Virginia Held

Dzieła

• 2006The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Etyka troski: osobista, polityczna i globalna)

  Troska jako praktyka i wartość, jej związek ze sprawiedliwością i jej zasięg w społeczeństwie i polityce globalnej.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Public Interest and Individual Interests (1970)
• Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (1993)
• How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (2008)