Noddings and the Ethics of Care as Moral Foundation

Nel Noddings, a former mathematics teacher who went on to become a professor of education at Stanford University, published Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education in 1984 (University of California Press), the book that gave care ethics its first fully worked-out philosophical foundation. Where Gilligan's work was primarily empirical and psychological, Noddings offered a systematic normative theory: ethics, she argued, should be grounded not in universal, impartially applied principles but in the concrete caring relation itself, understood as a real dyadic bond between a "one-caring," the party who attends and responds, and a "cared-for," the party whose needs and reality are attended to — a relation that, for Noddings, is ontologically prior to any rule derived from it.