Virginia Held Quotes on Love
Virginia Held's Ethics of Care (2006) and the prior The Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theory and Feminist Morality develop one of the principal contemporary articulations of care ethics. The principal thesis is that the post-Kantian moral philosophy organized around the impartial application of universal principles abstracts away from the practices of care — the sustained relations of caregiving on which any human life depends, particularly in the family — and that the philosophical recovery of care as a central moral category requires a corresponding shift away from the contractarian and consequentialist frameworks that dominate Anglophone normative theory. The framework engages Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto, and the broader feminist ethical tradition in a sustained reconstruction of moral concepts on a relational rather than individualist foundation.
Quotes
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Attributed to Virginia Held:
“Care is not the opposite of justice; care is the practice from which justice grows.”
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Attributed to Virginia Held:
“We were all dependent before we became autonomous; the ethical life remembers this.”
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Attributed to Virginia Held:
“Political philosophy that ignores caregiving misses half of what holds a society together.”
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Attributed to Virginia Held:
“Universal principles are tools; loving attention is the hand that uses them.”