Freedom and the Evolution of Care

The version of care ethics I want to defend differs from more rigid normative traditions in one central respect: it does not assume that one fixed value-order should be preserved unchanged in every circumstance. Care ethics asks both carer and cared-for to adjust their understanding of care as the relation itself changes. Consider the relation between parents and children. In childhood and adolescence, a person is mainly a cared-for subject and must learn how to respond properly to care. Later, that same person may gradually become the carer, especially when parents enter old age. The relation changes; the pattern of care changes with it. This is quite unlike traditions that insist on preserving one stable hierarchy within the relation.

That does not mean that care ethics opposes values such as honesty, responsibility, or social trust. On the contrary, it agrees that in the ordinary and healthy circumstances of contemporary social life those values matter and should usually be respected. The problem is that they are not always applicable in the same way. If you suspect that you are dealing with a scam, should you still disclose private information in the name of honesty? Obviously not. At that point, no proper relation has yet been established. I am not saying that deception is a positive ideal, still less that every lie preserves a relationship. I mean only that human beings often relax one value in order to preserve another relational good. Lovers flatter one another. Friends sometimes praise clothes they do not really admire. Such speech can be insincere in a narrow sense, yet both sides often understand perfectly well what kind of social work it is doing.

So the real problem is not how to cling to one value at all costs. It is how to preserve value while also sustaining or rightly ordering relationships that carry different values. No single universal principle can solve every case in advance. That is why care ethics, as I understand it, must remain exploratory. We need not a final formula but a durable capacity for correction.

This is also why I speak of the evolution of care. When children move from the family into school, the first thing they confront is not merely new knowledge but a new ecology of relationships. Many of them move from being almost wholly self-centred recipients of care into a more equal social world. Friendship introduces a new kind of caring relation, one in which a person must learn how to be both a proper carer and a proper cared-for person. For many people, school is the first setting in which this transformation can actually take place.

In China, many only children easily develop a form of egocentrism tied closely to family relations. Parents often do not consciously treat their children as ethical subjects, but simply as blood relations. Yet once a child is approached as an ethical subject, responsibility and obligation can no longer remain entirely one-sided. The child, as the cared-for person, has to learn how to respond to care rather than merely absorb it. That cannot be learned from books alone. It has to be learned through ordinary, repeated episodes of life together.

I once saw this very clearly in a younger relative of mine. His father set a password on a smartphone so that the child could not use it without permission, and the child exploded in anger. He demanded of his father: “Who matters more, you or me?” The hidden premise was obvious: I matter more, so my interests should decide the question. This was not a moment for crude punishment. It was a moment for education. What had to be explained was simple but important: his father mattered no less than he did; the phone belonged to the father; and the father therefore had the right to regulate its use. The educational point was not to create a new taboo and demand blind obedience. It was to train the child to think conceptually about relations and to move more freely within them.

That freedom matters because prejudice accompanies us throughout life and continually resists the widening of caring relations. One sign of genuine freedom is some degree of awareness of the prejudices we already possess and of those we may acquire later. This can never be complete. In that sense, there is something discouraging about the conclusion. But it is not quite as bleak as it may sound.

As I argued in the previous section, relationships are mediated by concepts. I do not want to wander too deeply into cognitive psychology here, but one point matters: a concept is not merely a neat definition corresponding to a set. It is part of a network. Human beings do not cognize the world only through pure analysis. This is especially true when they build relationships. A concept like “bird,” for instance, may connect in one person’s experience with both flying and swimming if the relevant image is a seagull, while another person may reject the connection because the image in mind is an eagle. Experience, expectation, and intuition all shape what appears natural to us. Freedom, in this sense, means maintaining openness toward the structure of concepts and relationships. Without that kind of openness, people would not have been able, in times of racial discrimination, to recognize that Black people are equally capable of dignity, intelligence, and moral excellence, and therefore equally entitled to just treatment.

At the same time, we cannot eliminate prejudice simply by trying to eliminate all motives for prejudice. Human beings necessarily organize the world through concepts, and any conceptual network has boundaries. Categorization is one of the basic ways in which we simplify an overwhelmingly complex world. We label things because doing so increases efficiency. The question, then, is not how to abolish categories. It is how to prevent categories from hardening into unquestioned errors. Since care ethics cannot honestly present itself as a perfectly impartial method for handling every relation, mistakes are inevitable. What matters is a flexible and enduring mechanism of correction. And the basis of that mechanism is a lasting openness to counter-evidence.