Defining Feminism:

My parents didn't love me less because I was born a daughter. When I was eight, I was confused at being called bossy because I wanted to direct the plays that we would put on for our parents. But the boys were not. When at 14, I started to be sexualized by certain elements of the media, I decided that I was a feminist. For the record, feminism by definition, is the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals. If not me, who If not now. When?

Harvard's Michael Sandel on Natural Law (Listen to 1st 25 minutes or so):

Funding for this program is provided by. Additional funding provided by. Today we turn to John Locke. On the face of it, Locke is a powerful ally of the libertarian. First. He believes, as libertarians today maintain, that there are certain fundamental individual rights that are so important that no government, even a representative government, even a democratically elected government, can override them. Not only that, he believes that those fundamental rights include a natural right. To life, liberty, and property. And furthermore, he argues that the right to property. Is not just the creation of government or of law. The right to property is a natural right in the sense that it is pre-political. It is a right that attaches to individuals as human beings Even before government comes on the scene, even before parliaments and legislatures enact laws to define rights and to enforce them. Locke says in order to think about what it means to have a natural right, we have to imagine the way things are before government, before law. And that's what Locke means by the state of nature. He says the state of nature is a state of liberty. Human beings are free and equal beings. There is no natural hierarchy. It's not the case that some people are born to be kings and others are born to be serfs. We are free and equal in the state of nature. And yet he makes the point that there's a difference between a state of liberty and a state of license. And the reason is that even in the state of nature, there is a kind of law. It's not the kind of law that legislatures enact. It's a law of nature. And this law of nature constrains what we can do, even though we're free, even though we're in the state of nature. Well, what are the constraints? The only constraint given by the law of nature is that the rights we have, the natural rights we have, we can't give up. Nor can we take them from somebody else. Under the law of nature, I'm not free to take somebody else's life or liberty or property, nor am I free to take my own life or liberty or property, even though I'm free. I'm not free to violate the law of nature. I'm not free to take my own life, or to sell myself into slavery, or to give to somebody else arbitrary absolute power over me. So where does this constraint. You may think it's a fairly minimal constraint, but where does it come from? Well, Locke tells us where it comes from, and he gives two answers. Here's the first answer. For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, namely God. They are his property whose workmanship they are made to last during his, not one another's pleasure. So one answer to the question is, why can't I give up my natural rights to life? Liberty and property is, well, they're not, strictly speaking, yours After all, you are the creature of God. God has a bigger property right in us. A prior property, right? Now, you might say that's an unsatisfying, unconvincing answer, at least for those who don't believe in God. What did Locke have to say to them? Well, here's where Locke appeals to the idea of reason. And this is the idea that if we properly reflect on what it means to be free, we will be led to the conclusion that freedom can't independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. This leads to a puzzling, paradoxical feature of Locke's account of rights, familiar in one sense, but strange in another Consider an airline ticket. Airline tickets are non-transferable or tickets to the Patriots and or to the Red Sox. Non-Transferable tickets are unalienable. I own them in the limited sense that I can use them for myself, but I can't trade them away. So in one sense, an unalienable right, a non-transferable right makes something I own less fully mine. But in another sense of unalienable rights, especially where we're thinking about life, liberty and property. For a right to be unalienable makes it more deeply, more profoundly mine. And that's Locke's sense of unalienable. We see it in the American Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson drew on this idea of Locke unalienable rights to life, liberty and as Jefferson amended, Locke to the pursuit of happiness. Unalienable rights. Rights that are so essentially mine that even I can't trade them away or give them up. So these are the rights we have in the state of nature before there is any government. In the case of life and liberty, I can't take my own life. I can't sell myself into slavery any more than I can take somebody else's life or take someone else's slave by force. But how does that work in the case of property? Because it's essential to Locke's case that private property can arise even before there is any government. How can there be a right to private property even before there is any government Locke's famous answer comes in section 27. Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his So he moves, as the libertarians later would move from the idea that we own ourselves, that we have property in our persons, to the closely connected idea that we own our own labor. And from that to the further claim that whatever we mix our labor with that is unowned becomes our property. Whatever he removes out of the state that nature is provided and left it in. He has mixed his labour with and joined it to something that is his own and thereby makes it his property. Why? Because the labor is the unquestionable property of the laborer, and therefore no one but the laborer can have a right to what is joined to or mixed with his labor. And then he adds this important provision, at least, where there is enough and as good left in common for others. But we not only acquire a property in the fruits of the earth, in the deer that we hunt in the fish that we catch, but also if we till and plough and enclose the land and grow potatoes, we own not only the potatoes, but the land, the earth, as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates and can use. The product of so much is his property. He by his labor encloses it from the commons. So the idea that rights are unalienable seems to distance Locke from the libertarian libertarian wants to say we have an absolute property right in ourselves, and therefore we can do with ourselves whatever we want. Locke is not a sturdy ally for that view. In fact, he says, if you take natural rights seriously, you'll be led to the idea that there are certain constraints on what we can do with our natural rights constraints given either by God or by reason. Reflecting on what it means, really, to be free and really to be free means recognizing that our rights are unalienable. So here's the difference between Locke in the libertarians. But when it comes to Locke's account of private property, he begins to look again like a pretty good ally, because his argument for private property begins with the idea that we are the proprietors of our own person, and therefore of our labor, and therefore of the fruits of our labor, including not only the things we gather and hunt in the state of nature, but also we acquire property right in the land that we enclose and cultivate and improve. There are some examples that can bring out the the moral intuition that our labor can take something that is unowned and make it ours, though sometimes there are disputes about this. There's a debate among rich countries and developing countries about trade related intellectual property rights. It came to a head recently over drug patent laws. Western countries, and especially the United States say we have a big pharmaceutical industry that develops new drugs. We want all countries in the world to agree to respect the patents. Then there came along the Aids crisis in South Africa, and the American Aids drugs were hugely expensive, far more so than could be afforded by most Africans. So the South African government said, we're going to begin to buy a generic version of the Aids antiretroviral drug at a tiny fraction of the cost, because we can find an Indian manufacturing company that figures out how the thing is made and produces it, and for a tiny fraction of the cost, we can save lives if we don't respect that patent. And then the American government said, no, here's a company that invested research and created this drug. You can't just start mass producing these drugs without paying a licensing fee. And so there was a dispute. And the the US, the pharmaceutical companies sued the South African government to try to prevent their buying the cheap generic, as they saw it, pirated version of an Aids drug. And eventually the pharmaceutical industry gave in and said, all right, you can do that. But this dispute about what the rules of property should be of intellectual property, of drug patenting, in a way, is the last frontier of the state of nature, because among nations where there is no uniform law of patent rights and property rights, it's up for grabs until by some act of consent, some international agreement that people enter into some settled rules. What about Locke's account of private property and how it can arise before government and before law comes on the scene? Is it successful? How many think it's pretty persuasive? Raise your hand. How many? Don't find it persuasive. All right. Let's hear from some critics. What is wrong with Locke's account of how private property can arise without consent? Yes. Yeah, I think it justifies European cultural norms. As far as when you look at how Native Americans may not have cultivated American land, but by their arrival in the Americas, that would mean that contributed to the development of America, which wouldn't have otherwise necessarily happened then or by that specific group. So you think that this is a defense, this defense of private property in land? Yes, because it complicates original acquisition. If you only cite the arrival of foreigners that cultivated the land. I see, and what's your name? Rochelle. Rochelle. Yeah. Rochelle says this account of how property arises would fit what was going on in North America during the time of the the settlement, the European settlement Do you think, Rochelle, that it's a it's a way of defending the appropriation of the land? Indeed. Because I mean, he's also, uh, you know, justifying the Glorious Revolution. So I don't think it's inconceivable that he's also justifying colonization as well. from the Native Americans who didn't enclose it. Is there someone who will defend Locke on that point? Are you ready? Are you going to defend Locke like you're accusing him of justifying the European, basically massacre of the Native Americans? But who says he's defending that we can only emerge from by an agreement or an act of consent. And that's what would have been required. Yeah, fairly to resolve would have had to agree to it and carry it out and everything. But what about when. What's your name? Dan. But Dan, what about Rochelle says this argument in section 27 and then in 32 about appropriating land. That argument, if it's valid, would justify the settlers appropriating that land and excluding others from it. Do you think that argument is a good argument? Well, doesn't it kind of imply that the Native Americans hadn't already done that? Well, the Native Americans as hunter gatherers didn't actually enclose enclosed land. So I think Rochelle is onto something there. What I want to I'd like to go ahead, Dan, at the same time he's saying that just by picking an acorn or taking an apple or maybe killing a buffalo on a certain amount of land, that makes it yours because it's your labor and that's, you know, your labor would enclose that land. So by that definition, maybe they didn't have fences around little plots of land, but didn't they were using it. Yeah. By Locke's definition. Maybe by Locke's definition, the Native Americans could have claimed a property right in the land itself, but they just didn't have Locke on their side, as she points out. Okay. That's good. Uh, one more defender of Locke. Go ahead. Well, I mean, just to defend Locke, he does say that there are some, um, some times in which you can't take another person's land. For example, you can't acquire a land that is common property to people. In terms of American Indians, I feel like they already have civilizations themselves, and they were using land in common. So it's kind of like what an analogy to what he was talking about with, like the common English property, you can't take land that everybody is sharing That's interesting. And also you can't, um, you can't take land unless you make sure that there's, um, as much land as possible left for other people to take as well. So if you're taking common. So you have to make sure that whenever you take land or that there's enough left for other people to use, that's just as good as the land that you took. So that's it's that's true. Locke says there has to be this right to private property in the Earth is subject to the provision that there be as much in as good left for others. What's your name? I'm Fang. So Fang, in a way, agrees with Dan that maybe there is a claim within Locke's framework that could be developed on behalf of the Native Americans. Here's the further question. If the right to private property is natural, not conventional, if it's something that we acquire even before we agree to government how does that right constrain what a legitimate government can do? In order finally to see whether whether Locke is an ally or potentially a critic of the libertarian idea of the state, we have to ask what becomes of our natural rights once we enter into society. We know that the way we enter into society is by consent, by agreement, to leave the state of nature and to be governed by the majority and by a system of laws, human laws. But those human laws are only legitimate if they respect our natural rights, if they respect our unalienable rights to life, liberty and property No Parliament, no legislature, however democratic, its credentials can legitimately violate our natural rights. This idea that no law can violate our right to life, liberty and property would seem to support the idea of a government so limited that it would gladden the heart of the libertarian, after all. But those hearts should not be so quickly gladdened, because even though for Locke, the law of nature persists once government arrives, even though Locke insists on limited government, government limited by the end for which it was created, namely the preservation of property. Even so, there's an important sense in which what counts as my property, what counts as respecting my life and liberty are for the government to define That there be property, that there be respect for life and liberty. Is what limits government, but what counts? As respecting my life In order to answer that question, which will decide Locke's fit with the libertarian view, we need to look closely at what legitimate government looks like for Locke, and we turn to that next time. would you pay your taxes? Um, I don't think so. I would I would rather have a system personally that I would, that I could give money to exactly those believes in certain fundamental rights that constrain what government can do, and he believes that those rights are natural rights, not rights that flow from law or from government. And so Locke's great philosophical experiment is to see if he can give an account of how there could be a right to private property without consent before government and legislators arrive on the scene to define property. That's his question. That's his claim. There is a way Locke argues, to create property, not just in the things we gather and hunt, but in the land itself, provided there is enough and as good left for others. Today, I want to turn to the question of consent, which is Locke's second big idea. Private property is one, consent is the other. What is the work of consent? People here have been invoking the idea of consent since we began. Since the first week. You remember when we were talking about pushing the fat man off the bridge? Someone said. But he didn't agree to sacrifice himself. It would be different if he consented. Or when we were talking about the cabin boy killing and eating the cabin boy, some people said, well if they had consented to a lottery, it would be different, then it would be all right. So consent has come up a lot. And here in John Locke we have one of the great philosophers of consent. Consent is an obvious, familiar idea in moral and political philosophy Locke says that legitimate government is government founded on consent, and who nowadays would disagree with him. Sometimes, when the ideas of political philosophers are as familiar as Locke's ideas about consent, it's hard to make sense of them or at least to find them very interesting. But there are some puzzles, some strange features of Locke's account of consent as the basis of legitimate government. And that's what I'd like to take up today. One way of testing the plausibility of Locke's idea of consent, and also of probing some of its perplexities. Is to ask just what a legitimate government founded on consent can do, what are its powers? According to Locke Well, in order to answer that question, it helps to remember what the state of nature is like. Remember, the state of nature is the condition that we decide to leave. And that's what gives rise to consent Why not stay there? Why bother with government at all? Well, what's Locke's answer to that question? He says there are some inconveniences in the state of nature. But what are those inconveniences? The main inconvenience is that everyone can enforce the law of nature. Everyone is an enforcer, or what Locke calls the executor of the state of nature, and he means executor. Literally. If someone violates the law of nature he's an aggressor. He's beyond reason, and you can punish him. And you don't have to be too careful or fine about gradations of punishment in the state of nature. You can kill him. You can certainly kill someone who comes after you. Tries to murder you. That's self-defense. But the enforcement power, the right to punish everyone can do the punishing in the state of nature. And not only can you punish with death people who come after you seeking to take your life you can also punish a thief who tries to steal your goods, because that also counts as aggression against the law of nature. If someone has stolen from a third party, you can go after him. Why is this? Well, violations of the law of nature are an act of aggression. There is no police force. There are no judges, no juries. So everyone is is the judge in his or her own case? And Locke observes that when people are the judges of their own cases, they tend to get carried away And this gives rise to the inconvenience in the state of nature, people overshoot the mark. There's aggression, there's punishment, and before you know it, everybody is insecure in the enjoyment rights are so powerful that their unalienable what starts out looking very benign once you look closer, is pretty fierce and filled with violence. And that's why people want to leave. How do they leave? Well makes war here's where consent comes in. The only way to escape from the state of nature is to undertake an act of consent, where you agree to give up the enforcement power and to create a government or a community where there will be a legislature to make law and where everyone agrees in advance. Everyone who enters agrees in advance to abide by whatever the majority decides. But then the question, and this is our question, and here's where I want to get your views. Then the question is what powers, what can the majority decide? Now here it gets tricky for Locke because you remember alongside the whole story about consent and majority rule, there are these natural natural rights, the law of nature, these unalienable rights. And you remember, they don't disappear when people join together to create a civil society. So even once the majority is in charge the majority can't violate your inalienable rights, can't violate your fundamental right to life, liberty and property. So here's the puzzle. How much power does the majority have? How limited is the government created by consent? It's limited by the obligation on the part of the majority to respect and to enforce the fundamental natural rights of the citizens They don't give those up. We don't give those up when we enter government. That's this powerful idea taken over from Locke by Jefferson in the declaration. Unalienable rights. So let's go to our two cases. Remember Michael Jordan, bill gates, the libertarian objection to taxation for redistribution? Well, what about Locke's limited government? Is there anyone who thinks that Locke does give grounds for opposing taxation, for redistribution Anybody go ahead. If you if the majority rules that there should be taxation, uh, even if the minority should still not have to be taxed, because that's taking away property, which is one of the rights of nature All right. So and what's your name? Ben. So if the majority taxed taxes the minority. Without the consent of the minority to that particular tax law, it does amount to a taking of their property without their consent. And it would seem that Locke should object to that. Do you want some textual support for your view for your reading of Locke? Ben. Sure. All right. I brought some along just in case you raised it. If you've got if you have your texts, look at 138 passage 138, the supreme power by which Locke means the legislature cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent for the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, and necessarily supposes and requires that people should have property. That was the whole reason for entering society in the first place, to protect the right to property. And when Locke speaks about the right to property, he often uses that as a kind of global term for the whole category the right to life, liberty, and property. So that part of Locke, that beginning of 138 seems to support Ben's reading. But what about the part of 138? If you keep reading men, therefore in society having property, they have such a right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs. Look at this and that. No one can take from them without their consent. And then at the end of this passage he says, so it's a mistake to think that the legislative power can do what it will, and dispose of the estates of the subject arbitrarily, or take any part of them at pleasure. Here's what's elusive. On the one hand, he says, the government can't take your property without your consent. He's clear about that. But then he goes on to say, I mean, that's the natural right to property. But then it seems that property, what counts as property, is not natural, but conventional, defined by the government. The goods which by the law of the community are theirs. And the plot thickens. If you look ahead to section 140. In 140, he says, governments can't be supported without great charge. Government is expensive, and it's fit that everyone who enjoys his share of the protection should pay out of his would be a violation of the law of nature and would be illegitimate. But it's a further question. Here's the conventional aspect of property. It's a further question what counts as property, how it's defined, and what counts as not the consent of Bill gates himself, if he's the one who has to pay the tax, but by the consent that he and we, all of us within the society gave when we emerged from the state of nature and created the government in the first place. It's the collective consent And by that reading. It looks like consent is doing a whole lot. And the limited government consent creates isn't all that limited. Does anyone want to respond to that or have a question about that? Go ahead, stand up. Well, I'm just wondering what Locke's view is on. Once you have a government that's already in place, whether it is possible for people who are born into that government to then leave and return to the state of nature. I mean, I don't think that Locke mentioned that at all in the what do you think? Well, I think as the convention, it would be very difficult to leave the government because you are no longer there because nobody else is just living in the state of nature. Everybody else is now governed by this legislature. What would it mean today, you're asking? And what's your name? Nikola. Nikola. To leave the state. Suppose you wanted to leave civil society today. You want to withdraw your consent and return to the state of nature? Well, because you didn't actually consent to it. You were just born into it. It was your ancestors who joined, right? So you didn't sign the social contract? I didn't sign it. Exactly. All right, so what does Locke say there Yeah, I don't think Locke says that you have to sign anything. I think that he says that. And it's kind of implied consent. And by living and taking government services, you are implying that you are consenting to the government taking things from you. All right. So implied consent. That's a partial answer to this challenge. Now, you may not think that implied consent is as good as the real thing. Is that what you're shaking your head about, Nikolai? Speak up. Stand up and speak up. I don't think that necessarily. Just by utilizing the government, um, you know, various resources, that we are necessarily implying that we agree with the way that this government was formed or that we have consented to actually join into the social contract. So you don't think the idea of implied consent is strong enough to generate any obligation at all to obey the government? Not necessarily. No. Nikolai, if you didn't think you'd get caught would you pay your taxes? Um, I don't think so. I would I would rather have a system personally that I would, that I could give money to exactly those sections of the government that I support and not just blanket support. Everything. You'd rather be in the state of nature at least on April 15th. But what I'm trying to get at is, do you consider that you're under no obligation, since you haven't actually entered into any act of consent, but for prudential reasons, you do what you're supposed to do according to the law? Exactly. If you look at it that way, then you're violating another one of Locke's treatises, which is that you can't take anything from anyone else. Um, like you can't you can't take the government services and then not give them anything in return. If you if you want to go live in the state of nature that's fine. But you can't take anything for the government because by the government's terms, which are the only terms under which you can enter the agreement, say that you have to pay taxes to take those things. So you're saying that that Nikola can going back into the state of nature if she wants to, but she can't drive on Mass Ave? Exactly, I want to I want to raise the stakes beyond using the mass, beyond using mass ave. Yes, and even beyond taxation. What about life? What about military conscription? Yes. What do you say? Stand up? Um, first of all, we have to remember that sending people to war is not necessarily implying that they'll die. I mean, obviously you're not raising their chances here, but it's not a death penalty. So if you're going to discuss whether or not military conscription is equivalent to, you know, suppressing people right to life, you shouldn't approach it that way. Um, secondly, the real problem here is Locke has this view about consent and natural rights, but you're not allowed to give up your natural rights either. So the real question is, you know, how does he himself figure it out between I agree to give up my life, give up my property when he talks about taxes or military conscription for the fact But I guess Locke would be against suicide. And that's still, you know, my own consent, I agree. Good. All right. What's your name? Eric. So Eric brings us back to the puzzle we've been wrestling with since we started reading Locke. On the one hand, we have these unalienable rights to life, liberty and property, which means that even we don't have the power to give them up. And that's what creates the limits on legitimate government. It's not what we consent to that limits government. It's what we lack the power to give away when we consent. That limits government That's the that's the point at the heart of Locke's whole account of legitimate government. But now you say, well, if we can't give up our own life, if we can't commit suicide, if we can't give up our right to property, how can we then agree to be bound by a majority that will force us to sacrifice our lives or give up our property? There's like, have a way out of this? Or is he basically sanctioning an all powerful government despite everything he says about unalienable rights? Does he have a way out of it? Who would speak here in defense of Locke or make sense? Find a way out of this predicament. All right. Go ahead. I feel like there's a general distinction to be made between the right to life that individuals possess and the and the fact that a government cannot take away, uh, a single individual's right to life. Uh, I think if you look at conscription as the government picking out certain individuals to go fight in war, then that would be a violation of their rights, their natural right to life. On the other hand, if you have conscription or, uh, let's say a lottery, for example, then in that case, I would view that as is the population picking their representatives to defend them in the case of war, the idea being that since the whole population cannot go out there to defend its own right to property, it picks its own representatives through a process, uh, that's essentially random. And then these, these sort of elected representatives go out and fight for, uh, the rights of the people It works very similar. Uh, it works just like an elected government, in my opinion. All right. So an elected government can conscript citizens to go out and defend the way of life, the community that makes the enjoyment of rights possible. I think. I think it can, because, uh, to me, it seems that it's very similar to the process of electing uh, representatives to a legislature, although here it's as if the government is electing by conscription certain citizens to go die for the sake of, of the whole Is that consistent with respect for a natural right to liberty? Well, what I would say there is there is a distinction between picking out individuals, uh, and having a random choice of individuals, like between picking out let me make between picking out individuals. Well, let me what's your name? Gokul. Gopal says there's the difference between picking out individuals to lay down their lives and having a general law. I think this is on. I think this is the answer I would give. Actually, Gopal Lock is against arbitrary government. He's against the arbitrary taking, the singling out of Bill gates to finance the war in Iraq. He's against singling out a particular citizen or group of people to go off and fight. But if there's a general law such that the government's choice the majority's action is non-arbitrary, it doesn't really amount to a violation of people's basic rights. What does count as a violation is an arbitrary taking, because that would essentially say not only to Bill gates, but to everyone. There is no rule of law. There is no institution of property because at the whim of the king, or for that matter, of the Parliament, we can name you or you to give up your property or to give up your life. But so long as there is a non-arbitrary rule of law, then. It's permissible. Now you may say this doesn't amount to a very limited government, and the libertarian may complain that lock is not such a terrific ally after all the libertarian has two grounds for disappointment in lock. First, that the rights are unalienable, and therefore I don't really own myself. After all, I can't dispose of my life or my liberty or my property in a way that violates my rights That's disappointment, number one, disappointment number two, once there's a legitimate government based on consent, the only limits for lock are limits on arbitrary takings of life or of liberty or of property. But if the majority decides if the majority promulgates a generally applicable law, and if it votes duly according to fair procedures, then there is no violation. Whether it's a system of taxation or a system of conscription So it's clear that lock is worried about the absolute arbitrary power of kings. But it's also true. And here's the darker side of lock that this great theorist of consent came up with a theory of private property that didn't require consent That may. And this goes back to the point Rochelle made last time, may have had something to do with Locke's second concern, which was America. You remember when he talks about the state of nature, he's not talking about an imaginary place In the beginning, he says, all the world was America. And what was going on in America. The settlers were enclosing land and engaged in wars with the Native Americans. Locke, who was an administrator of one of the colonies, may have been as interested in providing a justification for private property through enclosure without consent, through enclosure and cultivation, as he was with developing a theory of government based on consent that would reign in kings and arbitrary rulers. The question we're left with, the fundamental question we still haven't answered is what then becomes of consent? What work can it do? What is its moral force? What are the limits of consent Consent matters not only for governments, but also for markets. And beginning next time, we're going to take up questions of the limits of consent in the buying and selling of goods. Don't miss the chance to interact online with other viewers of justice. Join the conversation. Take a pop quiz, watch lectures you've missed and learn a lot more. Visit Justice Harvard. Org. It's the right thing to do. Funding for this program is provided by additional funding provided by.



Care Ethics
The moral theory known as “ the ethics of care” implies that there is moral significance in the fundamental elements of relationships and dependencies in human life. Normatively, care ethics seeks to maintain relationships by contextualizing and promoting the well-being of care-givers and care-receivers in a network of social relations. Most often defined as a practice or virtue rather than a theory as such, “care” involves maintaining the world of, and meeting the needs of, ourself and others. It builds on the motivation to care for those who are dependent and vulnerable, and it is inspired by both memories of being cared for and the idealizations of self. Following in the sentimentalist tradition of moral theory, care ethics affirms the importance of caring motivation, emotion and the body in moral deliberation, as well as reasoning from particulars. One of the original works of care ethics was Milton Mayeroff’s short book, On Caring, but the emergence of care ethics as a distinct moral theory is most often attributed to the works of psychologist Carol Gilligan and philosopher Nel Noddings in the mid-1980s. Both charged traditional moral approaches with male bias, and asserted the “voice of care” as a legitimate alternative to the “justice perspective” of liberal human rights theory. Annette Baier, Virginia Held, Eva Feder Kittay, Sara Ruddick, and Joan Tronto are some of the most influential among many subsequent contributors to care ethics.

Typically contrasted with deontological/Kantian and consequentialist/utilitarian ethics, care ethics is found to have affinities with moral perspectives such as African ethics, Confucian ethics, and others. Critics fault care ethics with being a kind of slave morality, and as having serious shortcomings including essentialism, parochialism, and ambiguity. Although care ethics is not synonymous with feminist ethics, much has been written about care ethics as a feminine and feminist ethic, in relation to motherhood, international relations, and political theory. Care ethics is widely applied to a number of moral issues and ethical fields, including caring for animals and the environment, bioethics, and more recently public policy. Originally conceived as most appropriate to the private and intimate spheres of life, care ethics has branched out as a political theory and social movement aimed at broader understanding of, and public support for, care-giving activities in their breadth and variety.

Table of Contents
History and Major Authors
Carol Gilligan
Nel Noddings
Other Influential authors
Annette Baier
Virginia Held
Eva Feder Kittay
Sara Ruddick
Joan Tronto
Definitions of Care
Criticisms
Care Ethics as a Slave Morality
Care Ethics as Empirically Flawed
Care Ethics as Theoretically Indistinct
Care Ethics as Parochial
Care Ethics as Essentialist
Care Ethics as Ambiguous
Feminine and Feminist Ethics
Relation to Other Theories
Maternalism
International Relations
Political Theory
Caring for Animals
Applied Care Ethics
Care Movements
References and Further Reading
1. History and Major Authors
a. Carol Gilligan

While early strains of care ethics can be detected in the writings of feminist philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine and Harriet Beecher, and Charlotte Perkins, it was first most explicitly articulated by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings in the early 1980s. While a graduate student at Harvard, Gilligan wrote her dissertation outlining a different path of moral development than the one described by Lawrence Kohlberg, her mentor. Kohlberg had posited that moral development progressively moves toward more universalized and principled thinking and had also found that girls, when later included in his studies, scored significantly lower than boys. Gilligan faulted Kohlberg’s model of moral development for being gender biased, and reported hearing a “different voice” than the voice of justice presumed in Kohlberg’s model. She found that both men and women articulated the voice of care at different times, but noted that the voice of care, without women, would nearly fall out of their studies. Refuting the charge that the moral reasoning of girls and women is immature because of its preoccupation with immediate relations, Gilligan asserted that the “care perspective” was an alternative, but equally legitimate form of moral reasoning obscured by masculine liberal justice traditions focused on autonomy and independence. She characterized this difference as one of theme, however, rather than of gender.

Gilligan articulated these thematic perspectives through the moral reasoning of “Jake” and “Amy”, two children in Kohlberg’s studies responding to the “Heinz dilemma”. In this dilemma, the children are asked whether a man, “Heinz”, should have stolen an overpriced drug to save the life of his ill wife. Jake sees the Heinz dilemma as a math problem with people wherein the right to life trumps the right to property, such that all people would reasonably judge that Heinz ought to steal the drug. Amy, on the other hand, disagrees that Heinz should steal the drug, lest he should go to prison and leave his wife in another predicament. She sees the dilemma as a narrative of relations over time, involving fractured relationships that must be mended through communication. Understanding the world as populated with networks of relationships rather than people standing alone, Amy is confident that the druggist would be willing to work with Heinz once the situation was explained. Gilligan posited that men and women often speak different languages that they think are the same, and she sought to correct the tendency to take the male perspective as the prototype for humanity in moral reasoning.

Later, Gilligan vigorously resisted readings of her work that posit care ethics as relating to gender more than theme, and even established the harmony of care and justice ethics (1986), but she never fully abandoned her thesis of an association between women and relational ethics. She further developed the idea of two distinct moral “voices”, and their relationship to gender in Mapping the Moral Domain:  A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education (Gilligan, Ward, and Taylor, 1988), a collection of essays that traced the predominance of the “justice perspective” within the fields of psychology and education, and the implications of the excluded “care perspective”. In Making Connections:  The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School, Gilligan and her co-editors argued that the time between the ages of eleven and sixteen is crucial to girls’ formation of identity, being the time when girls learn to silence their inner moral intuitions in favor of more rule bound interpretations of moral reasoning (Gilligan, Lyons, and Hamner, 1990, 3). Gilligan found that in adulthood women are encouraged to resolve the crises of adolescence by excluding themselves or others, that is, by being good/responsive, or by being selfish/independent. As a result, women’s adolescent voices of resistance become silent, and they experience a dislocation of self, mind, and body, which may be reflected in eating disorders, low leadership aspiration, and self-effacing sexual choices. Gilligan also expanded her ideas in a number of articles and reports (Gilligan, 1979; 1980; 1982; 1987).

b. Nel Noddings
In 1984 Noddings published Caring, in which she developed the idea of care as a feminine ethic, and applied it to the practice of moral education. Starting from the presumption that women “enter the practical domain of moral action…through a different door”, she ascribed to feminine ethics a preference for face-to face moral deliberation that occurs in real time, and appreciation of the uniqueness of each caring relationship. Drawing conceptually from a maternal perspective, Noddings understood caring relationships to be basic to human existence and consciousness. She identified two parties in a caring relationship—“one-caring” and the “cared-for”—and affirmed that both parties have some form of obligation to care reciprocally and meet the other morally, although not in the same manner. She characterized caring as an act of “engrossment” whereby the one-caring receives the cared-for on their own terms, resisting projection of the self onto the cared-for, and displacing selfish motives in order to act on the behalf of the cared-for. Noddings located the origin of ethical action in two motives, the human affective response that is a natural caring sentiment, and the memory of being cared-for that gives rise to an ideal self. Noddings rejected universal principles for prescribed action and judgment, arguing that care must always be contextually applied.

Noddings identified two stages of caring, “caring-for” and “caring-about”. The former stage refers to actual hands-on application of caring services, and the latter to a state of being whereby one nurtures caring ideas or intentions. She further argued that the scope of caring obligation is limited. This scope of caring is  strongest towards others who are capable of reciprocal relationship. The caring obligation is conceived of as moving outward in concentric circles so enlarged care is increasingly characterized by a diminished ability for particularity and contextual judgment, which prompted Noddings to speculate that it is impossible to care-for everyone. She maintained that while the one-caring has an obligation to care-for proximate humans and animals to the extent that they are needy and able to respond to offerings of care, there is a lesser obligation to care for distant others if there is no hope that care will be completed. These claims proved to be highly controversial, and Noddings later revised them somewhat. In her more recent book Starting From Home, Noddings endorsed a stronger obligation to care about distant humans, and affirms caring-about as an important motivational stage for inspiring local and global justice, but continued to hold that it is impossible to care-for all, especially distant others. (See 3a.iv below)

c. Other Influential authors
Although many philosophers have developed care ethics, five authors are especially notable.

i. Annette Baier
Annette Baier observes certain affinities between care ethics and the moral theory of David Hume, whom she dubs the “women’s moral theorist.” Baier suggests both deny that morality consists in obedience to a universal law, emphasizing rather the importance of cultivating virtuous sentimental character traits, including gentleness, agreeability, compassion, sympathy, and good temperedness (1987, 42). Baier specially underscores trust, a basic relation between particular persons, as the fundamental concept of morality, and notes its obfuscation within theories premised on abstract and autonomous agents. She recommends carving out room for the development of moral emotions and harmonizing the ideals of care and justice.

ii. Virginia Held
Virginia Held is the editor and author of many books pertaining to care ethics. In much of her work she seeks to move beyond ideals of liberal justice, arguing that they are not as much flawed as limited, and examines how social relations might be different when modeled after mothering persons and children. Premised on a fundamental non-contractual human need for care, Held construes care as the most basic moral value. In Feminist Morality (1993), Held explores the transformative power of creating new kinds of social persons, and the potentially distinct culture and politics of a society that sees as “its most important task the flourishing of children and the creation of human relationships”. She describes feminist ethics as committed to actual experience, with an emphasis on reason and emotion, literal rather than hypothetical persons, embodiment, actual dialogue, and contextual, lived methodologies. In The Ethics of Care (2006), Held demonstrates the relevance of care ethics to political, social and global questions. Conceptualizing care as a cluster of practices and values, she describes a caring person as one who has appropriate motivations to care for others and who participates adeptly in effective caring practices. She argues for limiting both market provisions for care and the need for legalistic thinking in ethics, asserting that care ethics has superior resources for dealing with the power and violence that imbues all relations, including those on the global level. Specifically, she recommends a view of a globally interdependent civil society increasingly dependent upon an array of caring NGOs for solving problems. She notes: “The small societies of family and friendship embedded in larger societies are formed by caring relations… A globalization of caring relations would help enable people of different states and cultures to live in peace, to respect each others’ rights, to care together for their environments, and to improve the lives of their children”(168). Ultimately, she argues that rights based moral theories presume a background of social connection, and that when fore-grounded, care ethics can help to create communities that promote healthy social relations, rather than the near boundless pursuit of self-interest.

iii. Eva Feder Kittay
Eva Feder Kittay is another prominent care ethicist. Her book, Women and Moral Theory (1987), co-edited with Diana T. Meyers, is one the most significant anthologies in care ethics to date. In  this work they map conceptual territory inspired by Gilligan’s work, both critically and supportively, by exploring major philosophical themes such as self and autonomy, ethical principles and universality, feminist moral theory, and women and politics. In Love’s Labor (1999), Kittay develops a dependency based account of equality rooted in the activity of caring for the seriously disabled. Kittay holds that the principles in egalitarian theories of justice, such as  those of John Rawls, depend upon more fundamental principles and practices of care, and that without supplementation such theories undermine themselves (108). Kittay observes that in practice some women have been able to leave behind traditional care-giving roles only because other women have filled them, but she resists the essentialist association between women and care by speaking of “dependency workers” and “dependency relations”. She argues that equality for dependency workers and the unavoidably dependent will only be achieved through conceptual and institutional reform. Employing expanded ideals of fairness and reciprocity that take interdependence as basic, Kittay poses a third principle for Rawls’ theory of justice: “To each according to his or her need, from each to his or her capacity for care, and such support from social institutions as to make available resources and opportunities to those providing care” (113). She more precisely calls for the public provision of Doulas, paid professional care-workers who care for care-givers, and uses the principle of Doula to justify welfare for all care-givers, akin to worker’s compensation or unemployment benefits.

iv. Sara Ruddick
Held identifies Sara Ruddick as the original pioneer of the theory of care ethics, citing Ruddick’s 1980 article “Maternal Thinking” as the first articulation of a distinctly feminine approach to ethics. In this article, and in her later book of the same title (1989), Ruddick uses care ethical methodology to theorize from the lived experience of mothering, rendering a unique approach to moral reasoning and a ground for a feminist politics of peace. Ruddick explains how the practices of “maternal persons” (who may be men or women), exhibit cognitive capacities or conceptions of virtue with larger moral relevance. Ruddick’s analysis, which forges strong associations between care ethics and motherhood, has been both well-received and controversial (see Section 6, below).

v. Joan Tronto
Joan Tronto is most known for exploring the intersections of care ethics, feminist theory, and political science. She sanctions a feminist care ethic designed to thwart the accretion of power to the existing powerful, and to increase value for activities that legitimize shared power. She identifies moral boundaries that have served to privatize the implications of care ethics, and highlights the political dynamics of care relations which describe, for example, the tendency of women and other minorities to perform care work in ways that benefit the social elite. She expands the phases of care to include “caring about”, “taking care of” (assuming responsibility for care), “care-giving” (the direct meeting of need), and “care-receiving”. She coins the phrase “privileged irresponsibility” to describe the phenomenon that allows the most advantaged in society to purchase caring services, delegate the work of care-giving, and avoid responsibility for the adequacy of hands-on care. (See Sections 2 and 8 below).

2. Definitions of Care
Because it depends upon contextual considerations, care is notoriously difficult to define. As Ruddick points out, at least three distinct but overlapping meanings of care have emerged in recent decades—an ethic defined in opposition to justice, a kind of labor, and a particular relationship (1998, 4). However, in care ethical literature, ‘care’ is most often defined as a practice, value, disposition, or virtue, and is frequently portrayed as an overlapping set of concepts. For example, Held notes that care is a form of labor, but also an ideal that guides normative judgment and action, and she characterizes care as “clusters” of practices and values (2006, 36, 40). One of the most popular definitions of care, offered by Tronto and Bernice Fischer, construes care as “a species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment”. This definition posits care fundamentally as a practice, but Tronto further identifies four sub-elements of care that can be understood simultaneously as stages, virtuous dispositions, or goals. These sub-elements are: (1) attentiveness, a proclivity to become aware of need; (2) responsibility, a willingness to respond and take care of need; (3) competence, the skill of providing good and successful care; and (4) responsiveness, consideration of the position of others as they see it and recognition of the potential for abuse in care (1994, 126-136). Tronto’s definition is praised for how it admits to cultural variation and extends care beyond family and domestic spheres, but it is also criticized for being overly broad, counting nearly every human activity as care.

Other definitions of care provide more precise delineations. Diemut Bubeck narrows the definitional scope of care by emphasizing personal interaction and dependency. She describes care as an emotional state, activity, or both, that is functional, and specifically involves “the meeting of needs of one person by another where face-to-face interaction between care and cared for is a crucial element of overall activity, and where the need is of such a nature that it cannot possibly be met by the person in need herself” (129). Bubeck thus distinguishes care from “service”, by stipulating that “care” involves meeting the needs for others who cannot meet their needs themselves, whereas “service” involves meeting the needs of individuals who are capable of self-care. She also holds that one cannot care for oneself, and that care does not require any emotional attachment. While some care ethicists accept that care need not always have an emotional component, Bubeck’s definitional exclusion of self-care is rejected by other care ethicists who stress additional aspects of care.

For example, both Maurice Hamington and Daniel Engster make room for self-care in their definitions of care, but focus more precisely on special bodily features and end goals of care (Hamington, 2004; Engster, 2007). Hamington focuses on embodiment, stating that: “care denotes an approach to personal and social morality that shifts ethical considerations to context, relationships, and affective knowledge in a manner that can only be fully understood if care’s embodied dimension is recognized. Care is committed to flourishing and growth of individuals, yet acknowledges our interconnectedness and interdependence” (2004, 3). Engster develops a “basic needs” approach to care, defining care as a practice that includes “everything we do to help individuals to meet their vital biological needs, develop or maintain their basic capabilities, and avoid or alleviate unnecessary or unwanted pain and suffering, so that they can survive, develop, and function in society” (2007, 28). Although care is often unpaid, interpersonal, and emotional work, Engster’s definition does not exclude paid work or self-care, nor require the presence of affection or other emotion (32). Although these definitions emphasize care as a practice, not all moral theorists maintain this view of.

Alternatively, care is understood as a virtue or motive. James Rachels, Raja Halwani, and Margaret McLaren have argued for categorizing care ethics as a species of virtue ethics, with care as a central virtue (Rachels, 1999; McLaren, 2001; Halwani, 2003). The idea that that care is best understood as virtuous motives or communicative skills is endorsed by Michael Slote who equates care with a kind of motivational attitude of empathy, and by Selma Sevenhuijsen, who defines care as “styles of situated moral reasoning” that involves listening and responding to others on their own terms.” (Slote, 2007; Sevenhuijsen, 1998, 85).

Some ethicists prefer to understand care as a practice more fundamental than a virtue or motive because doing so resists the tendency to romanticize care as a sentiment or dispositional trait, and reveals the breadth of caring activities as globally intertwined with virtually all aspects of life. As feminist ethicists, Kittay and Held like to understand care as a practice and value rather than as a virtue because it risks “losing site of it as work” (Held, 2006, 35). Held refutes that care is best understood as a disposition such as compassion or benevolence, but defines “care” as “more a characterization of a social relation than the description of an individual disposition.”

Overall, care continues to be an essentially contested concept, containing ambiguities that Peta Bowden, finds advantageous, revealing  “the complexity and diversity of the ethical possibilities of care”(1997, 183).

3. Criticisms
A number of criticisms have been launched against care ethics, including that it is: a) a slave morality; b) empirically flawed; c) theoretically indistinct; d) parochial, e) essentialist, and f) ambiguous.

a. Care Ethics as a Slave Morality
One of the earliest objections was that care ethics is a kind of slave morality valorizing the oppression of women (Puka, 1990; Card, 1990; Davion, 1993). The concept of slave morality comes from the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, who held that oppressed peoples tend to develop moral theories that reaffirm subservient traits as virtues. Following this tradition, the charge that care ethics is a slave morality interprets the different voice of care as emerging from patriarchal traditions characterized by rigidly enforced sexual divisions of labor. This critique issues caution against uncritically valorizing caring practices and inclinations because women who predominantly perform the work of care often do so to their own economic and political disadvantage. To the extent that care ethics encourages care without further inquiring as to who is caring for whom, and whether these relationships are just, it provides an unsatisfactory base for a fully libratory ethic. This objection further implies that the voice of care may not be an authentic or empowering expression, but a product of false consciousness that equates moral maturity with self-sacrifice and self-effacement.

b. Care Ethics as Empirically Flawed
Critics also question the empirical accuracy and validity of Gilligan’s studies. Gilligan has been faulted for basing her conclusions on too narrow a sample, and for drawing from overly homogenous groups such as students at elite colleges and women considering abortion (thereby excluding women who would not view abortion as morally permissible). It is argued that wider samples yield more diverse results and complicate  the picture of dual and gendered moral perspectives (Haan, 1976; Brabeck, 1983). For instance, Vanessa Siddle Walker and John Snarey surmise that resolution of the Heinz dilemma shifts if Heinz is identified as Black, because in the United States African-American males are disproportionately likely to be arrested for crime, and less likely to have their cases dismissed without stringent penalties (Walker and Snarey, 2004). Sandra Harding observes certain similarities between care ethics and African moralities, noting that care ethics has affinities with many other moral traditions (Harding, 1987). Sarah Lucia Hoagland identifies care as the heart of lesbian connection, but also cautions against the dangers of assuming that all care relations are ideally maternalistic (Hoagland, 1988). Thus, even if some women identify with care ethics, it is unclear whether this is a general quality of women, whether moral development is distinctly and dualistically gendered, and whether the voice of care is the only alternative moral voice. However, authors like Marilyn Friedman maintain that even if it cannot be shown that care is a distinctly female moral orientation, it is plausibly understood as a symbolically feminine approach (Friedman, 1987).

c. Care Ethics as Theoretically Indistinct
Along similar lines some critics object that care ethics is not a highly distinct moral theory, and that it rightly incorporates liberal concepts such as autonomy, equality, and justice. Some defenders of utilitarianism and deontology argue that the concerns highlighted by care ethics have been, or could be, readily addressed by existing theories (Nagl-Docekal, 1997; Ma, 2002). Others suggest that care ethics merely reduces to virtue ethics with care being one of many virtues (Rachels, 1999; Slote, 1998a; 1998b; McLaren, 2001, Halwani, 2003). Although a number of care ethicists explore the possible overlap between care ethics and other moral theories, the distinctiveness of the ethic is defended by some current advocates of care ethics, who contend that the focus on social power, identity, relationship, and interdependency are unique aspects of the theory (Sander-Staudt, 2006). Most care ethicists make room for justice concerns and for critically scrutinizing alternatives amongst justice perspectives. In some cases, care ethicists understand the perspectives of care and justice as mutual supplements to one another. Other theorists underscore the strategic potential for construing care as a right in liberal societies that place a high rhetorical value on human rights. Yet others explore the benefits of integrating care ethics with less liberal traditions of justice, such as Marxism (Bubeck, 1995).

d. Care Ethics as Parochial
Another set of criticisms center around the concern that care ethics obscures larger social dynamics and is overly parochial. These critiques aim at Noddings’ original assertion that care givers have primary obligations to proximate others over distant others (Tronto, 1995, 111-112; Robinson, 1999, 31). Critics worry that this stance privileges elite care-givers by excusing them from attending to significant differences in international standards of living and their causes. Critics also express a concern that without a broader sense of justice, care ethics may allow for cronyism and favoritism toward one’s family and friends (Friedman, 2006; Tronto, 2006). Noddings now affirms an explicit theme of justice in care ethics that resists arbitrary favoritism, and that extends to public and international domains. Yet she upholds the primacy of the domestic sphere as the originator and nurturer of justice, in the sense that the best social policies are identified, modeled, and sustained by practices in the “best families”. Other care ethicists refine Noddings’ claim by emphasizing the practical and moral connections between proximate and distant relations, by affirming a principle of care for the most vulnerable on a global level, and by explicitly weaving a political component into care theory.

e. Care Ethics as Essentialist
The objection that care ethics is essentialist stems from the more general essentialist critique made by Elizabeth Spelman (1988). Following this argument, early versions of care ethics have been faulted for failing to explore the ways in which women (and others) differ from one another, and for thereby offering a uniform picture of moral development that reinforces sex stereotypes (Tronto, 1994). Critics challenge tendencies in care ethics to theorize care based on a dyadic model of a (care-giving) mother and a (care-receiving) child, on the grounds that it overly romanticizes motherhood and does not adequately represent the vast experiences of individuals (Hoagland, 1991). The charge of essentialism in care ethics highlights ways in which women and men are differently implicated in chains of care depending on variables of class, race, age, and more. Essentialism in care ethics is problematic not only because it is conceptually facile, but also because of its political implications for social justice. For example, in the United States women of color and white women are differently situated in terms of who is more likely to give and receive care, and of what degree and quality, because the least paid care workers predominantly continue to be women of color. Likewise, lesbian and heterosexual women are differently situated in being able to claim the benefits and burdens of marriage, and are not equally presumed to be fit as care-givers. Contemporary feminist care ethicists attempt to avoid essentialism by employing several strategies, including: more thoroughly illuminating the practices of care on multiple levels and from various perspectives; situating caring practices in place and time; construing care as the symbolic rather than actual voice of women; exploring the potential of care as a gender neutral activity; and being consistently mindful of perspective and privilege in the activity of moral theorizing.

f. Care Ethics as Ambiguous
Because it eschews abstract principles and decisional procedures, care ethics is often accused of being unduly ambiguous, and for failing to offer concrete guidance for ethical action (Rachels, 1999). Some care ethicists find the non-principled nature of care ethics to be overstated, noting that because a care perspective may eschew some principles does not mean that it eschews all principles entirely (Held, 1995). Principles that could be regarded as central to care ethics might pertain to the origin and basic need of care relations, the evaluation of claims of need, the obligation to care, and the scope of care distribution. On principle, it would seem, a care ethic guides the moral agent to recognize relational interdependency, care for the self and others, cultivate the skills of attention, response, respect, and completion, and maintain just and caring relationships. However, while theorists define care ethics as a theory derived from actual practices, they simultaneously resist subjectivism and moral relativism.

4. Feminine and Feminist Ethics
Because of its association with women, care ethics is often construed as a feminine ethic. Indeed, care ethics, feminine ethics, and feminist ethics are often treated as synonymous. But although they overlap, these are discrete fields in that although care ethics connotes feminine traits, not all feminine and feminist ethics are care ethics, and the necessary connection between care ethics and femininity has been subject to rigorous challenge. The idea that there may be a distinctly woman-oriented, or a feminine approach to ethics, can be traced far back in history. Attempts to legitimate this approach gained momentum in the 18th and 19th centuries, fueled by some suffragettes, who argued that granting voting rights to (white) women would lead to moral social improvements. Central assumptions of feminine ethics are that women are similar enough to share a common perspective, rooted in the biological capacity and expectation of motherhood, and that characteristically feminine traits include compassion, empathy, nurturance, and kindness.

But once it is acknowledged that women are diverse, and that some men exhibit equally strong tendencies to care, it is not readily apparent that care ethics is solely or uniquely feminine. Many women, in actuality and in myth, in both contemporary and past times, do not exhibit care. Other factors of social identity, such as ethnicity and class, have also been found to correlate with care thinking. Nonetheless, care has pervasively been assumed to be a symbolically feminine trait and perspective, and many women resonate with a care perspective. What differentiates feminine and feminist care ethics turns on the extent to which there is critical inquiry into the empirical and symbolic association between women and care, and concern for the power-related implications of this association. Alison Jaggar characterizes a feminist ethic as one which exposes masculine and other biases in moral theory, understands individual actions in the context of social practices, illuminates differences between women, provides guidance for private, public, and international issues, and treats the experiences of women respectfully, but not uncritically (Jaggar, 1991).

While most theorists agree that it is mistaken to view care ethics as a “woman’s morality”, the best way to understand its relation to sex and gender is disputed. Slote develops a strictly gender neutral theory of care on the grounds that care ethics can be traced to the work of male as well as female philosophers. Engster endorses a “minimally feminist theory of care” that is largely gender neutral because he defines care as meeting needs that are more generally human. Although he acknowledges that women are disadvantaged in current caring distributions and are often socialized to value self-effacing care, his theory is feminist only in seeking to assure that the basic needs of women and girls are met and their capabilities developed.

In contrast, Held, Kittay, and Tronto draft more robust overlaps between care and feminist theory, retaining yet challenging the gender-laden associations of care with language like “mothering persons” or “dependency workers”. While cautious of the associations between care and femininity, they find it useful to tap the resources of the lived and embodied experiences of women, a common one which is the capacity to birth children. They tend to define care as a practice partially in order to stay mindful of the ongoing empirical (if misguided) associations between care and women, that must inform utopian visions of care as a gender-neutral activity and virtue. Complicating things further, individuals who are sexed as women may nonetheless gain social privilege when they exhibit certain perceived traits of the male gender, such as being unencumbered and competitive, suggesting that it is potentially as important to revalue feminine traits and activities, as it is to stress the gender-neutral potential of care ethics.

As it currently stands, care ethicists agree that women are positioned differently than men in relation to caring practices, but there is no clear consensus about the best way to theorize sex and gender in care ethics.

5. Relation to Other Theories
Care ethics originally developed as an alternative to the moral theories of Kantian deontology and Utilitarianism consequentialism, but it is thought to have affinities with numerous other moral theories, such as African ethics, David Hume’s sentimentalism, Aristotelian virtue ethics, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Levinasian ethics, and Confucianism. The most pre-dominant of these comparisons has been between care ethics and virtue ethics, to the extent that care ethics is sometimes categorized as a form of virtue ethics, with care being a central virtue. The identification of caring virtues fuels the tendency to classify care ethics as a virtue ethic, although this system of classification is not universally endorsed.

Some theorists move to integrate care and virtue ethics for strategic reasons. Slote seeks to form an alliance against traditional “masculine” moral theories like Kantianism, utilitarianism, and social contract theory (Slote, 1998). He argues that, in so doing, care ethics receives a way of treating our obligations to people we don’t know, without having to supplement it with more problematic theories of justice. McLaren posits that virtue theory provides a normative framework which care ethics lacks (McLaren, 2001). The perceived flaw in care ethics for both authors is a neglect of justice standards in how care is distributed and practiced, and a relegation of care to the private realm, which exacerbates the isolation and individualization of the burdens of care already prevalent in liberal societies. McLaren contends that virtue theory provides care ethics both with a standard of appropriateness and a normative framework: “The standard of appropriateness is the mean—a virtue is always the mean between two extremes…The normative framework stems from the definition of virtue as that which promotes human flourishing” (2001, 105). Feminist critics, however, resist this assimilation on the grounds that it may dilute the unique focus of care ethics (Held, 2006; Sander-Staudt, 2006). They are optimistic that feminist versions of care ethics can address the above concerns of justice, and doubt that virtue ethics provides the best normative framework.

Similar debates surround the comparison between care ethics and Confucianism. Philosophers note a number of similarities between care ethics and Confucian ethics, not least that both theories are often characterized as virtue ethics (Li, 1994, 2000; Lai Tao, 2000). Additional similarities are that both theories emphasize relationship as fundamental to being, eschew general principles, highlight the parent-child relation as paramount, view moral responses as properly graduated, and identify emotions such as empathy, compassion, and sensitivity as prerequisites for moral response. The most common comparison is between the concepts of care and the Confucian concept of jen/ren. Ren is often translated as love of humanity, or enlargement. Several authors argue that there is enough overlap between the concepts of care and ren to judge that care ethics and Confucian ethics are remarkably similar and compatible systems of thought (Li, 1994; Rosemont, 1997).

However, some philosophers object that it is better to view care ethics as distinct from Confucian ethics, because of their potentially incompatible aspects. Feminist care ethicists charge that a feminist care ethic is not compatible with the way Confucianism subordinates women. Ranjoo Seodu Herr locates the incompatibility as between the Confucian significance of li, or formal standards of ritual, and a feminist care ethics’ resistance to subjugation (2003). For similar reasons, Lijun Yuan doubts that Confucian ethics can ever be acceptable to contemporary feminists, despite its similarity to care ethics. Daniel Star categorizes Confucian ethics as a virtue ethic, and distinguishes virtue ethics and care ethics as involving different biases in moral perception (2002). According to Star, care ethics differs from Confucian ethics in not needing to be bound with any particular tradition, in downgrading the importance of principles (versus merely noting that principles may be revised or suspended), and in rejecting hierarchical, role-based categories of relationship in favor of contextual and particular responses.

There are also refutations of the belief that care ethics is conceptually incompatible with the justice perspectives of Kantian deontology and liberal human rights theory. Care ethicists dispute the inference that because care and justice have evolved as distinct practices and ideals, that they are incompatible. Some deny that Kantianism is as staunchly principled and rationalistic as often portrayed, and affirm that care ethics is compatible with Kantian deontology because it relies upon a universal injunction to care, and requires a principle of caring obligation. An adaptation of the Kantian categorical imperative can be used to ground the obligation to care in the universal necessity of care, and the inconsistency of willing a world without intent to care. Other theorists compare the compatibility between care ethics and concepts of central importance to a Kantian liberal tradition. Thus, Grace Clement argues that an ideal of individual autonomy is required by normative ideals of care, in the sense that care-givers ideally consent to and retain some degree of autonomy in caring relations, and also ideally foster the autonomy of care-receivers (Clement, 1996). Mona Harrington explores the significance of the liberal ideal of equality to care ethics by tracing how women’s inequality is linked to the low social valuing and provision of care work (Harrington, 2000). Other ways that Kantianism is thought to benefit care ethics is by serving as a supplementary check to caring practice, (denouncing caring relations that use others as mere means), and by providing a rhetorical vehicle for establishing care as a right.

6. Maternalism
As a theory rooted in practices of care, care ethics emerged in large part from analyses of the reasoning and activities associated with mothering. Although some critics caution against the tendency to construe all care relations in terms of a mother-child dyad, Ruddick and Held use a maternal perspective to expand care ethics as a moral and political theory. In particular, Ruddick argues that “maternal practice” yields specific kinds of thinking and supports a principled resistance to violence. Ruddick notes that while some mothers support violence and war, they should not because of how it threatens the goals and substance of care. Defining a mother as “a person who takes responsibility for children’s lives and for whom providing child care is a significant part of his or her working life”, Ruddick stipulates that both men and women can be mothers (40). She identifies the following metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities, and virtues associated with mothering: preservative love (work of protection with cheerfulness and humility), fostering growth (sponsoring or nurturing a child’s unfolding), and training for social acceptability (a process of socialization that requires conscience and a struggle for authenticity). Because children are subject to, but defy social expectations, the powers of mothers are limited by the “gaze of the others”. Loving attention helps mothers to perceive their children and themselves honestly so as to foster growth without retreating to fantasy or incurring loss of the self.

Expanding on the significance of the bodily experience of pregnancy and birth, Ruddick reasons that mothers should oppose a sharp division between masculinity and femininity as untrue to children’s sexual identities. In so doing, mothers should challenge the rigid division of male and female aspects characteristic of military ideology because it threatens the hope and promise of birth. Ruddick creates a feminist account of maternal care ethics that is rooted in the vulnerability, promise, and power of human bodies, and that by resisting cheery denial, can transform the symbols of motherhood into political speech.

But however useful the paradigm for mothering has been to care ethics, many find it to be a limited and problematic framework. Some critics reject Ruddick’s suggestion that mothering is logically peaceful, noting that mothering may demand violent protectiveness and fierce response. Although Ruddick acknowledges that many mothers support military endeavors and undermine peace movements, some critics are unconvinced that warfare is always illogical and universally contrary to maternal practice. Despite Ruddick’s recognition of violence in mothering, others object that a motherhood paradigm offers a too narrowly dyadic and romantic paradigm, and that this approach mistakenly implies that characteristics of a mother-child relationship are universal worldly qualities of relationship. For these reasons, some care ethicists, even when in agreement over the significance of the mother-child relationship, have sought to expand the scope of care ethics by exploring other paradigms of care work, such as friendship and citizenship.

7. International Relations
Care ethics was initially viewed as having little to say about international relations. With an emphasis on known persons and particular selves, care ethics did not seem to be a moral theory suited to guide relations with distant or hostile others. Fiona Robinson challenges this idea, however, by developing a critical ethics of care that attends to the relations of dependency and vulnerability that exist on a global scale (Robinson, 1999). Robinson’s analysis expands the sentiment of care to address the inequalities within current international relations by promoting a care ethic that is responsive and attentive to the difference of others, without presuming universal homogeneity. She argues that universal principles of right and wrong typically fail to generate moral responses that alleviate the suffering of real people. But she is optimistic that a feminist phenomenological version of care ethics can do so by exploring the actual nature, conditions, and possibilities of global relations. She finds that the preoccupation with the nation state in cosmopolitanism and communitarianism, and the enforced global primacy of liberal values such as autonomy, independence, self-determination, and others, has led to a ‘culture of neglect’. This culture is girded by a systemic devaluing of interdependence, relatedness, and positive interaction with distant others. A critical ethic of care understands the global order not as emerging from a unified or homogeneous humanity, but from structures that exploit differences to exclude, marginalize and dominate. While Robinson doubts the possibility of “a more caring world” where poverty and suffering are entirely eliminated, she finds that a critical care ethic may offer an alternative mode of response that can motivate global care.

Likewise, Held is hopeful that care ethics can be used to transform international relations between states, by noticing cultural constructs of masculinity in state behaviors, and by calling for cooperative values to replace hierarchy and domination based on gender, class, race and ethnicity (Held, 2006). Care ethicists continue to explore how care ethics can be applied to international relations in the context of the global need for care and in the international supply and demand for care that is served by migrant populations of women.

8. Political Theory
As a political theory, care ethics examines questions of social justice, including the distribution of social benefits and burdens, legislation, governance, and claims of entitlement. One of the earliest explorations of the implications of care ethics for feminist political theory was in Seyla Behabib’s article “The Generalized and the Concrete Other:  The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory” (Benhabib, 1986). Here, Benhabib traces a basic dichotomy in political and moral theory drawn between the public and private realms. Whereas the former is thought to be the realm of justice, the social and historical, and generalized others, the latter is thought to be the realm of the good life, the natural and atemporal, and concrete others. The former is captured by the favored metaphor of social contract theory and the “state of nature”, wherein men roam as adults, alone, independent, and free from the ties of birth by women. Benhabib traces this metaphor, internalized by the male ego, within the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and John Rawls, and the moral theories of Immanuel Kant and Lawrence Kohlberg. She argues that under this conception, human interdependency, difference, and questions about private life become irrelevant to politics.

The earliest substantial account of care as a political philosophy is offered by Tronto, who identifies the traditional boundary between ethics and politics as one of three boundaries  which serves to stymie the political efficacy of a woman’s care ethic, (the other two being the boundary between the particular and abstract/impersonal moral observer, and the boundary between public and private life) (Tronto, 1993). Together, these boundaries obscure how care as a political concept illuminates the interdependency of human beings, and how care could stimulate democratic and pluralistic politics in the United States by extending a platform to the politically disenfranchised. Following Tronto, a number of feminist care ethicists explore the implications of care ethics for a variety of political concepts, including Bubeck who adapts Marxist arguments to establish the social necessity and current exploitation of the work of care; Sevenhuijsen who reformulates citizenship to be more inclusive of caring need and care work; and Kittay who develops a dependency based concept of equality (Bubeck, 1995; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Kittay, 1999). Other authors examine the relevance of care ethics to the political issues of welfare policy, restorative justice, political agency, and global business.

The most comprehensive articulation of care ethics as a political theory is given by Engster, who defends a need based account of moral obligation (Engster, 2007). Engster’s “minimal capability theory” is formed around two major premises—that all human beings are dependent upon others to develop their basic capabilities, and that in receiving care, individuals tacitly and logically become obliged to care for others. Engster understands care as a set of practices normatively informed by three virtues: attention, responsiveness, and respect. Defining care as everything we do to satisfy vital biological needs, develop and sustain basic capabilities, and avoid unnecessary suffering, Engster applies these goals to domestic politics, economic justice, international relations, and culture. Engster holds governments and businesses responsible for offering economic provisions in times of sickness, disability, frail old age, bad luck, and reversal of fortune, for providing protection, health care, and clean environments, and for upholding the basic rights of individuals. He calls for businesses to balance caring and commodity production by making work and care more compatible, although he surmises that the goals of care need not fully subordinate economic ends such as profitability.

According to Engster, care as a political theory has universal application because conditions of dependency are ubiquitous, but care need not be practiced by all groups in the same way, and has no necessary affinities with any particular political system, including Marxism and liberalism. Governments ought to primarily care for their own populations, but should also help the citizens of other nations living under abusive or neglectful regimes, within reasonable limits. International humanitarian interventions are more obligatory than military given the risk of physical harm, and the virtues of care can help the international community avoid dangers associated with humanitarian assistance. With specific reference to cultural practices in the U.S., Engster recommends a number of policy changes to education, employment, and the media.

9. Caring for Animals
While Gilligan was relatively silent about the moral status of animals in care ethics, Noddings made it clear that humans have moral obligations only to animals which are proximate, open to caring completion, and capable of reciprocity. On these grounds she surmises that while the one-caring has a moral obligation to care for a stray cat that shows up at the door and to safely transport spiders out of the house, one is under no obligation to care for a stray rat or to become a vegetarian. She further rejects Peter Singer’s claim that it is specieist to favor humans over animals. Other care ethicists, however, such as Rita Manning, point out differences in our obligations to care for companion, domesticated, and wild animals based upon “carefully listening to the creatures who are with you in [a] concrete situation” (Manning, 1992; 1996).

The application of care ethics to the moral status of animals has been most thoroughly explored by Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan (Adams and Donovan 1996; 2007). Expanding on Adams’ original analysis of the sexual politics of meat (Adams, 1990), they maintain that a feminist care tradition offers a superior foundation for animal ethics. They specifically question whether rights theory is an adequate framework for an animal defense ethic because of its rationalist roots and individualist ontology, its tendency to extend rights to animals based on human traits, its devaluing of emotion and the body, and its preference for abstract, formal, and quantifiable rules. Alternatively, they argue that a feminist care ethic is a preferable foundation for grounding moral obligations to animals because its relational ontology acknowledges love and empathy as major bases for human-animal connections, and its contextual flexibility allows for a more nuanced consideration of animals across a continuum of difference.

Engster similarly argues that the human obligation to care for non-human animals is limited by the degree to which non-human animals are dependent upon humans (Engster, 2006). Because an obligation to care is rooted in dependency, humans do not have moral obligations to care for animals that are not dependent upon humans. However, an obligation to care for animals is established when humans make them dependent by providing food or shelter. Engster surmises that neither veganism nor vegetarianism are required providing that animals live happy, mature lives, and are humanely slaughtered, but also acknowledges that the vast majority of animals live under atrocious conditions that care ethics renounces.

Empirical studies suggest interesting differences between the way that men and women think about the moral status of animals, most notably, that women are more strongly opposed to animal research and meat eating, and report being more willing to sacrifice for these causes, than men (Eldridge and Gluck, 1996). While feminist care ethicists are careful not to take such empirical correlations as an automatic endorsement of these views, eco-feminists like Marti Kheel explicate the connection between feminism, animal advocacy, environmental ethics, and holistic health movements (Kheel, 2008). Developing a more stringent obligation to care for animals, Kheel posits the uniqueness of all animals, and broadens the scope of the moral obligation of care to include all individual beings as well as larger collectives, noting that the majority of philosophies addressing animal welfare adopt masculine approaches founded on abstract rules, rational principles, and generalized perspectives.

10. Applied Care Ethics
In addition to the above topics, care ethics has been applied to a number of timely ethical debates, including reproductive technology, homosexuality and gay marriage, capital punishment, political agency, hospice care, and HIV treatment, as well as aspects of popular culture, such as the music of U-2 and The Sopranos. It increasingly informs moral analysis of the professions, such as education, medicine, nursing, and business, spurring new topics and modes of inquiry. It is used to provide moral assessment in other ethical fields, such as bioethics, business ethics, and environmental ethics. Perhaps because medicine is a profession that explicitly involves care for others, care ethics was quickly adopted in bioethics as a means for assessing relational and embodied aspects of medical practices and policies. As well as abortion, both Susan Sherwin and Rosemary Tong consider how feminist ethics, including an ethic of care, provides new insights into contraception and sterilization, artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and gene therapy. Care ethics is also applied by other authors to organ transplantation, the care of high risk patients, artificial womb technologies, advanced directives, and the ideal relationships between medical practitioners and patients.

11. Care Movements
There are a rising number of social movements organized around the concerns highlighted in care ethics. In 2000, Deborah Stone called for a national care movement in the U.S. to draw attention to the need for social programs of care such as universal health care, pre-school education, care for the elderly, improved foster care, and adequate wages for care-givers. In 2006, Hamington and Dorothy Miller compiled a number of essays concerning the theoretical understanding and application of care ethics to public life, including issues of welfare, same-sex marriage, restorative justice, corporate globalization, and the 21st century mother’s movement (Hamington and Miller, 2006). A number of formal political organizations of care exist, most of them on the internet, which variously center around themes of motherhood, fatherhood, health care, care as a profession, infant welfare, the woman’s movement, gay and lesbian rights, disability, and elder care. These organizations work to disseminate information, organize care advocates on key social issues, and form voting blocks. Of those focused around mothering, one of the most prominent is MomsRising.org, organized by Joan Blades, one of the original founders of MoveOn.org, and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. Others include: The Mothers Movement Online,  Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights, the National Association of Mothers’ Centers, and Mothers and More. Judith Stadtman Tucker notes that problems with some mother’s movements include an overly exclusive focus on the interests of white, middle class care-givers, and an occasional lack of serious-mindedness, but she is also hopeful that care movements organized around motherhood can forge cultural transitions, including shorter work weeks, universal health care unhitched from employment, care leave policies, and increased levels of care work performed by men and states (Tucker, 2001).

NATURAL LAW
&
HUMAN RIGHTS
Natural Law Theory: As IS nature so OUGHT we to be.
NATURE’S ORDER
 Nature has a design – a natural order - that is
good and should be followed
 Think of the modern notion of so-called
“crimes against nature”
 But there are problems such as the so-called
natural fallacy, which claims a descriptive
(what is) equals a normative (what ought to
be)
NATURAL HUMAN DESIRES AS GOOD
 Natural Human Desires or Inclinations Include:
1) Life – so preserve it
2) Reproduction – so reproduce responsibly
3) Education – so provide it to your children
4) Social togetherness – so we need each other in ordered
societies
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
AMERICA’S MORAL FOUNDATIONS
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights, that among
these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.”
 From Natural Law come Natural Rights:
 “moral requirements ...grounded in human
nature ....” (eText p.59)
 Basically, a claim to something as a natural
right is a claim that something is ours by the
fact of our human nature.
 Rights are called inalienable because one’s
humanity cannot be taken away by any one
or any government.

Moral Orientation: Women’s
Suppressed Moral Perspective
In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic
of care,” Carol Gilligan.
From In a Different Voice by Carol Gilligan, 1982. NYU
School of Law
Kohberg’s 3 Levels Moral Dev.
 Preconventional level (childhood) motivation:
◦ To avoid punishment (1st stage)
◦ To get what you want (2nd stage)
 Conventional level - motivation is:
◦ Group Acceptance (1st stage)
◦ Loyalty to society & government (2nd stage)
 Postconventional - motivation is
◦ Rationality of law & of keeping commitments (stage 1)
◦ Universalizability principle (stage 2 – Kantian)
In the Ethics of Justice
Self as Adjudicator – A
top-down theory
Multiple others involved in the case
In the Ethics of Care
Self-and-others-in-relation –
A horizontal web-like
theory
Interconnected web of repercussions
Norm: I must do the right thing Norm: I must keep relationships in tack
TWO DIVERGENT
OUTLOOKS ON ETHICS
Childhood Developmental Priorities:
a Comparison in Gender Studies
 From dependency to
individuality: all begin life in a
relation of dependent inequality
➢ To live need careChildhood Developmental Priorities:
a Comparison in Gender Studies
 From dependency to
individuality: all begin life in a
relation of dependent inequality
➢ To live need care
One Theory: Girls & the ‘Doubling of
Mother’ vs. Boys & Breaking Bonds
 To their mothers:
begin as dependent
➢ Sense of self-identity
in mother/child bond
➢ Girls: maternal bond
nurtured/developed
differently than boys
Identification with mother
– Boys pushed toward
detachment from their
mothers while girls mostly
not so pushed.

 The Ought/Is problem (the naturalistic fallacy):
Can you derive what you ought to do from facts about the world? This is a style of argument many people use. They take how things are and use that to draw conclusions about how things should be. For example, we evolved as meat eating animals. Therefore we ought to eat meat. Is this a reasonable way of arguing? David Hume thought not. In his view, people move too readily from observations of facts to judgments about values. There's a gap in their reasoning. This is the famous is ought gap, also known as Hume's law or Hume's guillotine because he severs any direct connection between facts and values. In the meat eating example, there's an implied, unstated assumption we ought to do whatever we evolve to do, but that is a controversial moral premise that vegetarians would dispute. Since Hume described it in the 18th century, numerous moralists have tried to bridge. This is odd gap. They've argued for what is natural or unnatural to what we should or shouldn't do. From facts about what makes human beings happy, to evaluations of what we should do next, or from discoveries about human biology to claims about how we ought to live. If Hume was right, they've all committed a logical mistake



e-text:
Chapter 7. Natural Law and Human Rights
Learning Outcomes
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

7.1
Explain how natural law theory is related to the law of peoples and norms of international law.
7.2
Identify the contributions to natural law theory made by key thinkers such as Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke.
7.3
Explain the importance of teleology for thinking about natural law.
7.4
Describe how natural law theory is related to the idea of natural rights and the idea of human rights.
7.5
Clarify how natural law arguments are grounded in claims about the essence of human nature that resist relativism.
7.6
Defend your own thesis with regard to the value of natural law theory and the idea of human rights.
The Rights of Refugees

Details
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In the summer of 2022, the United Nations estimated that a record 100 million people had been forcibly displaced from their homes within the past year. These refugees come from an array of countries: Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ukraine. Many of these people are fleeing violence, war, and oppression. But people are also forced from their homes by floods, storms, and other natural disasters. Refugees are quite vulnerable since they are often left without the protection of their previous home government. The United Nations has a number of documents and agreements that explicitly call for the protection of refugees, beginning with the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states (Article 14), “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” One of the most important of rights of refugees is the right not to be forcibly returned to a home country, where they might face torture, imprisonment, or death. In international law this is called the right of non-refoulement. Other rights include the right not to be punished for illegally entering a country of refuge, as well as the right to housing, education, free movement, and the right to work. But refugees create challenges for countries that receive them, including how to house them and provide for their care and protection. And some people fear an influx of foreigners who may not assimilate. These challenges have led to many well-publicized crises. One of these occurred at the southern border of the United States in 2021, when more than ten thousand Haitian refugees camped out under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The U.S. government refused entry for many of these refugees. By 2022, the United States had forcibly returned at least twenty thousand refugees to Haiti, where they must contend with disease, poverty, violence, and political turmoil. The Trump and Biden administrations defended the deportation of Haitian refugees as a matter of public safety. Human rights organizations decried it as a violation of human rights and international law.

What Do You Think?
Do refugees have a right to take refuge? Should they be protected against refoulement?

Do you agree that refugees have a right to education, housing, freedom of movement, and work?

What is the basis for your thinking about these rights? And about human rights in general?

Can you imagine good reasons for denying refugees the right to asylum? Do you agree with the U.S. policy of forcibly deporting Haitian refugees?

Introduction
7.1
Explain how natural law theory is related to the law of peoples and norms of international law.
In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” were of the same species, born with the same basic capacities. Locke argues that because all humans have the same basic nature, they should be treated equally. This argument should sound familiar from our previous discussion of Kant and deontology. Kant emphasizes respect for human persons as ends in themselves. Locke and Jefferson fill in this abstract idea with a list of natural human rights, including the right to life and liberty. Locke also thought that there was a natural right to own property, while Jefferson thought that there was a right to the pursuit of happiness. These natural rights are supposed to be grounded in self-evident truth. This self-evidence is found in “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” as the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence puts it.

Discussions of human rights remain important today. We saw in Chapter 2 that the United Nations issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which began by asserting “the inherent dignity and . . . the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” These rights are said to be shared by all human beings, regardless of cultural, religious, or political differences. But in reality, respecting and upholding human rights is not always a simple task for societies and governments, including that of the United States. Our opening discussion in this chapter, of the rights of refugees, reminds us how complicated this can be. But despite this complication, there is a growing sense in the world that there is a set of common global norms that ought to guide domestic and international life. Some of these norms have been codified into international law and show up in documents such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights. These norms can be used to criticize the behavior of states, including their legal systems. It is common to say that these norms are based on a system of “natural law” that transcends any give system of civil law (what is sometimes called “positive law”).

Consider another example of how the natural law and the idea of human rights can be used. Following the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, questions arose about the legal status and treatment of individuals captured by the U.S. forces. In our discussion of utilitarianism in Chapter 5, we mentioned that the U.S. government endorsed the use of torture (referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques”) for some of these individuals. This would seem to be a violation of Article 5 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Furthermore, since 2004, many of these suspected terrorists have been transferred to a prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a U.S. naval base on the southeastern side of the island. (The United States still holds a lease to this land because of the 1903 Cuban–American Treaty.) It was thought that these individuals were members, supporters, or sympathizers of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was said that these prisoners were not part of any army of any state and thus not prisoners of war but, rather, “enemy combatants” not covered by any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions. These individuals were not given the protections of U.S. laws. And they were denied such basic human rights as knowing the charges against them and being allowed to defend themselves in court. This treatment would seem to violate Article 6 of the UN Declaration, which states, “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

In recent years—and after intense legal and humanitarian scrutiny of Guantanamo’s detainment policies—many hundreds of the detainees have been sent back to their countries of origin. Some were finally allowed lawyers, although not of their own choosing. U.S. courts have also ruled that the detainees must be given trials in U.S. military, rather than civilian, courts. As of mid-2022, fewer than 40 prisoners still remained in the Guantanamo detention facility, at a cost of over $500 million per year. The U.S. has been working to process these prisoners. But some seem doomed to be held indefinitely, since even when they are cleared for release, there are no countries that are willing to accept them. Some of these prisoners went on a hunger strike in 2013 to protest their treatment. Prison officials force-fed them—by inserting feeding tubes up their noses. Critics argued that it was a violation of international law and a human rights violation to force-feed prisoners in this way.

Figure 7-1

Details
Shane McCoy/WireImage/Getty Images

Detainees in a holding area at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In this and many other contemporary situations, we may ask what is meant by “human rights”—and does every person possess such rights, even enemy combatants? This is one of the fundamental questions addressed in this chapter.

A related question is how the idea of rights applies in situations in which there is no legal or political system to enforce them. Is there a system of “natural law” that is more fundamental than the positive laws of any particular legal or political system? While the idea of natural law is an ancient one, the concept has been an object of renewed interest, especially now that we are aware that states can commit crimes against their own people, including war crimes and genocide. If there is something that we might call natural law, we would suppose that it would at least include a law against genocide.

Figure 7-2
A photo shows two children working in a trench-like region. They are shirtless and barefoot.
BrazilPhotos/Alamy Stock Photo

Child labor seems to be a human rights violation.

The Nuremberg trials were trials of Nazi war criminals held in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1949. There were thirteen trials in all. In the first trial, Nazi leaders were found guilty of violating international law by starting an aggressive war. Nine of them, including Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess, were sentenced to death. In other trials, defendants were accused of committing atrocities against civilians. Nazi doctors who had conducted medical experiments on those imprisoned in the death camps were among those tried. Their experiments maimed and killed many people, all of whom were unwilling subjects. For example, experiments for the German air force were conducted to determine how fast people would die in very thin air. Other experiments tested the effects of freezing water on the human body. The defense contended that the military personnel, judges, and doctors were only following orders from their superiors in the Nazi regime. However, the prosecution argued successfully that even if the experimentation did not violate the defendants’ own laws, they were still “crimes against humanity.” The idea was that a law more basic than civil laws exists—a moral law—and these doctors and others should have known what this basic moral law required. (We discuss war crimes further in Chapter 18.)

The idea that the basic moral law can be known by human reason is a central tenet of natural law theory. Some treatments of human rights also use human nature as a basis. According to this view, human rights are those things that we can validly claim because they are essential for human beings to function well. These natural human rights are the same for all human beings, since, on this theory, all human beings share a common essence or human nature.


Natural Law Theory
The natural law theory is a theory of ethics that holds that there are moral laws found in nature and discernable by the use of reason. The way the term is used in discussions of ethics should not be confused with those other “laws of nature” that are the generalizations of natural science. The laws of natural science are descriptive laws. They describe how nature behaves. For example, gases expand with their containers and when heat is applied. Boyle’s law about the behavior of gases does not tell gases how they ought to behave. In fact, if gases were found to behave differently from what we had so far observed, the laws would be changed to match this new information. Simply put, scientific laws are descriptive generalizations of fact.

Moral laws, on the other hand, are prescriptive laws. They tell us how we ought to behave. The natural law is the moral law written into nature itself. What we ought to do, according to this theory, is determined by considering certain aspects of nature. In particular, we ought to examine our nature as human beings to see what is essential for us to function well as members of our species. We look to certain aspects of our nature to know what is good and what we ought to do.

Civil law is also prescriptive. As an expression of the moral law, however, natural law is supposed to be more basic or higher than the laws of any particular society. Although laws of particular societies vary and change over time, the natural law is supposed to be universal and stable. In Antigone, an ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles, the protagonist disobeys the king and buries her brother’s body—thereby breaking the law of her monarchical society. She does so because she believes that she must follow a higher law, which requires that her brother be buried. In the play, Antigone loses her life for obeying this higher law. In the Nuremberg trials, prosecutors also argued that there was a higher law that all humans should recognize—one that takes precedence over national laws and customs.

People today sometimes appeal to this moral law in order to claim that civil laws ought to be reformed. This is the basic idea behind the theory of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal as outlined and practiced by Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. (as discussed in Chapter 2 and in the opening vignette of Chapter 6). When Thoreau was imprisoned for not paying taxes that he thought were used for an unjust war, he defended his actions by appealing to a system of rights and wrongs that is superior to the civil law. In his famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” he writes, “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.” In suggesting that “the right” is more important than “the law,” Thoreau is pointing toward the idea of natural law, which provides us with a source of morality that transcends the civil law.


Historical Origins
7.2
Identify the contributions to natural law theory made by key thinkers such as Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke.
The tradition of natural law ethics is a long one. Aristotle was among the first to develop a complex ethical philosophy based on the view that certain actions are right or wrong because they are suited to or go against human nature (we discuss Aristotle in more detail in Chapter 8). Aristotle had a profound influence on the medieval Christian philosopher and Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274). Aquinas is often credited as a primary source for natural law ethics.

The natural law idea can also be found in a variety of other ancient Greek thinkers, especially the Stoics, who held that we have a duty to obey the basic laws of nature. (The Stoics were discussed in Chapter 6.) The key moral principle for the Stoics was to “follow nature.” This means that nature has a goal or telos for human beings, which we ought to pursue. They also believed that there are laws to which all people are subject, no matter what their local customs or conventions. Early Roman jurists believed that a common element existed in the codes of various peoples: a jus gentium, or “law of peoples.”

One of the most important of the Roman authors associated with the natural law tradition is Cicero (106–43 BCE). In his Republic, Cicero explained the natural law as follows:

True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions, and the wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing today, and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer. And he who does not obey it flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. And by so doing he will endure the severest penalties even if he avoid the other evils which are usually accounted punishments.

Cicero’s point is that the natural law transcends time and place: it is eternal and imperishable, the same today and tomorrow, the same in Rome as in Athens. Moreover, he maintains that the natural law comes from God himself. It is not surprising that Cicero and his ideas had a profound impact, for example, on Thomas Jefferson and the authors of the founding documents of the United States.

During the medieval period, Greek and Roman philosophy died out in Western Europe, although these ideas were preserved in the East, especially in the work of Islamic scholars. Medieval Islamic and Christian traditions tended to think that morality was primarily derived from scripture. Greek and Roman ideas eventually reentered European culture and were distilled and connected to Christianity by Aquinas. Aquinas’s goal was to find a way to synthesize faith and reason, to connect the insights of reason with the commands of faith. While the natural law tradition is often connected to religion, it is not merely a version of divine command theory, since it holds that reason can discover the moral law independent of scripture.

Aquinas was a theologian who held that the natural law is part of the divine law or plan for the universe. The record of much of what he taught can be found in his work the Summa Theologica (an excerpt is provided in the reading selection at the end of this chapter). Aquinas maintains that “the natural law shares in the eternal law.” He recognizes that this may make it seem that there is no need for human law. But Aquinas argues that particular human laws are a reflection or incomplete manifestation of the divine law. Aquinas indicated his debt to Cicero by quoting him several times in his discussions of law and justice. For example, “Human law originally sprang from nature. Then things became customs because of their rational benefit. Then fear and reverence for law validated things that both sprang from nature and were approved by custom.” The point here is that human laws reflect both the natural law and the developed expression of these laws in the customs and positive laws made by humans.

Echoing the views of Aristotle, Aquinas held that the moral good consists in following the innate tendencies of our nature. We are biological beings. Because we tend by nature to grow and mature, we ought to preserve our being and our health by avoiding undue risks and doing what will make us healthy. Furthermore, as sentient animals, we can know our world through the physical senses. We ought to use our senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight; we ought to develop and make use of these senses to appreciate those aspects of existence that they reveal to us. We ought not to do things that injure these senses. Like many nonhuman animals, we reproduce our kind through intercourse. This is what nature means for us to do, according to this version of natural law theory. (See further discussion of this issue in Chapter 16.)

Figure 7-3

Portrait of Thomas Aquinas/Italian School, (17th century)/ARNOLDO MONDADORI EDITORE (AMBROSIANA)/Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy/Bridgeman Images

A portrait of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

Unique to persons are the specific capacities of knowing and choosing freely. Thus, we ought to treat ourselves and others as beings that are capable of understanding and free choice. Those things that help us pursue the truth, such as education and freedom of public expression, are good. Those things that hinder pursuit of the truth are bad. Deceit and lack of access to the sources of knowledge are morally objectionable simply because they prevent us from fulfilling our innate natural drive or orientation to know the way things are. Moreover, whatever enhances our ability to choose freely is good. A certain amount of self-discipline, options from which to choose, and reflection on what we ought to choose are among the things that enhance freedom. To coerce people and to limit their possibilities of choosing freely are examples of what is inherently bad or wrong.

Finally, natural law theory argues that we ought to find ways to live well together, for this is a theory that emphasizes the interconnectedness of human beings in which no person is an island. We are social creatures by nature. Thus, the essence of natural law theory is that we ought to further the inherent ends of human nature and not do what frustrates human fulfillment or flourishing. These ideas can be developed into a concern for social justice, including care for impoverished people and persons with disabilities, the right to decent work and living conditions, and even the right to health care.

After Aquinas and throughout the modern period of European history, the idea of natural law and natural right became more widespread and more secular. One of the important authors who developed ideas about the natural law was Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist who was working during the early part of the seventeenth century. Grotius explained the development of natural law from out of human nature as follows:

For the mother of right, that is, of natural law, is human nature; for this would lead us to desire mutual society, even if it were not required for the supply of other wants; and the mother of civil laws, is obligation by mutual compact; and since mutual compact derives its force from natural law, nature may be said to be the grandmother of civil laws.

Grotius is known as one of the founders of international law. His ideas about international law had a practical application, for example, in his discussion of the rules of war. Grotius maintained that there was a common law among nations, which was valid even in times of war. We will return to this topic in Chapter 18, where we will discuss the just war theory. Note that the idea of natural law may give us grounds to criticize the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the case we discussed above. If we think that all human beings have basic rights and that these rights exist even in time of war, perhaps we ought to provide these rights to the prisoners at Guantanamo. And, with reference to this chapter’s opening vignette, it is worth noting that Grotius also explains the idea of a right to asylum and refuge. He stated, “Those who have been driven from their homes have the right to acquire a permanent residence in another country, in submission to the government there in authority.” He connects this right with a right to hospitality, including the right to “temporary sojourn” in a foreign land.


Evaluating Natural Law Theory
7.3
Explain the importance of teleology for thinking about natural law.
Natural law theory has many appealing characteristics. Among them are its belief in the objectivity of moral values and the notion of the good as human flourishing. Natural law is also appealing insofar as it links ethical principles to a more general account of reality. Using philosophical terminology, we might say that the virtue of natural law is its explicit connection with metaphysics and ontology, by which we mean that natural law is based on an account of what exists, where it comes from, and what its meaning and purpose is. This part of the theory—the focus on meaning and purpose—can be described as an account of teleology. The important idea here is that the world is supposed to be organized in such a way that human beings have a basic set of aims, purposes, ends, or functions. Reason can discern these values, which are found in the very nature of reality. In traditional versions of the natural law theory, this ontological and teleological approach includes an account of the summum bonum (the highest, most complete and perfect good). For Aquinas, this was connected to an account of the place of humanity within the order of the created universe. And while this is typically a religious idea, natural law is unlike some versions of divine command theory. Philosophical natural law theories emphasize that reason provides a key (as opposed to more dogmatic appeal to scripture or revelation). Natural law holds that reason is able to discern the natural order of things and understand the moral structures built into reality. For traditional natural law theory, what reason shows us is that life is organized teleologically: it has a purpose and function. Again, for traditional natural law theorists such as Aquinas, this purpose is to know God and find your place within the God-created order. Unlike some contemporary human rights theories (which we discuss further below), natural law theories want to locate our rights within a larger metaphysical account of where these rights come from and what we are supposed to do with our rights. To explain this, we might point out that natural law is not merely about a permission or limitation on interference (as rights are sometimes conceived); rather, natural law also gives us an obligation. As Aquinas says, good is to be done and evil is to be avoided. In order to know what we ought to do, we need also to know what the good is.

Various criticisms of the theory have also been advanced, including the following.

First, according to natural law theory, we are to determine what we ought to do by deciphering the moral law as it is written into nature—specifically, human nature. One problem that natural law theory must address concerns our ability to read nature. The moral law is supposedly knowable by human reason. But in fact, people have disagreed about what counts as natural and reasonable. The fact of cultural relativism (which we discussed in Chapter 3) makes this clear. People have also disagreed about the highest good (or summum bonum). Not only do they disagree about what the highest good might be, but they also disagree that there is even such a thing as the summum bonum. Thomas Hobbes made this point in Leviathan (Chapter 11) when he said, “there is no such finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.”

A further problem is that traditional natural law theory has picked out highly positive traits of human nature: the desire to know the truth, to choose the good, and to develop as healthy mature beings. Not all views of the essential characteristics of human nature have been so positive, however. Some philosophers have depicted human nature as deceitful, evil, and uncontrolled. This is why Hobbes argued that we need a strong government. Without it, he wrote, life in a state of nature would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” (We discussed Hobbes in Chapter 4.) A further problem is that if nature is taken in the broader sense—meaning all of nature—and if a natural law as a moral law were based on this, the general approach might even endorse such theories as social Darwinism. This view holds that because the most fit organisms in nature are the ones that survive and dominate, so also the most fit should endure in human society and the weaker ought to perish. When applied to capitalist economic and social organization, social Darwinism could be used to explain why the wealthy dominate the lower classes. This idea was popularized at the end of the nineteenth century and was used to defend hierarchical social organization as a “natural” outcome of the struggle for survival. While this idea applied modern scientific theory (Darwinian biology) to explain and justify inequality and domination, the question of unequal social organization has a deeper historical connection with natural law. In the ancient world, slavery and the subordination of women were taken for granted as a “natural” feature of the human world (as we discuss further later in this chapter).

Another question for natural law theory is the following: Can the way things are by nature provide the basis for knowing how they ought to be? On the face of it, this may not seem right. Just because something exists in a certain way does not necessarily mean that it is good. Floods, famine, and disease all exist, but that does not make them good. And slavery was once taken for granted as “natural,” along with the subordination of women. But these apparently natural facts may not be natural at all—and even if domination and oppression are common and frequent in the history of the world, this does not make the right. As we saw in Chapter 1, in our discussion of the naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s law, it is not easy to derive an ought from an is. Evaluations cannot simply be derived from factual matters. Other moral philosophers have agreed. Henry Veatch, for example, worried that natural law and the related idea of natural rights were undermined by this problem: “the entire doctrine of natural rights and natural law would appear to rest on nothing less than a patent logical fallacy.”

In response to this objection, defenders of natural law might claim that what they are really focused on is a set of basic or intrinsic goods. Or they may deny, as Ralph McInerny has, that there is anything fallacious about deriving an ought from an is: “The concern not to infer value from fact, Ought from Is, is a symptom of false fastidiousness. Worse, it is to take at face value one of the most fundamental errors of modern moral thought.” According to McInerny, the value of things is connected to the purpose and function of those things. McInerny maintains that natural law makes best sense in a theistic framework, where the purpose of things is embedded in these things by God. Other authors have clarified that natural law is connected to a theory of basic goods that are known self-evidently: “They cannot be verified by experience or deduced from any more basic truths through a middle term. They are self-evident.” This idea of self-evident moral principles and basic goods fits with Jefferson’s language in the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. . . .”

A standard criticism of this idea would question whether any truths are self-evident in this way. And returning to Hume’s problem of deriving an ought from an is, we can still ask (as G. E. Moore did) how we make the leap from fact to value. When we know something to be a fact, that things exist in a certain way, it still remains an open question whether this fact is good. One response for the natural law theory is to state that nature is teleological, that it has a certain directedness. The Thomistic approach grounds this directedness in God. But it is possible to develop this idea from a nontheistic point of view. In Aristotle’s terms, we could say that things move or develop toward some natural goal, their final purpose. If we were going to defend natural law theory, we would have to be able to explain human nature in terms of its innate potentialities and the goals of human development. Yet from the time of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, such final purposes have become suspect. One could not always observe nature’s directedness, and it came to be associated with discredited notions of nonobservable spirits directing things from within. If natural law theory does depend on there being purposes in nature, it must be able to explain where these purposes come from and how we can know what they are.

Consider one possible explanation of the source of whatever purposes there might be in nature. Christian philosophers have long maintained that nature manifests God’s plan for the universe. For Aristotle, however, the universe is eternal; it always existed and was not created by God. His concept of God was that of a most perfect being toward which the universe is in some way directed. According to Aristotle, there is an order in nature, but it did not come from the mind of God. For Christian philosophers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, however, nature has the order it does because the universe was created after a divine plan. Nature not only is intelligible but also exists for a purpose that was built into it. Some natural law theorists follow Aquinas on this, whereas others either follow Aristotle or abstain from judgments about the source of the order in nature. But can we conceive of an order in nature without a divine orderer? This depends on what we mean by order in nature. If it is taken in the sense of a plan, this implies that it has an author. However, natural beings may simply develop in certain ways as a result of chance or evolutionary adaptation, while, in reality, there is no plan.

Evolutionary theory thus presents a challenge to natural law theory. If the way that things have come to be is the result of many chance variations, there are no purposes, plans, or preordained functions in nature. The biological and anthropological sciences tend to undermine the idea that there is a universal human nature, since individuals and species vary and change over time. If we wanted to defend natural law theory in the context of contemporary biology, we would have to find natural bases and norms for behavior. One such Darwinian version of natural law has been defended by Larry Arnhart, who argues that human beings have a “natural moral sense” and that “modern Darwinian biology supports this understanding of the ethical and social nature of human beings by showing how it could have arisen by natural selection through evolutionary history.”



Natural Rights and Human Rights
7.4
Describe how natural law theory is related to the idea of natural rights and the idea of human rights.
As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the idea that moral requirements may be grounded in human nature is central to the theory of natural rights. John Locke provided a theory of natural rights that Thomas Jefferson drew on in the Declaration of Independence. According to Locke, certain things are essential for us as persons. Among these are life itself, as well as liberty and the ability to pursue those things that bring happiness. These are said to be rights not because they are granted by some state, but because they are important for us as human beings or persons. They are thus moral rights first, though they may need to be enforced by societal institutions and laws.

A central feature of the Declaration’s statement of our inalienable rights is the idea that these rights are self-evidently true. These rights are supposed to be known by the light of reason with as much clarity as the truths of mathematics. One apparent problem for natural rights claims is that not everyone agrees about rights. Consider the problem of slavery and the issue of equality for women. For centuries of U.S. history, it was not self-evidently true to a majority of citizens that non-White people and women were entitled to equal rights. In response to this problem, defenders of natural rights will argue that experience and education are required to show us what is true. No one is born knowing the truths of mathematics or ethics—and people can be mistaken about these truths. We learn these things over time. Indeed, cultures and traditions develop (even the traditions of mathematics). John Finnis, for example, explains self-evident truth as follows: “The important thing about a self-evident proposition is that people (with the relevant experience and understanding of terms) assent to it without needing the proof of argument.” Thus, in this view, Jefferson might mean that people with relevant experience and understanding will agree that we have the inalienable rights he enumerates in the Declaration (although such agreement continues to be a problem in our diverse, pluralistic culture).

Throughout the eighteenth century, political philosophers often referred to the laws of nature in discussions of natural rights. For example, Voltaire wrote that morality has a universal source. It is the “natural law . . . which nature teaches all men” what they should do. The Declaration of Independence was influenced by the writings of jurists and philosophers who believed that a moral law is built into nature. Thus, in the first section, it asserts that the colonists were called on “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station, to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

Today, various international codes of human rights, such as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions’ principles for the conduct of war, contain elements of a natural rights tradition. These attempt to specify rights that all people have simply by virtue of being human, regardless of their country of origin, race, or religion.

One problem that arises in thinking about all of this is the question of whether there is a difference between “natural rights” and “human rights.” For many people these terms are more or less synonymous. But some scholars have argued that the idea of natural rights is more closely related to the idea of natural law than is the idea of human rights. In the thinking of Locke and Jefferson, the notion of rights was grounded in a worldview that includes a creator who endows us with these rights. This worldview looks very similar to the worldview of the traditional natural law theory. Locke made this explicit in his Second Treatise of Government:

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.

But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the assertion of “human rights” has often been made without grounding it in a religious or metaphysical worldview. The UN Declaration of Human Rights does not invoke the idea of a creator. Instead, it speaks of inherent dignity and inalienable rights without appealing to a religious idea or metaphysical system of natural law that grounds these ideas. Here, for example, is the first clause of the UN Declaration;

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

Notice that this statement makes a quasi-consequentialist argument about the importance of recognizing human dignity—that it is essential for freedom, justice, and peace.

Also consider how Article 1 of the UN Declaration uses language that is reminiscent of Locke and Jefferson but without invoking a creator:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

This statement speaks of an endowment of reason without explaining where this endowment comes from.




Evaluating Natural Rights and Human Rights Theory
One of the virtues of the idea of human rights is that it is now part of our widely accepted moral vocabulary. Unlike Kantian deontology, ordinary people frequently make use of the language of rights. It is quite common to view moral conflicts and atrocities from the perspective of rights. When we claim that a fundamental value is at risk or has been damaged, we are likely to say that our rights have been violated. Of course, it remains an open question as to what we mean by the term “rights.”

In some cases, rights are merely defined as “civil rights,” which implies that these are rights that belong to us because of our membership in a political system. Civil rights include, for example, the right to vote. Noncitizens do not have that right within our community. Of course, we may think every human being has a basic human right to have the civil right to vote within their own community. But even this is up for debate. For example, should prisoners or parolees have the right to vote? This often depends on the jurisdiction in which they are imprisoned or paroled. But would it be a human rights violation to deny a prisoner the right to vote? Or is this merely a matter of positive law to be determined according to some specific account of how civil rights are distributed within a political community? Related to this question is another question about whether and to what extent our rights actually are “inalienable.” Is the death penalty a human rights violation? Or have murderers somehow give up their right to life? (We’ll discuss this further in Chapter 17.)

Knowledge Check
What is another name for the highest good?

SHOW ANSWER
Summa Theologica
Summa Cum Laude
Summum Malum
Summum Bonum
Which of the following is true with regard to Thomas Aquinas?

SHOW ANSWER
He based his ethical system entirely on a divine command theory.
He was interested in finding a way to unite faith and reason.
He was an atheist who denied that there was a moral law.
He denied reason in order to make room for faith.
What is the meaning of “nature” in the natural law theory of morality?

SHOW ANSWER
Natural law morality provides a descriptive account of the laws that structure physical reality, such as the law governing the expansion of gases.
Natural law morality is naturalistic in the sense that it asks us to behave according to our animal nature and in accord with the idea that is known as social Darwinism.
Natural law morality offers a normative theory that tells us what we ought to do, based on an account of natural purposes and functions.
Natural law is a fallacy that is based on the attempt to withdraw from the world of what is into the dream world of what we imagine.
What did Jefferson say about natural rights?

SHOW ANSWER
They were self-evident and inalienable.
They were created by the state.
The idea of natural rights was fallacious since in nature there really are no rights.
Natural rights gave the strong the authority to do whatever they can get away with.
As mentioned above, there is some confusion about the distinction between natural rights and human rights. Defenders of natural rights may claim that the virtue of the theory is the way it is grounded in something like natural law and religious traditions. But the more contemporary human rights approach seeks a language of rights that is more inclusive and less sectarian. Rather than invoking a creator who grants us our rights, the human rights tradition simply states that we have inherent dignity and inalienable rights. Some will see this as a virtue of the human rights theory—since it allows for a more inclusive approach to the idea that seems better suited for a cosmopolitan and secular world. But critics will claim that when human rights are divorced from some basis in natural law and natural right, the concept begins to become incoherent.

This worry reflects a famous criticism of natural rights that comes from the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.” Bentham thought that there were no rights outside of the legal and political system. Bentham worried that the idea of natural rights was a perversion of language—since there were no “rights” in nature. Bentham also worried that when people made declarations about the “rights of man” (as happened during the French Revolution), this only invited destructive revolutions and anarchy. While Locke, Jefferson, and Hobbes used the idea of natural rights to argue that states were founded on an underlying social contract (which we also discussed in Chapter 4), Bentham thought the social contract was also a fiction. According to Bentham, governments develop through a long history involving habit and force. And he thought the ethical goal was to make sure that the legal system pointed in the direction of general happiness—not to postulate rights, which could lead to revolution against the legal system.

A more troubling critique was presented by Alasdair MacIntyre in the 1980s. He claimed that every attempt at providing a defense of natural rights had failed. He said, “The truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.” MacIntyre makes this point with regard to a general failure in metaethical theory to resolve the dispute among intuitionists, emotivists, and others who claim divergent sources of moral insight. MacIntyre continues by saying that those who claim that our rights are “self-evident” are deluded. “We know that there are no self-evident truths,” he states. An obvious fact supports this claim: we disagree about who has which rights. The example we started with assumes, for example, that refugees have rights. But do they? Not everyone seems to agree.

This fact poses a significant problem for a natural rights theory: that not everyone agrees on what human nature requires or which natural rights are central. In the UN’s 1948 Declaration, the list of rights includes welfare rights and rights to food, clothing, shelter, and basic security. Just what kinds of things can we validly claim as human rights? Freedom of speech? Freedom of religion? Freedom of assembly? Housing? Clean air? Friends? Work? Income? Health care? Many of these are listed in a range of treaties and other documents that nations have adopted. However, an account of human rights requires more than lists. A rationale for what constitutes a human right is necessary in order to determine which rights should be protected or promoted. This is also something that a natural rights theory should help provide—perhaps by deriving the rights we are supposed to have from some more basic set of rights. Perhaps we think that the right to life, liberty, and happiness is fundamental and self-evident. But then we would need to describe how the right to work, education, or health care can be grounded in one of those other self-evident rights. The problem with merely stipulating a list of rights is that we need a justification for the list and basic rights—and the list that is derived from that basic list. But since different people come up with different lists, there is the danger of disagreement and the possibility of relativism.

One fundamental disagreement has to do with the question of whether our rights are basically negative prohibitions against interference or whether we have a more “positive” right to sustenance, care, and nourishment. Some contemporary philosophers argue that the basic rights that society ought to protect are not welfare rights, such as rights to food, clothing, and shelter, but only liberty rights, such as the right not to be interfered with in our daily lives. (See further discussion of negative and positive rights in the section on socialism in Chapter 14.) The conflict between positive and negative rights remains a problem to be solved for a theory of human rights.

A theory of human rights is typically connected to a theory of human nature, as discussed previously in relation to natural law. A significant problem arises, however, in terms of human beings who are not “natural” or “normal,” and with regard to nonhuman animals. Do people with cognitive disabilities or human fetuses have the same rights as adult human beings? Do nonhuman animals—especially those with advanced cognitive capacities, such as chimpanzees—have rights? These questions will return in our discussions of abortion and animal welfare in Chapters 11 and 17. But it is important to note here that considerations of rights raise complex questions about what sorts of creatures possess these rights. An account of rights that focuses on human nature will have to be careful to consider how human nature is expressed in fetuses and in people with disabilities. And if the concept of rights is to be restricted only to human beings, the defender of the concept of rights will have to explain the importance of the distinction between humans and our nonhuman relatives.

Finally, we should note that not all discussions of human rights are focused on human nature. John Stuart Mill argued that rights were related to general utility: “To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than general utility.” For Mill, rights language provides a strong assertion of those values that promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Another example is found in the writings of Walter Lippmann, one of the most influential political commentators of the twentieth century, who held a rather utilitarian view that we ought to agree that there are certain rights because these provide the basis for a democratic society, and it is precisely such a society that works best. It is not that we can prove that such rights as freedom of speech or assembly exist; we simply accept them for pragmatic reasons because they provide the basis for democracy.

The notion of rights can be and has been discussed in many different contexts. Among those treated in this book are issues of animal rights (Chapter 20), economic rights (Chapter 14), fetal rights (Chapter 11), women’s rights (Chapter 9), equal rights and discrimination (Chapter 13), and war crimes (Chapter 18).





Slavery and Gender from the Vantage Point of Natural Law and Natural Rights
One objection that critics may make with regard to natural law and natural rights theory is that these approaches have been connected with ideas that we find to be morally outrageous. Aristotle, for example, thought that slavery could be justified in that it was in accord with nature (a point we will explore further in the next chapter). And it is worth noting that some of the greatest proponents of natural law and natural rights themselves owned slaves and defended colonialism. John Locke was involved in authoring, in 1669, “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” which included the following: “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.” Locke also likely endorsed the enslavement of Native American people who were defeated by the British in war, although the scholarship on Locke and his views of slavery and colonialism continues to generate scholarly debate. And in subsequent centuries, proponents of the idea of natural rights nonetheless defended slavery. It is worth noting here that Thomas Jefferson enslaved over six hundred people. Defenders of Jefferson will argue that he eventually argued for the gradual emancipation of enslaved people. But the fact remains that he did not take action to free his own slaves.

It is worth noting that natural law arguments can be made against slavery. An important figure here is Francisco Vitoria (1486–1546), a theologian influenced by Aquinas and the idea of natural law. Vitoria argued in the 1530s against Spanish colonialism by claiming that “the Indians” were not natural slaves. Nonetheless, Vitoria allowed for the use of war against native peoples who attacked the Spanish as they expanded into the Americas. While he did not justify this by appealing to the claim that the native peoples of the Americas were natural slaves, he did suggest that the Spanish were justified in fighting against the natives if they resisted the Spanish conquest. His justification of this was based on natural law arguments connected with the idea of a law of peoples that allows for justified warfare. He claimed that if the Indians attacked first, the Spanish were justified in fighting in response.

Centuries later, abolitionists appealed to natural law and natural right arguments to make the case against slavery. Among these was Lysander Spooner (1808–1887), an American abolitionist who wrote in 1845 that slavery is “entirely contrary to natural right” and “entirely destitute of authority from natural law.” And Frederick Douglass pointed out the hypocrisy of slavery by invoking the basic American idea of natural rights in his famous Fourth of July speech in 1852 (“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”):

You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

A related problem arises in thinking about how the history of natural law and natural rights theories have been involved in patriarchal domination of men over women. Aristotle again provides a source: he thought that women were naturally inferior to men. The natural law tradition continued for long centuries to assume that there was a natural hierarchy in which men were entitled to rule over women. This idea influenced the thinking of Locke, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s writings were, however, criticized by Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is an important touchstone for feminism (which we’ll discuss further in Chapter 9).

Wollstonecraft maintains that Rousseau and others are wrong to infer from the female’s “natural” weakness in comparison with the male that women are lacking in value or rights. One significant problem is that the supposed weakness of women can be understood as the result of an oppressive patriarchal culture—and is not natural at all. Wollstonecraft also says that there is a flaw in the tradition, which holds that “the rights of humanity” are confined to “the male line from Adam downwards.” Wollstonecraft’s turn of phrase here is instructive: she focuses on the rights of humanity instead of the phrase “rights of man” that was typical of her era.

Figure 7-4

John Opie/Wikimedia Commons

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) argued for women’s rights.

Natural law arguments were traditionally used in support of gender inequality. It was thought to be natural for fathers to rule within the family and for men to rule over women. Women have historically not been given equal rights with men. In the United States, women were not all granted the right to vote until 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Women around the globe are still struggling for this basic right. The women of Kuwait only gained the right to vote in 2005. The inequality of women and denial of women’s rights are manifest in other parts of social, political, and economic life across the globe: achievement gaps, wage gaps, lack of access to health care, reproductive issues, control of sexuality, and so on. We consider these issues in more detail in subsequent chapters.

These discussions of inequality and violations of rights make one wonder whether our rights really are self-evident if people continue to disagree about them. On the one hand, the natural law and natural rights view suggests that our rights are self-evident. But those very ideas have been used to deny rights to enslaved people and to women. Defenders of the natural law and natural rights approach will argue that we are becoming more enlightened and that we are better now at understanding the true nature of things. But critics of natural law may argue that there is a fatal flaw in an approach that allowed for slavery and the oppression of women.



Is There a Human Nature?
7.5
Clarify how natural law arguments are grounded in claims about the essence of human nature that resist relativism.
Natural law and the idea of natural human rights presume that there is a common core to the human experience—that we are endowed with basic capacities, that we share common purposes, and that we value and enjoy a common set of intrinsic goods. In short, natural law and human rights rest on an objective account of human nature. One way of putting this is to say that human nature is discovered by us through the use of reason—and that human nature is not created by us or constructed by society. Let’s return, as we conclude this chapter, to the statement from the UN Declaration of Human Rights that we cited at the beginning. This document says that all human beings are “endowed with reason and conscience.” But this kind of essentializing language points toward some very deep philosophical questions. Is it true that all human beings possess reason and conscience? How are these ideas defined in different places, times, and cultures? And does this mean that those beings who lack reason and conscience are not fully human and not worthy of respect?

These kinds of questions may prompt some to think that there is simply no such thing as human nature. The history of humanity shows us that human beings have disagreed about who counts as fully human. In the twentieth century, existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre argued that there was no essential human nature. As Sartre puts it, “existence precedes essence,” which means that through the course of our lives we create our own nature or essence. More recent authors—who are often described as “postmodernists”—have made this argument in even stronger terms. Richard Rorty put the criticism of human nature this way:

There is nothing deep inside each of us, no common human nature, no built-in human solidarity, to use as a moral reference point. There is nothing to people except what has been socialized into them. . . . Simply by being human we do not have a common bond. For all we share with all other humans is the same thing we share with all other animals—the ability to feel pain.

This skepticism about human nature might point toward a broader conception of what matters morally. In Rorty’s view, as expressed here, what seems to matter is mere sentience, the ability to suffer and feel pain. This might provide a source of broad “solidarity” with all suffering beings that downplays the importance of those features of “human nature” that were often held up as the essential defining feature of humanity: rationality, autonomy, and so on. But is that enough of a foundation for us to speak of human rights?

Defenders of natural law ethics worry that if we deny that there is a human essence, we will end up with a kind of relativism. From the standpoint of natural law, a denial of a common human nature will appear as relativism and skepticism that prevent us from establishing universal moral rules. As Craig Boyd has argued in defense of natural law and against the sorts of criticism made by people like Sartre and Rorty, “Natural law requires, as a presupposition, that human beings have enduring, identifiable natures, which in turn requires some kind of realism.” From this standpoint, the hope is that by grounding morality in objective or “realist” claims, we can discover basic principles and moral ideals that will be shared by all of us—and which we can use to criticize unjust and immoral practices such as slavery. As you reflect on natural law ethics, one of the most fundamental questions is whether there is an enduring and identifiable human nature or whether the complexity and changeable history of the human experience undermines the very idea of a shared human nature.

Chapter Summary
7.1
How is natural law theory related to the law of peoples and the norms of international law? The idea that there is a law of peoples or a set of international laws points beyond the particular (or positive) laws of a given state or regime. Rather, there is supposed to be a transcendent law that could be used to criticize the laws of any particular country or government. Key thinkers in the natural law tradition, such as Grotius, were interested in developing systems of international law. This idea has evolved into contemporary ideas about universal human rights and the emerging system of international agreements and international laws.
7.2
What were the contributions that Cicero, Aquinas, and Locke made to natural law theory? Cicero was an ancient Roman thinker whose approach is associated with Stoicism. The Stoics encouraged us to “follow nature.” Cicero suggested that the natural law was both reasonable and eternal—as opposed to the changing and capricious laws of particular governments. Aquinas is a key thinker in Medieval European Christianity. He attempted to bring faith and reason together in a systematic way. And like the ancient philosophers, Aquinas thought that reason could help us to discern the moral law found in God-created nature. John Locke is a modern thinker who helped inspire the social contract idea that political law was grounded in the natural rights of the governed, including the right to life, liberty, and property. Locke’s thinking inspired Jefferson and others, who made use of natural rights arguments.
7.3
How is the idea of teleology import in understanding natural law theory? Natural law theory maintains that the universe is structured according to aims, ends, purposes, and functions. This is connected to a metaphysical and ontological account of reality. Reason can discern these purposes and functions. And morality is defined in connection with the goal of actualizing these aims and behaving according to a plan or system that organizes the cosmos. In some cases, this includes an account of the summum bonum or highest good, which provides us with an overarching goal or purpose.
7.4
How does natural law theory relate to the idea of natural rights and the idea of human rights? The natural law tradition suggests that reason can discern moral structure in nature, since nature is organized according to a system of purposes and functions that clarify what we ought to do and how we should behave. The idea of natural rights develops out of this idea, claiming that our rights are self-evident, as a natural endowment. Both natural law and natural rights traditions are connected to a metaphysical theory that was typically religious. Human rights theories develop out of this approach, usually attempting to assert human rights without invoking any particular sectarian point of view.
7.5
How are natural law arguments grounded in claims about the essence of human nature that resist relativism? The teleological account of the universe that is typical of natural law claims that human beings can be understood in terms of a basic set of purposes, functions, and ends. These functions help to define the human essence. Morality, according to natural law, should be directed toward helping us fulfill our function or purpose. This idea runs counter to a certain skepticism about human nature that is typical of relativism. Relativists tend to deny that there is any given human essence. Thus natural law offers a response to relativism. But one objection to natural law may be to raise the problem of relativism and the question of whether there is any real human essence.
7.6
How might you defend your own thesis with regard to the value of natural law theory and the idea of human rights? A virtue of natural law theory and the idea of natural rights is that it grounds morality in a set of claims about reality that are supposed to be knowable and even self-evident. This approach is often further grounded in a metaphysical account of ultimate reality and the meaning and purpose of human life. Human rights theory is less metaphysical; but it also typically offers an account of self-evident claims about human nature. For those who want a clear account of morality grounded in self-evident truth, natural law and human rights theories will be of use. However, others will reject this approach in light of skeptical questions about what is self-evident and in light of the kinds of problems raised by relativism. Moreover, critics of the theory may argue that its defenders often had moral views that we no longer believe (such as about the inequality of women or the defense of slavery). Defenders of the theory may suggest in response that it has been improved and perfected and that it is no longer used to justify inequality and slavery. Indeed, arguments against slavery and the inequality of women have often been grounded in claims about basic human rights.