CR: The New Centennial Review

Editor's Note

CR Editorial Assistant — 2025-03-21

Love in Action

Darcia Narvaez — 2025-03-21

Love is the basis of healthy social relationships and attachments across the lifespan. But love is particularly important in early life because it supports rapidly developing psychobiological systems. Love that supports healthy psychobiological development can be contextualized as providing an ecological context that meets the changing maturational needs of the developing child. This type of supportive, companionship care is identified as the evolved nest, the system of care that evolved to optimize infant and child wellbeing. The evolved nest is imperative for infant and child wellness across development. When the evolved nest is not provided, this increases the likelihood of sub-optimal (species-atypical) outcomes including the development of psychological wounds and physiological pathologies that can persist across the lifespan. Because of its critical significance in shaping either positive (when provided) or adverse (when deprived) long-term development, the evolved nest can be considered a human birthright for infants and children. We discuss the methods and importance of nest provision, highlighting how each recommendation centralizes specific types of care needed to support not only individual and community thriving but also advance personal and social justice, inclusive of the other than human.

The Right and Duty to Care

Victoria Camps — 2025-03-21

Since Carol Gilligan highlighted the value of care and its role in the development of girls’ moral conscience, the ethics of care has grown exponentially. Specifically, academic feminism and nursing studies gave content to an activity, caregiving, that for centuries was invisible and unrecognized. Today we know that care is a value "as important as justice" (Gilligan) or even "more basic than justice" (Virginia Held). The value of caring is no longer limited to healthcare responsibilities. As Joan Tronto explains, democracy as a whole must also be "caring" and take responsibility for meeting the needs of the most vulnerable.

"Loving Attention" in Murdoch, Smith, and the Ethics of Care

Maria A. Carrasco — 2025-03-21

In this article, we show how the moral proposals of Iris Murdoch and Adam Smith, despite belonging to such different traditions and periods, share two fundamental elements that are also central to any ethics of care. These elements relate to moral perception and to the way in which the particular is attended to and valued. Our thesis is that the combined analysis of these theories can be extremely useful in shedding new light on the fundamental structure of this new approach. Many see Murdoch as an immediate precursor of the ethics of care, and some have already seen British moral sentimentalism (especially Hume) as a relevant antecedent of this current. In this article, however, we want to be more specific and use theories as different as Murdoch's and Smith's to show and explain two fundamental elements of moral deliberation within the care approach: the importance of moral perception and of attention to particularity as a means of recognition and care.

Challenges to Creating a Caring Democracy

Joan C. Tronto — 2025-03-21

This paper will proceed through the following steps: first, let us consider the nature of care and the remarkably progressive thoughts about using care to center political life that are currently circulating. Second, the nature of the backlash needs to be made clear. Third, we shall explore the compelling case for caring democracy.

Moral Vulnerability

Christel Fricke — 2025-03-21

In this chapter, I argue that responsible agents conceive of themselves as bearers of rights. They expect and request other responsible agents to respect these rights. This attitude makes them morally vulnerable, namely vulnerable to the experience of disrespect of their rights. A person's moral vulnerabiility cannot be reduced to this person's vulnerability to either physical harm or material loss. I suggest that a person's moral vulnerability is explicable in terms of her or his vulnerable self, the self that is the object of her or his self-esteem. Persons learn to hold themselves in esteem in processes of interaction with other persons. Self-esteem is an acquired status, and it is this status that makes it morally vulnerable. For accounting for persons' responsible agency and moral vulnerability, we need an integrated ethics that combines the insights of legalistic ethics with the insights of an ethics of care.

Care as the Action of Mitigating Unwelcome Vulnerability and Promoting Freedom

Daniel Engster — 2025-03-21

Research on care ethics has blossomed over the last decade as theorists have developed a variety of new applications of it. While this research has greatly enriched the field, it has also invited a return to basics. If care ethics is to represent a distinct and cohesive ethical theory, it needs some common elements that unite it across applications. It is not always clear, however, what these common elements are. One candidate is a theory of caring actions that specifies what we do when our intention is to care. This notion of caring actions has always been central to care ethics but has not been very clearly articulated. This article engages with the recent work of Stephanie Collins (2015, chapter 5) and Steven Steyl (2020; 2021) on caring actions to clarify it. Both Collins and Steyl have taken tremendous steps toward clarifying the notion of caring actions and highlighting some of the shortcomings of earlier accounts of it. I begin by discussing their analyses and offering a couple amendments to them. I then defend my own account of the ends of caring actions: care as the action of mitigating unwelcome vulnerability. I next address some possible objections to my definition and offer a positive redescription of it: care as the action of promoting freedom. In the final section, I tie together my analysis by showing how it can better accommodate and facilitate the development of some of the new developments in care ethics.

Care as a Dialectical Activity

Josep Corbi — 2025-03-21

Care Ethics and Chinese Philosophy

michael Slote — 2025-03-21

Care ethics has proven itself capable of dealing in its own way with the major problems of ethical theory. But the position of care ethics could be made more philosophically secure if we could anchor it in plausible ideas over a range of topics outside of ethics. I argue that Chinese philosophy can help it be thus anchored. In particular, updated versions of yin and yang can provide underpinnings for such care-ethical virtues as compassion, but those two Chinese notions can also be applied to fundamental issues about the nature of cognition and of the human mind. Through such a larger context care ethics can be further supported and its philosophical significance more deeply recognized.

Preliminary Note

Maria A. Carrasco — 2025-03-21