Virginia Held: The Ethics of Care

In this video I examine an excerpt from Virginia Held's The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. I compere her concept of the ethics of care to the concept of virtue ethics as it appears in Aristotle and Kwame Gyeke's interpretation of the Akan ethics of Ghana.

[chrislee]

This is a good succinct video, as far as it goes.

However, it remains unclear if in her moral theory Held broaches the most important topic of when the use of violence is moral.

Morality is generally considered a metaphorical fence beyond which violence is a morally-acceptable response. Ie, physical assault passes the fence, is immoral, and therefore a proportionally-violent physical defense is moral.

In an ethic of caring, is not caring immoral and therefore subject to violent retaliation? Can people coerce others into caring?

We ought to reason ideas out to their end consequences, and the use of violence that an ethic permits or requires is a main one to clarify.

[chrislee]

Why ‘hope that the video doesn’t conk out on you’? (at ~2:20)

Either fix your machinery so that you don’t worry about it, or for good reason leave it as and accept that.


What is this appeal to hope, to some sort of god of probability or something, in a philosophy course?

That’s a genuine question, because there is an undergirding fundamental principle that you live by.