NATURE AND DIMENSIONS OF THE ETHICS OF CARE THEORY

Ethics is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the rightness and wrongness of human actions. It bothers on human interaction and how human life is valued and treated. As a normative discipline, ethics of care is a perspective that uses a relational and context bound approach toward morality and decision-making. It refers to ideas concerning both the nature of morality and the normative ethical theory. For sure, no one is an island; and as such, there is need to care for the other as others also care for one. The ethics of care takes responsibilities within relationships as the most important moral consideration. Thus, ethical issues are framed as issues that arise within particular relationships and can be dealt with only as participants in a relationship. Applying the philosophical methods of analysis and phenomenology, this study observes that Ethics of care, if not well-understood and applied, can promote favoritism or partiality as it is human orientation to always get attracted to some things more than others. It therefore submits that the biggest challenge for care ethics is on how to integrate some ethical values like justice which seem not to be in line with it in decision-making.

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