Virginia Held
Caring relationships, not contracts between strangers, are the basis of moral and political life, and a just society has to value care.
Placement
American philosopher at CUNY: care is both a practice and a value, and relations of care, not contracts between independent individuals, should be the model for morality – reaching into politics and global society.
Key ideas
- Care as practice and value
- Critique of the contract model
- Care and justice
Influence
Influenced by 2
Nel Noddings
influenced by
Held built on Noddings’s ethics of caring relations but carried care beyond personal relations into politics and global society (The Ethics of Care, 2006). V. Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006); N. Noddings, Caring (1984)
Evidence: AI draft
Nel Noddings › 1929–2022
Carol Gilligan
influenced by
Held built on Gilligan’s different voice of care to develop the ethics of care as a full moral and political theory (The Ethics of Care, 2006). V. Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (2006); C. Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982)
Evidence: AI draft
Carol Gilligan › b. 1936
Works
Care as practice and value, its relation to justice and its reach into society and global politics.
Position
Held began in social and political philosophy, with The Public Interest and Individual Interests (1970) and Rights and Goods, and moved from there to the question of what moral theory looks like when it starts from women’s experience. In Feminist Morality (1993) she criticised the dominance of the contract model, in which society appears as an agreement between independent, self-interested adults, and proposed the relation between a mothering person and a child as a better paradigm for many social relations: unequal, not chosen, and aimed at the growth of the other. The Ethics of Care (2006) is her systematic statement. Care is both a practice – the work of attending to and meeting needs – and a value by which practices can be judged. It is more basic than justice, since no one survives without care, but the two must be combined: care without justice can become oppressive, justice without care is empty. Held carried the argument into politics, asking which domains, such as health care, education and culture, should be protected from the market, and into global relations. In How Terrorism Is Wrong (2008) she argued that terrorism should be judged by the same standards as other political violence, including that of states. Critics have asked whether care can be a complete moral theory or must rely on principles of justice it cannot itself provide.
Life & context
Virginia Held was born in 1929 in Mendham, New Jersey. She studied at Barnard College and took her doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University in 1968. From 1965 until her retirement in 2001 she taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and from 1973 also at the CUNY Graduate Center, which named her Distinguished Professor in 1996. Her early books dealt with the public interest, rights and the justification of social action. From the 1980s she became one of the leading voices of feminist ethics and of care ethics. In 2001–02 she was president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. She died in 2026 at the age of 96.
Further main works
- The Public Interest and Individual Interests (1970)
- Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (1993)
- How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (2008)
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