Abstract

Ethics of care and ethics of justice have been thought to address different spheres of human life; an ethics of care the personal sphere, an ethics of justice the political sphere. Care ethicists do not necessarily consider these ethics to be mutually exclusive . They assume, nonetheless, that if these ethics address different spheres, an ethics of care cannot address the same issues as an ethics of justice. Michael Slote disagrees. He argues that an ethics of care can address the same issues as traditional approaches to justice, and so offer a complete approach to morality. Slote believes his ethics can address issues of justice by providing an account of those obligations correlative of rights. This paper argues that Slote’s ethics of care is unable to sustain such obligations as his ethics is not action-guiding, but is instead concerned with the post-hoc evaluation of motives and actions