| Abstract [eng] |
This thesis offers an analysis of a particular issue concerning the normativity of the ethics of care which is presently ever more relevant for this branch of ethics. This is the issue of how one could describe the normative content of the ethics of care and its specificity and what could be a normative foundation for this ethics. The goal of this thesis is to scrutinize main theoretical tendencies of the normative development of the ethics of care and to put forward the new developmental possibilities. In order to achieve this objective several steps are made. First of all, the works of first care ethicists (Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, etc.) are analysed so as to reconstruct the ethical meaning of the notion of care and the constitutive factors of it. It is argued that the specificity of the ethics of care is established by the relational ethical approach: the point of departure in this case is relation and relational moral agency. The analysis of the subsequent discourse of the ethics of care provides a critical view towards the tendency apply traditional moral theories, mostly virtue and sentimentalist ethics, for the normative purposes. It is argued that the attempts to conceptualise normative vocabulary of the ethics of care applying the concepts from other moral theories conceal the relational character of this branch of ethics. In order to find sufficient conceptual recourses for the development of the normative content of the relational ethics of care, philosophical ideas of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Soran Reader, and Emmanuel Levinas are analysed. The argument defended in this thesis is the following: the specificity of the ethics of care can be disclosed by the use of normative vocabulary that allows conceptualising moral demands of care in relational context. |
