The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. By Virginia Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 220p. $45. In her latest book, Virginia Held elaborates on themes from previously published articles to explicate and defend the ethics of care. For those unfamiliar with this well-developed tendency of feminist thought, she reviews its evolution from the 1980s writings of Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings to the more recent work of theorists including, among many others, Eva Kittay, Annette Baier, Joan Tronto, and Selma Sevenhuijsen. Held also underlines the differences between the ethics of care and dominant moral and political perspectives, including Kantian universalism,…