Commentary: Care tactics - arguments, absences and assumptions in relational ethics

Abstract

First paragraph: As the contributions to this special issue of Nursing Ethics imply, the ethics of care owes a debt to both Heidegger and the moral psychology of 30 years ago. Every article cites Gilligan's In a different voice, and most of them refer to the ‘relational view of the person', or to ‘relational ontology', effectively a version of Heidegger's ‘being with' after it has been passed through the blender of feminism and theology. Disappointingly, however, the interest in moral psychology appears to start and finish with Gilligan, the vast amount of work carried out in this burgeoning field since the early 1990s having been ignored. Moreover, the notion of a ‘relational ontology', as deployed by contemporary care ethicists, is rather slippery. So these are two of the themes that this commentary will consider: first, the absence of the more recent moral psychology from discussions of care ethics; and, second, the ambiguities and polarizations inherent in the idea of a relational ontology, at least as it is portrayed here.