This chapter is based on the premise that an examination of the relationship between care and justice is useful both for exploring the key themes of dependency, responsibility and rights with which this book is primarily concerned and for imagining different welfare futures. The chapter is in three parts. The first reviews the development of a feminist ethic of care and the differing principles of justice on which it draws. In the second part, the principal ideas associated with a political ethic of care are used to throw further light on dependency, responsibility and rights as they relate to recent policy developments in care in the UK. In the final section, the debate is extended to consider what lessons might be drawn from a discussion of care and justice as the basis for developing a more socially just set of arrangements for care.

The ethical framework of care

Justice and care

When Carol Gilligan (1982) took issue with Lawrence Kohlberg’s (1981) psychological theory of children’s moral development by claiming to have uncovered a ‘different voice’ among the women she interviewed, she sparked a long-running debate about the existence of masculine and feminine modes of moral reasoning (see Larabee, 1993). Gilligan maintained that a feminine moral code of care had been obscured by the supposedly universal masculine mode of moral reasoning uncovered in previous psychological research. The latter code, she argued, had been transposed into Western legal systems in an idealised form as ‘justice’ through its association with the culturally prized values of objectivity and impartiality (Smart, 1989). Gilligan identified three key distinctions between the competing moral discourses of care and justice. First, the ethic of care is rooted in the moral frameworks of responsibility and relationships rather than rights and rules. Second, the care orientation is inseparable from concrete circumstances rather than being a formal and abstract system of thought. Third, care is primarily grounded in the daily activity of care rather than a set of universal principles (in Tronto, 1993, p 242).

Feminist theorists of the ethic of care have subsequently suggested that the origins of competing moral discourses lie in a gendered division of labour rather than innate psychological attributes.