Nel Noddings, Caring

Posted: Mon, Oct 20, 2025

Warm-up activity: If you had to say what morality meant to you, how would you sum it up?

Historical & dialectical context

A feminist complaint: Women’s voices have been systematically neglected if not dismissed in discussions of morality.

This is a complaint regarding both moral psychology and normative ethical theory.

• Kohlberg’s 6 stages/3 levels of moral development
  • Preconventional morality (1–2): Decisions are made according to punishment or reward.
  • Conventional morality (3–4): Decisions are made according to social approval or laws.
  • Postconventional morality (5–6): Decisions are made according to social contract or universal principles.
• Bentham’s attempt to turn morality into a math problem and Kant’s privileging of universalizing reason.
• Anti-feminist argument that an appeal to feelings renders women incapable of either moral reasoning or morality outright.

Carol Gilligan’s extraordinarily influential 1982 book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, introduced a distinction between two “modes” or “orientations” or “voices” of moral reasoning:

• The dominant, “male” voice/ethics of “justice,” “rights,” and “rules.”
  • Noddings: A “highly intellectualized aesthetic.”
• A subversive, “female” voice/ethics of “care.”

Some of her examples: Pp. 64–65.

• The undergraduate women first present what they take to be the right or acceptable answer.
• When pressed, they reveal what they really think.
• The issue is that women are forced to speak of morality in a voice that alienates us.
• Or so the analysis goes.

What’s up with the gender?

• Gilligan says that “the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex. . . . No claims are made about the origins of the differences described or their distribution in a wider population, across cultures, or through time. Clearly, these differences arise in a social context where factors of social status and power combine with reproductive biology to shape the experience of males and females and the relations between the sexes. My interest lies in the interaction of experience and thought, in different voices and the dialogues to which they give rise, in the way we listen to ourselves and to others, in the stories we tell about our lives” (p. 2).
• Noddings also stresses: “An ethic built on caring is, I think, characteristically and essentially feminine—which is not to say, of course, that it cannot be shared by men, any more than we should care to say that traditional moral systems cannot be embraced by women. But an ethic of caring arises, I believe, out of our experience as women, just as the traditional logical approach to ethical problems arises more obviously from masculine experience” (p. 8).

Some puzzles:

• How are we supposed to understand “characteristically and essentially feminine” in a way that doesn’t imply essentialism?
  • Perhaps the issue is one of reclamation?
  • But it’s not a coincidence that caring is, by dominant social definition, feminine. Why should we think that this is the “different voice” in which women would on our own speak?
  • MacKinnon in Feminism Unmodified (1987): “I do not think that the way women reason morally is morality ‘in a different voice.’ I think it is morality in a higher register, in the feminine voice. Women value care because men have valued us according to the care we give them, and we could probably use some. Women think in relational terms because our existence is defined in relation to men. Further, when you are powerless, you don’t just speak differently. A lot, you don’t speak. Your speech is not just differently articulated, it is silenced. Eliminated, gone. . . . All I am saying is that the damage of sexism is real, and reifying that into differences is an insult to our possibilities” (p. 39).
• Race, class, …
  • Jaggar’s essay which we will read for Wednesday: It’s both the case that “the ethics of care reflects primarily the experience of women of certain races and classes as well as of some racial/ ethnic men of those classes” and the case that “justice orientation does not reflect the moral perspective of men universally, but only the perspective of men from the professional, administrative, and managerial classes” (p. 183).

Noddings’s account of care ethics

I want to focus on her analysis of the caring relationship and two of its implications—a relational rather than individualistic conception of our ethical self and a particularist rather than generalist/principle-based ideal of moral reasoning.

The motivating problem: To identify genuine caring.

• It is not enough to do care-giving work, which may or may not be done in a caring way.
• It is not enough to care merely about, e.g., the sufferings of migrants and refugees: While “we can maintain an internal state of readiness to try to care for whoever crosses our path,” this needs to go beyond “a verbal commitment to the possibility of caring” to constitute actually caring (p. 18, my emphasis).

Noddings: Genuine caring consists in the caring-for relation.

• “For our purposes, ‘relation’ may be thought of as a set of ordered pairs generated by some rule that describes the affect—or subjective experience—of the members” (pp. 3–4).
  • So, (a, b), where a stands for the one-caring and b the cared-for.
• Caring-for is characterized by the one-caring’s first-personal engrossment and second-personal motivational displacement as well as the cared-for’s reception of the care.
  • Engrossment: “The one-caring is sufficiently engrossed in the other to listen to him and to take pleasure or pain in what he recounts” (p. 19).
    • A “largely reactive and responsive” receptivity to the cared-for’s needs and desire for their well-being.
    • “The engrossment need not be intense nor need it be pervasive in the life of the one-caring, but it must occur.”
    • “The one-caring, in caring, is present in her acts of caring.”
    • Caring can fail “when our engrossment is divided, and several cared-fors demand incompatible decisions from us,” “when what the cared-for wants is not what we think would be best for him,” and “when we become overburdened and our caring turns into ‘cares and burdens’” (p. 18).
  • Motivational displacement: “Caring involves stepping out of one’s own personal frame of reference into the other’s” (p. 24).
    • This is “a move away from self” to “grasp the reality of the other as a possibility for myself” (pp. 15–16).
  • Reception: “The one cared-for sees the concern, delight, or interest in the eyes of the one-caring and feels her warmth in both verbal and body language” (p. 19).
    • There is something amiss about one-sided caring.
    • Caring must be completed in the cared-for.
    • Note the implicit privileging of eye contact?
• When caring is done right, “the cared-for glows, grows stronger, and feels not so much that he has been given something as that something has been added to him” (p. 20).

Some of her examples: Math (pp. 15–16) and lecture (p. 20).

• The caring fails without uptake: The students also see through the teacher’s eyes.

Two implications:

• Our ethical self is relational, not individualistic: Genuine “caring for self, for the ethical self, can emerge only from a caring for others. . . . When we say of someone, ‘He cares only for himself,’ we mean that, in our deepest sense, he does not care at all. . . . Whatever he sees in others is pre-selected in relation to his own needs and desires. He does not see the reality of the other as a possibility for himself but only as an instance of what he has already determined as self or not-self. Thus, he is ethically both zero and finished” (pp. 14–15).
• Moral reasoning is particuarlist, not based on general principles: “This gives us, as outsiders to the relation, a way, not infallible to be sure, to judge caretaking for signs of real caring. To care is to act not by fixed rule but by affection and regard. It seems likely, then, that the actions of one-caring will be varied rather than rule-bound; that is, her actions, while predictable in a global sense, will be unpredictable in detail. Variation is to be expected if the one claiming to care really cares, for her engrossment is in the variable and never fully understood other, in the particular other, in a particular set of circumstances” (p. 24).

Reflections: What does care ethics add, and how does it challenge our understanding of morality?