about projected needs, genuine caring requires background social conditions that go beyond the specifics of the caring relationship.

Her examples: “Other, more clearly gendered, abuses include incest and even footbinding. Incestuous fathers often portray themselves as caring for their daughters, even as nurturing or initiating them, and the Chinese women who bound the feet of their daughters and granddaughters also equated the pain they caused with care.”
It’s not just that “appropriate caring is not guaranteed by the intentions of the one who claims to care but that such a guarantee is not supplied even by agreement on the part of the one who is cared-for” (p. 192).

On structural responses to injustice:

Homelessness: While care ethics prompts us to “build houses or even taking them into one’s own home,” it does not draw our attention to “challenging zoning and credit restrictions, pressing for governmental provision of housing, or even questioning why so many people, especially women, lack the money for housing.”
World hunger: “But care thinking does not question why some ‘neighbors’ have food while others do not, let alone identify the larger social forces causing peasant dislocation and dispossession, the assignment of land to cash crops for export rather than food for local people, Third World deforestation and desertification, and the draining of Third World resources to service its debt to international financial institutions” (p. 197).

Importantly, traditional moral theory fares no better.

For instance, care reasoning addresses instances of rape and domestic violence by “strongly disapproving” of them (Noddings 1990b: 125) and tries to protect victims and survivors by establishing moral authority over their assailants; justice reasoning, as commonly construed, is likely to condemn these assaults as violations by individuals of other individuals’ rights. In order to fully comprehend sexual violence, however, its meanings and functions as a systematic social practice must be addressed, together with the ways in which many social institutions implicitly condone and legitimate it. Neither care nor justice reasoning, as ordinarily construed, constitutes the kind of hermeneutical moral thinking capable of questioning conventional definitions of assault as well as of exploring the complex assumptions about sexuality, aggression, and gender that make rape not only thinkable but predictable and even normal. (p. 198)