Ethics of Care: Analysis of a Moral Paradigm in Weil and Tronto

Abstract

This work sets to demonstrate, within the perimeter of ethics, the conceptual connections internal to the notion of care by making reference to Christianity and feminist thought, paradigmatic here in Simone Weil and Joan Tronto. First, I aim to identify the constitutive features of an ethics of Christian care by dissecting the Weilian notion of attention as applied to the Gospel narrative of the Good Samaritan. For Weil, care takes the form of dilectio proximi, love of our neighbor, of which kenosis is the cornerstone — the act of emptying the self in order to make room for the need of the other and, necessarily, satisfy it. Second, I photograph the moral elements of the ethics of care as outlined by Tronto — attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness — and relate them to the ethics of Christian care, tentatively contextualizing them in the Good Samaritan parable. This way of proceeding in parallel unveils the underlying intention of my inquiry: to integrate the two paradigms of care.