The Meshing of Care and Justice

Author(s): Virginia Held

Source: Hypatia , Spring, 1995, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1995), pp. 128-132
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.

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 SYMPOSIUM ON CARE AND JUSTICE

The Meshing of Care and Justic

VIRGINIA HELD

This essay attempts to work out how justice and care and their related concerns f
together. I suggest that as a basic moral value, care should be the wider mor
framework into which justice should be fitted.

Feminist understandings of justice and care have by now made clear, in m

view, that these are different values, reflecting different ways of interpretin
moral problems and of expressing moral concern. And feminist discussion h
also made clear that neither can be dispensed with: both are highly importan
for morality. Not all feminists agree, by any means, but this is how I see th
debates of the last decade on these issues (Baier 1994; Card 1991; Friedman
1993; Gilligan et al. 1988; Held 1993; Noddings 1984; Okin 1989; Tront
1993).
What remains to be worked out, as I see it, is how justice and care and their
related concerns fit together. How does the framework that structures justice,
equality, rights, and liberty mesh with the network that delineates care,
relatedness, and trust? Or are they incompatible views we must, at least at a
given time and in a given context, choose between?
One clearly unsatisfactory possibility is to think that justice is a value
appropriate to the public sphere of the political, while care belongs to the
private domains of family and friends and charitable organizations. Feminist
analyses have shown how faulty are traditional divisions between the personal
and the political, but even if we use cleaned-up versions of these concepts, we
can see how unsatisfactory it is to assign justice to public life and care to private,
although I myself in earlier work may have failed to say enough along these
lines (Held 1984). I have argued that we need different moral approaches for
different domains, and have tried to map out which are suitable for which
domains. And there is an initial plausibility, certainly, in thinking of justice as

Hypatia vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring 1995) © by Virginia Held

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 Virginia Held 129

a primary value in the domain of law, and care as a primary value in the domain
of the family. But more needs to be said.
Justice is badly needed in the family as well as in the state: in a more equitable
division of labor between women and men in the household, in the protection
of vulnerable family members from domestic violence and abuse, in recogniz-
ing the rights of family members to respect for their individuality. In the
practice of caring for children or the elderly, justice requires us to avoid
paternalistic and maternalistic domination.
At the same time, we can see that care is badly needed in the public domain.
Welfare programs are an intrinsic part of what contemporary states provide,
and no feminist should fail to acknowledge the social responsibilities they
reflect, however poorly. The nightwatchman state is not a feminist goal.
Almost all feminists recognize that there should be much more social and
public concern for providing care than there now is in the United States,
although it should be provided in appropriate and empowering ways very
different from the current system of welfare. There should be greatly increased
public concern for child care, education, and health care, infused with the
values of care.
Caretaking is needed by everyone when they are children, ill, or very old,
and it is needed by some most of their lives. Assuring that care is available to
those who need it should be a central political concern, not one imagined to
be a solely private responsibility of families and charities. Providing care has
always fallen disproportionately to women and minorities, who do the bulk of
unpaid or badly paid actual work of caring for those needing it. But in
addition to a fairer division of responsibilities for care, the care made
available through the institutions of the welfare state needs to be strength-
ened as well as reformed. Care and justice, then, cannot be allocated to the
separate spheres of the private and the public. But they are different, and they
are not always compatible.
Consider the category of "welfare" in its narrower sense rather than what is
referred to by the term "welfare state." One way of thinking about the issues
surrounding welfare and recommending action would be from a perspective of
justice, equality, and rights. We could then recognize welfare as something to
which each person is entitled by right under conditions of need. Welfare rights
would be recognized as basic rights guaranteeing persons the resources needed
to live. Against the traditional liberal view that freedom is negative only, we
would recognize the positive rights of persons to what they need to act freely.
And persons in need would be seen as entitled to the means to live, not as
undeserving suppliants for private or public charity. An interpretation of such
rights within the framework of justice would then be likely to yield monetary
payments such as social security checks and unemployment insurance supple-
mented by other such payments for those in need. For many competent persons
whose only major problem is a lack of money or a temporary lack of employ-

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130 Hypatia

ment, such arrangements would seem recommended, and would be preferable

to an array of social workers who are expected to practice care but who,
whether because of paternalistic tendencies or bureaucratic constraints, often
threaten the autonomy of persons in need.
Many persons, however, are not competent, autonomous, and only tempo-
rarily unemployed. Due to deficiencies of care at earlier stages or in various
areas of their lives, their needs are complex and persistent. Inadequately cared
for as children, at home, in school, and elsewhere, or inadequately provided
with work and earning experience, they have grown up with more serious
problems than a lack of money, or they suffer from illness or disability. In such
cases care itself is needed. It should be addressed to specific persons and their
needs. Dealing with these needs requires other specific persons to provide
actual care and caring labor, not a machine turning out equal payments to all
in a given category. The care should be sensitive and flexible, allowing for the
interaction of care provider and care receiver in such a way that the care
receiver is empowered to develop toward needing less care when such a
decrease is part of a process of growth or training or recovery. When the care
needed will be lasting, practices should evolve that preclude the provision of
care from becoming dominating, and the receiving of care from becoming
humiliating.
Whether we employ the perspectives of justice or care will affect how we
interpret the moral problems involved and what we recommend as institu-
tional policies or individual actions. We might try to combine care and justice
into a recommendation concerning welfare that each person is entitled to the
care needed for appropriate development, but such a recommendation will
remain an abstract and empty formulation until we deal with just the kinds of
very different policies and practices I've tried to outline.
If we try to see justice and care as alternative interpretations that we can
apply to the same moral problem, as I think Carol Gilligan recommends, we
can try to think of care and justice as different but equally valid. But we are
still left with the question of which interpretation to apply when we act, or
which to appeal to when we draw our recommendations. If we are merely
describing the problem and possible interpretations of it, as in alternative
literary accounts of it, we could maintain both of these alternative moral
frameworks and not have to choose between them. But if policy decisions must
be made about the problem, we will sometimes have to choose between these
interpretations. If we use the analogy Gilligan suggests, should we see the figure
as a duck or a rabbit? Moral theory should provide guidance for choice about
actions and policies, and the problem of choosing between the interpretive
frameworks of justice and care often persists after we have clarified both
frameworks.
When the concerns of justice and care conflict, how should we try to
reconcile these values? Does either have priority? Many philosophers have

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 Virginia Held 131

supposed that justice is the primary value of political institutions, but the
example concerning welfare that I have been discussing is one from an
important function of the moder state, and it did not yield the clear priority
of justice over care. To suppose that the "justice system" of courts and law
enforcement is the primary function of the contemporary state is surely
unhelpful; to what extent it should or should not be would be among the very
questions to be addressed by an adequately integrated ethic.
One possibility I have considered in the past is that justice deals with moral
minimums, a floor of moral requirements beneath which we should not sink
as we avoid the injustices of assault and disrespect. In contrast, care deals with
what is above and beyond the floor of duty. Caring well for children, for
instance, involves much more than honoring their rights to not be abused or
deprived of adequate food; good care brings joy and laughter. But as a solution
to our problem, I am coming to think that this is not clear. Perhaps one can
have ever more justice in the sense of more and more understanding of rights,
equality, and respect. And certainly there are minimums of care that must be
provided for persons to live, though excellent care will far exceed them.
Another possible metaphor is that justice and rights set more or less absolute
bounds or moral constraints within which we pursue our various visions of the
good life, which would for almost everyone include the development of caring
relationships. But this metaphor collapses for many of the same reasons as does
that of justice as a floor of moral minimums. For instance, if there is anything
that sets near absolute constraints on our pursuit of anything, including justice,
it is responding to the needs of our children for basic care.
I now think-somewhat tentatively--that care is the wider moral frame-
work into which justice should be fitted. Care seems to me the most basic moral
value. As a practice, empirically described, we can say that without care we
cannot have life at all. All human beings require a great deal of care in their
early years, and most of us need and want caring relationships throughout our
lives. As a value, care indicates what many practices ought to involve. When,
for instance, necessities are provided without the relational human caring
children need, children do not develop well, if at all. And when, in society,
individuals treat each other with only the respect that justice requires, the
social fabric of trust and concern can be missing or disappearing.
Though justice is surely a most important moral value, much life has gone
on without it, and much of that life has been moderately good. There has, for
instance, been little justice within the family, but much care; so we can have
care without justice. Without care, however, there would be no persons to
respect, either in the public system of rights-even if it could be just-or in
the family. But care is not simply causally primary, it is more inclusive as a
value. Within a network of caring, we can and should demand justice, but
justice should not then push care to the margins, imagining justice's political
embodiment as the model of morality, which is, I think, what has been done.

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132 Hypatia

From a perspective of care, persons are relational and interdependent, not

the individualistic autonomous agents of the perspective of justice and rights.
This relational view is the better view of human beings, of persons engaged in
developing human morality. We can decide to treat persons as individuals, to
be the bearers of rights, for the sake of constructing just political and other
institutions. But we should not forget the reality and the morality this view
obscures. Persons are relational and interdependent. We can and should value
autonomy, but it must be developed and sustained within a framework of
relations of trust.
At the levels of global society and of our own communities, we should
develop frameworks of caring about and for one another as human beings.
These will of course be different from caring about and for the human beings
who are members of our families or who are friends. We should care for one
another as persons in need of a habitable environment with a sufficient absence
of violence and with sufficient provision of care for human life to flourish. We
need to acknowledge the moral values of the practices and family ties under-
lying the caring labor on which human life has always depended, and we need
to consider how the best of these values can be better realized. Within a
recognized framework of care we should see persons as having rights and as
deserving justice, most assuredly. But we should embed this picture, I think, in
the wider tapestry of human care.
Of course, in these short remarks, I cannot elaborate or fill in this tapestry.
What I am trying to do is to suggest the directions in which I think we should
be heading as we explore these issues of feminist morality.

REFERENCES

Baier, Annette. 1994. Moral prejudices: Essays on ethics. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Card, Claudia, ed. 1991. Feminist ethics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Friedman, Marilyn. 1993. What are friends for? Feminist perspectives on personal relationships
and moral theory. Ithaca: Comell University Press.
Gilligan, Carol, Janie Victoria Ward, andJill McLean Taylor, eds. 1988. Mapping the moral
domain: A contribution of women's thinking to psychological theory and education.
Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
Held, Virginia. 1984. Rights and goods: Justifying social action. New York: Free Press.
. 1993. Feminist morality: Transforming culture, society, and politics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, gender, and the family. New York: Basic Books.
Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. New York:
Routledge.

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