Held on Care as a Political and Social Value

Virginia Held, professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, synthesized two decades of care-ethics scholarship in The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006, Oxford University Press), building on her earlier Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (1993, University of Chicago Press). Held argued explicitly, and more systematically than Noddings had, that care should be recognized as a distinct fourth major tradition in normative ethics, standing alongside Kantian deontology, utilitarian consequentialism, and Aristotelian virtue ethics rather than reducing to any of them.