Ethics of Care

These are two part short answers covering the questions as follow and does not need a wordcount of 550:

For this case, identify the parties and the moral issue(s) at stake, concentrate on identifying the relationships among the individuals. What relationships of care need to be maintained or developed?

A married couple discover that their 22-year-old daughter, a college senior, is a lesbian. They are shocked and dismayed, for they regard this as moral degeneracy. They are thinking of refusing to attend her graduation and refusing to welcome her in their home until she renounces this sexual preference.

Human life in terms of cycles of attachment overlap relations and cycles of relations make up who we are as individuals. We do not get a sense of who we are by detaching ourselves from our relations with others. This contrasts with the conception of defining the self in separation from and even opposition to others. Do you agree with the idea that we are who we are in terms of our relations, and that we are neither independent nor separate?

Gilligan rejects Kohlberg’s assumption of a hierarchical ordering that places abstract thinking above thinking in terms of narratives involving human relations when trying to gauge the moral development of individuals. Do you see her critique as a strong one? And if so, what might the success of her critique suggest about employing similar feminist approaches to other areas of the Western philosophical tradition beyond just ethics—such as metaphysics or epistemology?  For instance, how might a feminist, or what other philosopher’s have called a “Communitarian”, approach to the metaphysical question concerning the nature of the individual, or self—and what it means to be one—contrast with what Hobbes or Kant took the self to be?