Virginia Held b. 1929

Virginia Held is an American moral and political philosopher, distinguished professor emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and one of the leading philosophical defenders of the ethics of care. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global gave the most systematic philosophical statement of care ethics, arguing that the practice of caring relationships, and not the impersonal calculation of utility or the abstraction of universal principles, is the deepest source of moral knowledge. How Terrorism Is Wrong applied her care framework to the ethics of political violence, while her earlier Rights and Goods set out her foundational arguments for a feminist normative philosophy.

Virginia Held was born in Mendham, New Jersey, in October 1929. She took her bachelor's at Barnard College in 1950, worked for several years as a journalist for Reporter magazine, and returned to academia for her doctorate in philosophy at Columbia in 1968. She has taught at Hunter College since 1962 and at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. She has served as president of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division and as president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

Her books include The Public Interest and Individual Interests (1970), Rights and Goods: Justifying Social Action (1984), Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (1993), the essays of Justice and Care (edited 1995), the foundational The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006), and How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (2008).

Held is one of the founding figures of contemporary feminist ethics and the leading philosophical theorist of the ethics of care. She argues that the experience of caring for dependent others — children, the ill, the elderly — exhibits a moral structure of attention, responsibility, and relationship that liberal contractualism cannot reconstruct, and that this structure can guide political and global ethics as much as private life.